Reverse Engineering The Behringer Ultranet Protocol

Ultranet is a protocol created by audio manufacturer Behringer to transmit up to 16 channels of 24-bit sound over a Cat-5 cable. It’s not an open standard, though: Behringer doesn’t offer an API or…

Sonolithography With The Raspberry Pi Pico

You can do some wild things with sound waves, such as annoy your neighbours or convince other road users to move out of your way. Or, if you get into sonolithography like [Oliver Child] has, you ca…

Up Close And Personal With A MEMS Microphone

If you’ve ever wondered what lies beneath the barely visible hole in the can of a MEMS microphone, you’re in luck, because [Zach Tong] has a $10 pair of earbuds to sacrifice for the cau…

CT Scanner Reveals The Difference Between Real And Fake AirPods

These days, you have to be careful what you buy. Counterfeit hardware is everywhere, especially when you’re purchasing things sight unseen over the Internet. [Jon Bruner] recently set out to …

Noise Cancelling Isn’t As Easy As You’d Think

On the face of it, producing a set of noise cancelling headphones should be a relatively straightforward project. But as [Pete Lewis] found out, things are not always as they seem. The result is a …

After MEMS Microphones, MEMS Speakers Enter The Market

These days it’s hard to not come across solid-state (micro-electromechanical systems, MEMS) microphones, as they are now displacing electret microphones almost everywhere due to their small s…

Stream Vinyl To Your Sonos Without The Financial Penalty

One of the unexpected success stories in the world of hi-fi over the past decade has been the resurgence of the vinyl LP as a musical format. What was once old hat is now cool again, but for freshy…

The Best-Sounding Walnut You’ll Hear Today

Do you ever find yourself eating walnuts and think, this would make a great enclosure for something like a Bluetooth speaker? That seems to be exactly what happened to [Penguin DIY]. In the mesmeri…

Exploring Hidden Lyrics On 1990s DCC Audio Tapes

Having a fondness for old and obscure audio and video media formats, [Techmoan] recently revisited the Philips Digital Compact Cassette (DCC) format introduced in 1992. Despite being billed as the …

Fixing Some More Of Apple’s Design Mistakes

Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that Apple has strayed from the Woz’s original open platform ideal for the Apple II. [Ken Pillonel] is back for another round of fixing Apple&…

Planar Speaker Build Uses Hard Drive Magnets

We like to see people building things that are a little unusual, and we really like it when said unusual thing uses salvaged parts. This project from [JGJMatt] ticks all our boxes — the build…

IKEA Hack – Kvart Into Mic Stand

While audiophiles might spend gazillions of hours finely honing a microphone stand that isolates their equipment from the trials and perturbations of the world, most of us who use a microphone don&…

Know Audio: Distortion Part One

If you follow audiophile reviewers, you’ll know that their stock-in trade is a very fancy way of saying absolutely nothing of quantifiable substance about the subject while sounding knowledge…

Op-Amp Challenge: Compare Op-Amps, By Listening To Them

In the world of audiophilia there are arguments that rage over the relative merits of particular components. Sometimes this can reach silly levels as in the high-end ALPS pot we once saw chosen as …

Digitizing Sound On An Unmodified Sinclair ZX81

Whatever the first computer you used to manipulate digital audio was, the chances are it came with dedicated sound hardware that could play, and probably record, digitized audio. Perhaps it might h…

A Studio Condenser Microphone For A Constrained Budget

As the Internet has turned so many of us into content creators, we’ve seen the quality of webcams and microphones steadily increase to the point at which even a fairly modestly-equipped YouTu…

A Feature-Rich Amplifier Module For 3-Way Speaker Builds

There’s something rewarding about building your own DIY audio hardware. Knowing you put it together yourself gives you faith in the construction, and psychosomatically makes the music sound a…

Ploopy Builds Open Source RP2040-Powered Headphones And You Can Too!

We’ve seen many DIY headphones projects on these fair pages over the years, but not many that are quite as DIY as the Ploopy Headphones. What makes this project interesting is the sheer depth…