FrankenBoom

A portable boom box made out of a cheap 2.1 speaker system and a power bank. Only one piece to carry.

Stuff:

• a 2.1 speaker system
  • a decent 2.1 amplifier thing. Might be in the 2.1 thingy, but some have too poor quality
  • twetters. May be from the sattelites, but mine where missing
• a power bank
• some mdf
• saw, file, sandpaper, glue and a drill

Ah, cheap 2.1 computer speaker. Advertised with drölf watts of power and some shiny exteriour. With great exaggeration comes great disappointment...

I just happened to find the woofer from one such system. It sounded aweful, even by the high standards set by the industrie of dirt cheap speakers with ridicoules high ratings. They where called "Trust Vortex 2.1 Speaker Set", and oh yes, you can trust that all sound will be mushed and distorted beyond recognition. Advertised with 60 Watts, they use two 2.5 Watts amps. While most of the woofer is made of mdf, the backside is a thin piece of soft and wobbly plastics. But actually, the speaker itself sounded not half as bad without the resonating backside and using a decent amplifier.

From erlier it happened to have the amplifier board from one of these USB speaker thingies, which was populated with two actually pretty good amplifiers. Even less power than the ones originally used by trust, but much better sound.

The tweeters are from a pair of broken 90ths desktop computer speakers, the power bank i had intended to use for a torch. But meh. Lets go.

All straight forward. Make sure the battery is well insulated, a shortage might burn your house down. I used a piece of plastic to mount the amplifier and power bank circuits.

Without words, but much of wood glue

I had too add a backside, the original one was plastic and resonated like hell. The holes are mounts for the electronics and a bass reflex tube (actually cut off from the original backside).