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Turning Dead Drives into Speakers? 157

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-you-can dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Why pay 500$ for Klipsch's latest speaker system? You can make something that looks way cooler for the price of a DIY amplifier and some HDDs out of a dumpster. It doesn't sound quite as good but who cares!" Next week we'll show you how to turn a laundry basket and a speak & spell into your own segway.
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Turning Dead Drives into Speakers? More

Turning Dead Drives into Speakers?

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  • DIY (Score:5, Funny)

    by MullerMn ( 526350 ) <andy@nospaM.andrewarbon.co.uk> on Sunday August 11, 2002 @01:47PM (#4050793) Homepage
    Next week we'll show you how to turn a laundry basket and a speak & spell into your own segway.

    Warning!: This will reduce the value of your speak & spell and laundry basket.

  • Umm... REPOST (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jhon ( 241832 ) on Sunday August 11, 2002 @01:48PM (#4050803) Homepage Journal
    Been there, done that. GOTTA be a better way to check for stuff thats been reposted.

    -jhon
  • This is more a joke than a reality. I get a surround sound system with a sub for $30, and I cant really justify building one. Btw, do the junked hard drives have to work?

    • Re:Um, wrong topic? (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 11, 2002 @02:09PM (#4050876)
      Yes, the junked hard drives have to work. If you use broken hard drives, the amplifier will cause the loose magnetic particles in the broken hard drives to signal a channel directly to the operator's brain, rearranging your neurons according to the sound being amplified which will cause you to become confused, and your memories will become jumbled, randomized, and replaced, and you will start to speak in tongues. I've also heard that if you use broken hard drives for this project, that it's possible that your liver will turn inside out (something to do with frequences being emitted on certain broken hard drives). This complication is more rare than the brain side-effects, though. I'd recommend you use strictly working hard drives to avoid these issues.

      • Re:Um, wrong topic? (Score:5, Funny)

        by b1t r0t ( 216468 ) on Sunday August 11, 2002 @09:30PM (#4052275)
        If you use broken hard drives, the amplifier will cause the loose magnetic particles in the broken hard drives to signal a channel directly to the operator's brain, rearranging your neurons according to the sound being amplified which will cause you to become confused, and your memories will become jumbled, randomized, and replaced, and you will start to speak in tongues.

        ...and when it gets really bad, you start reposting Slashdot stories.

    • I'd to know where to get that (heck, i'll pay for the s&h)
      • I can't find the system I bought, but heres one for $26 with a pricewatch coupon code. http://www.amamax.com/allanmul5pc2.html The coupon code is (avs500) (pretty original, it's the model name :-) This is Altec Lansing, so you got quality.

  • Deja vu (Score:1, Redundant)

    by SILIZIUMM ( 241333 )
    I was sure I already saw this : http://slashdot.org/articles/02/02/16/1439211.shtm l?tid=133 [slashdot.org]
  • This was posted back in Feb (See this link [slashdot.org].) It even gives the same link...
    In all seriousness, would it be all too hard to include some form of archive-checking feature to the submission queue? (Note: I don't use slash, so I don't know the internals...) Something like "if this link has been posted before, raise a flag to the administrator to make sure they really want to post a duplicate"...
    Might weed out at least some of the repeats... Heck, maybe even a "link similarity" feature that could match http://foo.com as possibly identitcal to http://foo.com/index.html.
    • Right, next you'll want to add a spell checker to the submission queue, then you'll be on everyone's case to read the articles first. What are you, some kinda journalist or something?
    • Next week we'll show you how to turn a laundry basket and a speak & spell into your own segway.

      CmdrTaco just thought that the joke about the segway was so hilarious he had to post this story again.

    • Incredibly hard, actually. Just like it would be incredibly hard to simply disallow posts which contain links to goatse. Sure, there are redirects which circumvent it, but what the hell is wrong with just IP-banning people who try to post a link like that, automatically?
      Just as hard as it would be to disallow posts which start with "... by poopbot"
      Just as hard as it would be to just give up on the pointlessly worthless search feature in favore of a google site-search.
      In case you haven't noticed: The Editor's Don't Care.
      What they are doing is posting stories they like. They don't care enough to read the site themselves because, to them, that's not what the site is about. To them this site is about posting links. To us it's about reading those links.
      Seems that 90% of these posts should be -2 offtopic.
  • These repeating stories are almost as bad as those blasted X10 camera ads.

    It's a real crying shame I can't block the stories like I block the ads...

  • Redundancy Prevails (Score:3, Informative)

    by dragonman97 ( 185927 ) on Sunday August 11, 2002 @01:53PM (#4050827)
    from the reposting-four-month-old-stories dept.
    Hmmm, I rather liked this mod, after having read it here [slashdot.org]. I even mentioned it about a month ago in some thread about DJ's and hard drives, having recalled reading it here. To find the link to this wondrous dupe, I simply pressed ALT-F2 from KDE, typed `gg:hard drive speakers site:slashdot.org`, and the very first hit was the article.
    • Maybe the latest trolling techniques by our resident trolls?

      get the /. crew to post redundant stories...it's feasible.

      Funny how redundancy can be a good thing and a bad thing at the same time.
    • OMG Tr0llz sk1llz aer so l337 their tr0llaX0ring teh storiey cue! LOL!!1!1
    • I simply pressed ALT-F2 from KDE, typed `gg:hard drive speakers site:slashdot.org`, and the very first hit was the article.

      This is a REALLY good point... why doesn't the slashdot crew hack together a perl script to check for redundant article's like this? I think (hope) they already screen URLs but going to Google (through their helpful API) for stories about to be posted would virtually eliminate double posts.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • OK wtf (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Cyclone66 ( 217347 ) on Sunday August 11, 2002 @02:02PM (#4050857) Homepage Journal
    How come this gets posted twice but my submission of an article by the IEEE Spectrum on John Carmack [ieee.org] doesn't?
  • This is what we'll all be using once all the consumer speakers on the market end up with a Fritz Chip. :)
  • ...that college dining hall trays make excelent mounts for home brew electronics projects!
  • An anonymous reader writes "AMD is expected to announce a new chip to compete with arch-rival Intel. An overview of the new CPU can be seen here [amd.com], and some more information is available on Anandtech [anandtech.com]. Go AMD!" I just can't wait to see the prices on them! UPDATE: 08/11 17:00 GMT by T: This might be a re-post, as we have word that AMD working on a K8 processor, which will run at around 2 - 3GHZ.

  • It's a good thing all these posts claiming Slashdot is redundant aren't redundant themselves. Whew, what a relief!

  • Instead of speakers (Score:5, Funny)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Sunday August 11, 2002 @02:16PM (#4050900)
    Since this is a four-month old story, how about we discuss turning old HDDs into speakeasies instead? With hookers! And blackjack! In fact, forget the disk drives!

  • Far worse than a repost: complaining about it! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think this hard drive mod is clever, and I am glad I got to see the story, regardless if it was a repost.

    Reposts may be annoying to the 10% or so of the readership that reads EVERY story. The repeat of a story isn't nearly as annoying as the 14 or so posts of "THIS IS A REPEAT" whiny crap that I can't filter out because some moderator doesn't have anything better to do than mod up such carping.

    Congratulations on being able to recall a story from February. Christ, not everyone reads this site every day. Does that mean a radio station should not ever play the same song twice? Or a television station should never show a rerun?

    Sorry you were so _wronged_, all of you that took the time to write a response to an article that you already read and increased the noise so I can't even read legitimate posts regarding the article.

    Maybe you should go find something worthwhile to submit to the story queue instead of digesting every freaking story and then bitching about how it ran once half a YEAR ago.
  • The Afrotech guy has also made some other really cool things.. Like putting a PSX [afrotechmods.com] into your PC, turning an old monitor into a Doom II [afrotechmods.com] diorama, and using aluminum foil [afrotechmods.com] to improve you AMD Athlon's cooling.
  • Seriously, what's wrong with reposts? They don't happen enough to be annoying.. I don't read Slashdot every day, and I hadn't seen this article. So it gives people who haven't seen it before a chance to check it out, and people who have read it can just ignore it.
    • They don't happen enough to be annoying..

      Yes they do.

      I have no problem with the editors posting a story again because they think it's still cool and not everyone saw it the first time, but that's not what happened here. They posted it again because they weren't paying attention and didn't realize this was already posted six months ago. It makes it seem like the editors don't care about what's on the site.
  • This was posted about half a year ago, as I recall. I even took the initiative to make a 5.1 audio sound system with them. It sounds like crap, but it sure as hell looks cool ;) And when company leaves, I just pull the Klipsches back out of my closet *grin*
  • Slashdot dupe nazi's be damned. Check out that whole site, there's a lot of quality humor in there. I laughed out loud several times.
  • of COMMENTS!!!

    my lord people, is it not enough that the first 60 people making comments give the link to the previous story. compared to duplicate comments, duplicate STORIES on /. are completely and utterly neglible. even if everyone here posted the dup notice for the sole sake of kharma whoring, SOMEONE has to mode these people up!

    QED
  • alright, just kinda found this ammusing seeing the story again. Here's the original link:
    here [slashdot.org]. My friend is the one who did this, when I saw the story here, I thought "Alrdy done, big whoop". But this kid is awesome, just in his free time he does this stuff. When he showed it to me (he lived a floor above me last year), It was really awesome. So many people thought it was a hoax, but it really wasn't. The greatest part is that the kid didn't think it was such a big deal. I'm shitting in my pants with harddrives doing this, and he just thinks of it as a week project for something to do. Very smart kid.

    One other thing, the first post (submitted by me) took up 65% of Carnegie Mellon's bandwidth for that week. No slashdotting, but 65% of all the bandwidth cmu used up that week was people going to this page. The power we have.
  • ...I can't wait until there's a minor update to the Linux kernel. Let's get some fresh stories in here!
  • Come on guys, I don't have enough mod points to mark you all redundant. Why dont you quit beating a dieing horse and either say something constructive or let it go.

  • Profit! (Score:4, Funny)

    by bellings ( 137948 ) on Sunday August 11, 2002 @03:32PM (#4051154)
    I have a plan! Here it is:
    1. Add a decent search engine to slashdot, and use it to eliminate duplicate stories.
    2. ...
    3. Profit!
    • Actualy i think a better was would be to adobt a plastic or kur5hin system where the stories we're reviewed by slashdotians before they are posted.

      -Jon
      • Better how? Increase ad revenue? Reduce the cost of running the site? Meaningfully improve the value of the site a spinoff business unit?

        As a shareholder, how is improving the story submission queue going to improve VA Linux's stock price? It won't. It'll only give the readers (read: product to be sold to the real customers (read: advertisers)) one less thing to be pissed off about. And, to be honest, I think at this point most readers look at slashdot for the same reason people rubber neck at car wrecks. Fixing slashdot would be like carting away the broken cars and sweeping the glass and oil off the sidewalks. It would take away all the fun, and no-one would bother stopping by anymore.
        • Take it one step further: Comments posted and read complaining about duplicate stories == More ad views. It's in the editor's best interests to post duplicate stories as frequently as the readers will tolerate without leaving!

          This conspiracy theory has been brought to you by the letter 'M'.
  • here: www.afrotechmods.com

    heck, it was even on /.

  • As a happy reader, I'm now very excited to see Slashdot has reached its 100th episode and can be seen on the WB or on UPN when ever I want. Hopefully FOX will also pick up on the trend and place Slashdot into their lineup after the Simpsons.
  • Why use dead hard drives when you can use repeat /. articles? Come on, Taco...
  • This may be a dupe, but just about now the last IBM 75GXP failed. It's great to know what we shall do with them. The story back in feb was a tad to early.
  • In the seventies, they did refer to disk drives as using "voice coil" technology. And loudspeakers did, and probably still do, use a strong magnet containing a deep, cylindrical groove in them into which the "voice coil" nests. In a speaker, the magnet weighs a few ounces, the coil is perhaps 3/4" in diameter, and it and the speaker cone weigh a fraction of an ounce.

    In a Digital RK05 disk drive, the magnet weighed pounds, the "voice coil" was about the size of a tin can, and generated enough thrust to move a drive assembly weighing a fraction of a pound. The recoil was enough to make the cabinets shake visibly. Under the right circumstances, disk drives of the sixties and seventies could and did walk across the floor like an unbalanced washing machine. I'm not sure I believe the stories about computer operators having "disk drive races," though.

    Anyway, I'll bet that if you rigged one of THOSE babies up as a loudspeaker, you could probably get frequencies up at least to thirty or forty Hz. You could probably get some nice Sensurround effects. Play a seismograph recording back through them and actually generate the feeling of a small earthquake, maybe?
  • I did this too. I took apart a dead IBM 75GXP (they are probably more useful as speakers) and soldered the speaker wire to the little wires on the servo arm. I connected it to my stereo (which is 100W/channel). The sound that sucker put out was surprising. At higher volumes, the moving of the arm across the platters gets annoying, so if you keep it from moving somehow, the sound improves, and you can crank it. This guy connected the amp to the drive's platter motor, too, but that didn't put out much sound for me.
  • was one I did a few years ago with an old B&W TV. Not sure how I pulled this off without sending a few thousand volts though me, but I did...

    Disconnected the beam deflectors at the base of the CRT from the board. That results in putting one very hot little white dot in the middle of the screen. Then connect your amplified audio signal to the deflector coils. Put it up where every one can see it wiggle!

    For more fun, choke the signal to the Horz. deflector for Bass only, then crank your mids and highs to the Vert. You may have to further amplify your mids and highs to have good deflection, but you get the idea... Anyway, pretty cool mod to do with your old junk...
  • "It doesn't sound quite as good but who cares!"

    Doesn't sound as good as the Klipsch Promedia? Ouch...
    The ProMedia series is famous for being very powerful for the money, but the sound quality is definitely below par. The mids are week and "flubbery", the highs are slightly colorized and overly enthusiastic. The lows are nice, but the transition from tweeters to subwoofer is off a bit. Monsoon speakers are good for those who want real sound quality from a PC at a sane (in fact, even cheaper than the Klipsch) price point. They are nowhere near as powerful though. Klipsch are for gamers and those who watch DVDs on their PC, where accurate sound reproduction takes a back seat to thumping. They are not good for the music listener at that price point. I have heard (no pun intended) that the new 5.1 Klipsch system solves many of these problems. Note that I have nothing against Klipsch--in fact, my home theater system uses KSB 3.1's, but the ProMedias do have their weaknesses.
  • These people have waaayyy too much free time
  • From the site:

    The system, with woofer, midrange, and tweeter harddisks, lying on my favourite stolen cafeteria tray:

    Ha! I can make the same quality sound using ONLY the cafeteria tray! Just use my Magic Wand! [thinkgeek.com]

  • All this talk about reposting has made me think. Just becuase I and almost everyone else has seen this story before doesn't mean that new viewers to slashdot have not. If its a repost story then ignore it. If not then enjoy it.
  • So here it is...

    Slashdot [slashdot.org], a news for nerds site, is reporting about a audio system where hard drives replace speakers [slashdot.org]. Over 208 comments are available.

  • I have found a similar use for old hard drives: a simple laser engine.

    If you connect the voice coils of two drives as suggested, (to an audio amp) and mount two small mirrors on them and shine a laser pointer on them with the axes 90 degrees apart, you can make a very cheap laser display. Connecting the audio to both drives with a few other basic components gives the most fantastic squiggles in time to the music - anything with a sampled beat is brilliant, the same pattern repeats when the same samples are played. Connecting the audio to one drive and a triangle wave generator to the other gives an oscilliscope-style wave display, which looks fantastic with a bit of smoke in the air. (a domesic iron makes a great smoke machine, just put the proper smoke juice in it and crank it up high. a tube from an aerosol pump or car windscreen wiper pump can be used to inject the fluid directly into the chamber)

    I am working on how to drive them from my computer as a laser engine to do real laser lightshows, anyone else done this? I'm thinking either from the soundcard as above, or a clear cover and actually use the heads to read the surface with positioning info on it for a closed-loop system ...

    (of course, you can buy the proper parts (galvanometers) to make laser shows but they cost big $$$, and also recycling is good)

    • Thanks for the post! I had thought about a homebrew laser light engine a few years ago, and it occured to me that a dead hard drive would probably be the best/cheapest way to go.

      What did you use for mirrors? Did they have to be lightweight? Did you leave the heads in the original drives, or remove them to get them closer together? Did you use a HeNe laster? Any other tricks you learned?

      If I was experimenting with this now, I think I would use a dedicated microcontroller with a 12 bit DAC and power amplifier. I wonder what the maximum frequency response of the drivers is, maybe higher than 20kHz, so the filtering on the sound card might be holding you back.

      My goal for this was to build something that would let me throw some arbitrary images and simple text against a wall. My hope was that I could do it with a fairly simple open loop drive, as a high speed closed loop control system sounds like it would take more than a couple weekends to get going!

      Anyway, if you got it to do some nice graphics with the sound card, I'd be interested in checking it out....
  • they are annoying becasue they aren't NEW!

    how would you feel if the news, 6 months after the fact, repeats the story about WorldCom and thier 3.8 billion dollar fraud case... Like it was brand new and no one had heard it before?

    Newsflash... this just in the Japanese have surrendered, WW2 is over!!

    Its news ONCE, after that, its annoying, especially to those that have submitted stories only to have them rejected...
  • I think this was only posted once before. However, it was referenced in a comment [slashdot.org] to this story [slashdot.org] about the Atari Synthesizer a few days ago....

  • "There should be 2 little wires that lead into the induction coil that controls the movement of the heads"

    heh, I thought induction coils were just a Star Trek thing. I learn so much from slashdot...
  • Well, you see, after the Remote control rats used these speakers to voice themselves once again on slashdot they decided they needed to give credit where credit was due and give a second appearnce to the speakers that made it all possible.

  • omfg (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wakko Warner ( 324 ) on Monday August 12, 2002 @12:49AM (#4052805) Homepage Journal
    "It doesn't sound quite as good but who cares!"

    Yeah. I buy speakers because they look good.

    - A.P.
  • I have some spare speakers hear.. and would love a few extra gb/mb of space..
  • Thank you for keeping the suck-level high on slashdot.
  • Great now I can get the extra points in the hackers purity test! Guru here I come. :) http://www.armory.com/tests/hacker.html [armory.com]
  • Why would you want something that doesn't sound good? I want to enjoy listening to my new lord of the rings dvd. Besides, I paid less than $500 for a nice pair of Klipsch Legend Series (brand new & included shipping, model KLF-10) and have yet to see a pair of speakers under $1000 than even come close.
  • So uhh, would these be Speakers for the Dead?

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