Category Archives: portable audio hacks

Turning 8-Track Player Into A Walkman

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Following time backward, for portable music we’ve had iPods, CDs, and cassette tapes which we played using small Walkmans around the size of a cigarette box. And for a brief time before that, in the 1960s and 1970s, we had 8-track tapes. These were magnetic tapes housed in cases around the size of a large slice of bread. Car dashboards housed players, and they also came in a carry-around format like the one [Todd Harrison] recently bought at a Hamfest for $5 and made more portable by machining clips for a strap and adding a headphone jack.

But before hacking …read more

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Custom Built Vacuum Tube Cassette Player

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As we’ve said many times here on Hackaday, it’s not our place to question why people make the things they make. There’s a legitimate need or utility for many of the projects we cover, no doubt about it. But there’s also a large number of them which are so convoluted that they border on absurd. Not that we love the crazy ones any less, in fact, we usually like those the best.

So when we saw this incredible modification to a Panasonic RN-404 microcassette recorder which replaces the audio hardware with a custom built vacuum tube amplifier, we didn’t bother …read more

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Custom Built Vacuum Tube Cassette Player

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As we’ve said many times here on Hackaday, it’s not our place to question why people make the things they make. There’s a legitimate need or utility for many of the projects we cover, no doubt about it. But there’s also a large number of them which are so convoluted that they border on absurd. Not that we love the crazy ones any less, in fact, we usually like those the best.

So when we saw this incredible modification to a Panasonic RN-404 microcassette recorder which replaces the audio hardware with a custom built vacuum tube amplifier, we didn’t bother …read more

Continue reading Custom Built Vacuum Tube Cassette Player→

CIPODS: Earbuds for Cochlear Implants

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If you wear cochlear implants, sound doesn’t enter through your ear, but rather from microphones above your ears. That means earbuds are useless and you have to resort to large and clumsy over the ear headphones. [Mjcraig23] wanted the convenience of earbuds and set out to do what we all do: hack it.

The result is handily portable as you can see in the video, below. The trick is that he used replacement battery covers and then grafted earbud holders (called EARBUDi) to them using one of our favorite fasteners, zip ties. Apparently, you can wire a cable directly into …read more

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Tiny Guitar Amp Rebuilt with Tiny Tubes

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[Blackcorvo] wrote in to tell us how he took a cheap “retro” guitar amplifier and rebuilt it with sub-miniature vacuum tubes. The end result is a tiny portable amplifier that not only looks the part, but sounds it to. He’s helpfully provided wiring schematics, build images, and even a video of the amplifier doing it’s thing.

The original Honeytone amplifier goes for about $26, and while it certainly looks old-school, the internals are anything but. [Blackcorvo] is too much of a gentleman to provide “before” pictures of the internals, but we looked it up and let’s just say it doesn’t …read more

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A Solar-Powered Headset From Recycled Parts

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Solar power has surged ahead in recent years, and access for the individual has grown accordingly. Not waiting around for a commercial alternative, Instructables user [taifur] has gone ahead and built himself a solar-powered Bluetooth headset.

Made almost completely of recycled components — reducing e-waste helps us all — only the 1 W flexible solar panel, voltage regulator, and the RN-52 Bluetooth module were purchased for this project. The base of the headset has been converted from [taifur]’s old wired one, meanwhile a salvaged boost converter, and charge controller — for a lithium-ion battery — form the power …read more

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Reverse Engineering Enables Slick Bluetooth Solution for Old Car Stereo

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Those of us who prefer to drive older cars often have to make sacrifices in the entertainment system department to realize the benefits of not having a car payment. The latest cars have all the bells and whistles, while the cars of us tightwads predate the iPod revolution and many lack even an auxiliary input jack. Tightwads who are also hackers often remedy this with conversion projects, like this very slick Bluetooth conversion on a Jeep radio.

There are plenty of ways to go about piping your favorite tunes from a phone to an old car stereo, but few are …read more

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Circuit Bent CD Player Is Glitch Heaven

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Circuit bending is the art of creatively short circuiting low voltage hardware to create interesting and unexpected results. It’s generally applied to things like Furbys, old Casio keyboards, or early consoles to create audio and video glitches for artistic effect. It’s often practiced with a random approach, but by bringing in a little knowledge, you can get astounding results. [r20029] decided to apply her knowledge of CD players and RAM to create this glitched out Sony Discman.

Portable CD players face the difficult problem of vibration and shocks causing the laser to skip tracks on the disc, leading to annoying …read more

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Sansa MP3 Player Runs Doom Unplayably

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DOOM, is there anything it won’t run on? Yes. Your front lawn cannot currently play DOOM. Pretty much everything else can though. It’s a testament to the game’s impact on society that it gets ported to virtually every platform with buttons and a graphical screen.

This video shows a Sansa Clip playing DOOM, but it’s only just barely recognizable. The Sansa Clip has a single color screen, with yellow pixels at the top and grey for the rest of the screen. The monochrome display makes things hard to see, so a dithering technique is used to try and make things …read more

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Low Noise Floor Microphone

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[Matt] likes to make videos (and he’s pretty good at it judging by the quality of his videos). But video isn’t much without audio. Handheld recorders with small built-in microphones have a fairly high noise floor so [Matt] has a Rode NT1-A — a pricey but very quiet microphone. However, for field work, it isn’t handy since it requires a power supply and preamp to go along with it.

Another problem is that for stereo recording you need two and because they are quiet, they tend to pick up handling noise so you probably need to mount them on tripods. …read more

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