Your Smart TV Does 4K, Surround Sound, Denial-of-service…

Any reader who has bought a TV in recent years will know that it’s now almost impossible to buy one that’s just a TV. Instead they are all “smart” TVs, with an on-board comp…

Early CD Player Teardown

While CD players are nothing new today, they were the height of high-tech in the early 1980s. [w1ngsfly] shows us the inside of a Phase Linear 9500 player from 1983. Not only does it have many comp…

Who’s Afraid Of A CRT?

Older consumer electronic devices follow a desirability curve in which after they fall from favour they can’t be given away. But as they become rarer, they reach a point at which everyone wan…

Building A Solar-Powered, Supercapacitor-Based Speaker

Inspired by many months of hours-long load shedding in South Africa, [JGJMatt] decided to make a portable speaker that can play tunes for hours on a single charge and even charge off the integrated…

Big Red Button Puts Toddler In Command Of Chromecast

Controversial position: the world needs more buttons. We’ve gotten so far away from physical interfaces like buttons, knobs, and switches in favor of sleek but sterile touch-screen “con…

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 …

Audio, Not Video Over The LKV373 HDMI Extender

[eta] found herself in a flat with several LKV373 HDMI extenders. Find the corresponding transmitter, plug it into your device, and you’ve got a connection to the TV/sound system, no fussing …

Tivoli Teardown Disappoints

[Fran] has been curious about the innards of Tivoli Audio’s Model One radio, but was reluctant to shell out $200 just to tear it apart. But she found one recently on eBay, won the auction, an…

Hackaday Prize 2023: OMOTE Universal Remote

A good universal remote can help tame today’s complex home entertainment systems, combining both classic IR and more modern WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity with programmable functions that al…

Recreating The Golden Era Of Cable TV

Fewer and fewer people have cable TV subscriptions these days, due to a combination of poor business practices by cable companies and the availability of alternatives to cable such as various strea…

An ESP In Your Mini TV

When miniature LCD TVs arrived on the market they were an object of desire, far from the reach of tech-obsessed youngsters. Now in the age of smartphones they’re a historical curiosity, but w…

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…

Prison TV Gets Simple Speaker Mod

American prisons are strict about television use. Typically they’re only to be used with headphones, and their enclosures need to be transparent so they can’t be used to smuggle goods. …

No Home Cinema Is Complete Without A Motorized Projector

In the home of the future, everything is automated. Some of us are already there, in dwellings fully tricked-out with IoT and smart home devices. But they don’t somehow look as futuristic as …

It’s Difficult To Read An Audiophile Guide As An Analogue Engineer

Sitting on a train leaving the Hackaday Berlin conference, and Hacker News pops up Julian Shapiro with a guide to HiFi. What Hackaday scribe wouldn’t give it a click, to while away the endles…

A Look At Zweikanalton Stereo Audio And Comparison With NICAM

With how we take stereo sound for granted, there was a very long period where broadcast audio and television with accompanying audio track were in mono. Over the decades, multiple standards were de…

How To Make A Larger Air-Cored Inductor

Radio amateurs often have a love-hate relationship with home-made inductors, sharing all kinds of tips and tricks as to how the most stable nanohenry inductor can be wound. But there’s anothe…

A CRT Audio Visualiser For When LEDs Just Won’t Do

It has been a recurring feature of consumer audio gear since the first magic eye tube blinked into life, to have some kind of visualization of the sound being played. Most recently this has meant a…

What’s Old Is New Again: A Linux PC From A Set Top Box

There was a time around two decades ago, when the new hotness was taking control of home routers to use as small Linux computers. An echo of this era lives on in the name of the OpenWrt minimal Lin…

Classic Video Chip Drives A Modern TFT

A lot of us have a soft spot for retrocomputers, and there’s nothing quite like running original hardware. Unfortunately if you’re after the truly original touch then that means carryin…