Speaker Hacking

Halloween preparations are coming along nicely so far. I'm not exactly where I'd like to be, but I almost never am at this point. I'll likely be scrambling the week before, but that's pretty much how these things go (and it's where the fun is, anyway).

I'll have a post soon on some of the pneumatic control I'm attempting, but I wanted to put a quick one up about my new sound system, which will probably wind up being the most successful and enduring part of this job. 

Last year I made use of my home theater system to provide some ambiance and specific cues for my Eyeball of Doom, but that was a pain for a few reasons. One was having to extend my speaker wiring to reach outside the house, then having to figure out how to hide them in trees, and finally protecting them from the elements when it rained. For that reason I decided to move my next presentation into my garage, but I wasn't really sure what that meant for sound.

This post is made possible by the fine makers of the XRocker chair.

So you can imagine my elation when I was driving through the neighborhood and I saw a used gaming chair that someone had put out to pasture by the road. I quickly nabbed it and brought it back to the house. I had no idea if it worked - the power cord was gone. It's usually not hard to find replacements, but the power requirements for this chair were a bit unusual, so I had to call the manufacturer, who sold me a new one for $12 plus shipping. When I received it, I plugged it in, hooked up my iPod and... viola! Sound! Now the rest of my plan could come to fruition.

Now, I couldn't really destroy this thing without using it first, so I made sure I spent an evening with my laptop plugged in and playing various games. I quite enjoyed the experience, but it wasn't practical to keep the chair like it was, despite the fact that my son, Atom, had fallen in love with the "music chair." So, let the hacking begin.

A box-cutter knife made quick work of the back of this chair, and the main interface on the side came out with the removal of half a dozen screws. It's attached directly to the subwoofer, but the cables have connectors that come out easily. 

Even better, the subwoofer assembly is an isolated box that's mounted to the middle of the chair via L-brackets and the whole thing comes out easily. The only thing that presents a problem for completely removing the whole system is the 5W, 4-Ohm speakers that are on either side of the chair. I had to cut the wires in order to remove them. That's not a big loss, though since I had intended to extend them anyway. This is what the whole mess looks like once it's been removed:

Perfect! Now to mount it. There's some decent attic space immediately above our garage. I'd previously used it to install electrical boxes for some florescent fixtures I'd added, precisely so I could do this kind of work in the garage in the evening, without having to depend on a 100W garage door opener bulb to see what I'm doing. 

Armed with a 3" hole saw blade for my drill for the speaker mounting holes, some 18 gauge speaker wire from Lowes and some wire nuts, I mounted the stereo speakers on either side of the garage ceiling. The wires lead to some storage shelves in the back of the garage, where I placed the subwoofer and control panel. I used some of the same screws and brackets to afix those two things to the shelving.

Note the ultra-cool LED ring in the speaker. High class stuff, here.

Mounting speakers in drywall: easy.
Not putting my foot through said drywall: not so easy.

It was extremely satisfying to plug the reconfigured system in for the first time and have it belt out some of my tunes. I had to resist the urge to turn it all the way up because everyone else was asleep in the house by that point. It's not a huge system, but it fills the garage very nicely with a great stereo effect and the subwoofer supplements it nicely. Since it's not in a chair and vibrating you directly anymore, the base has to be turned up nearly to max, but it still does the job.

I think this will do very nicely either for providing some spooky ambiance during Halloween, or just letting me listen to my favorite show tunes - I mean, cutting-edge indie rock - while I'm working on this and future projects.