Pulley System Makes Headphone Cables More Managable

It’s 2024. You’ve probably got one or more pairs of wireless headphones around the house. [Barnso] prefers wired headphones with a long cable, but he also decries the fact that it often…

Add USB-C To Your AirPods The Easy Way

While the death of Apple’s Lightning Connector can’t come soon enough, swapping the ports on their products as “category-defining innovations” seems a bit of a stretch. [Ken…

Winamp Releases Source Code, But Is It Really Open?

The 1990s seem to have reached that point at which they are once more considered cool, and ephemera of the decade has become sought-after. One of the unlikely software hits from the period was Wina…

Harmonic Table Keyboard Brings Old Idea Back To Life

If you missed the introduction of the Axis-49 and Axis-64 keyboards by C-Thru Music, you’re definitely not alone. At the time it was a new musical instrument that was based on the harmonic ta…

A3 Audio: The Open Source 3D Audio Control System

Sometimes, startups fail due to technical problems or a lack of interest from potential investors and fail to gain development traction. This latter case appears to be the issue befalling A3 Audio.…

An Ingenious Blu-Ray Mini-Disk Player

[befi] brings us a project as impressive as it is reminiscent of older times, a Blu-Ray mini disk player. Easily fitting inside a pocket like a 8 cm CD player would, this is a labour of love and, t…

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&…