Building A Museum Listening Station?

Anonymous Coward writes "I am building a museum exhibit which requires the use of 10 listening stations. These should be able to play back a few minutes of audio, should have an obvious Play button (and no other buttons: less confusion for the elderly and less to break for the kids), and should be able to work with an absolute minimum of supervision for three months of constant use. There are fancy ready-made solutions to this problem, but at $350, it would be too expensive to buy 10 of them. Similarly, there are cheap solutions ($20 CD player + $15 headphones), but this is probably not reliable or user friendly enough for this exhibit. Does the Slashdot community have any suggestions for how to build a reasonably inexpensive museum listening station?"

Comments

Go MP3?

[leetdan]

You should be able to pick up an older solid-state MP3 player for next to nothing. Wire it up with a DC adapter, connect the Play button, and either use headphones or amp it to a speaker.

Why not one that does 10 stations or more?

[MR_60]

Instead of 10 seperate stations, why not have one system that runs all the booths. It could be a PC with ten seperate sets of USB headphones, and some specially configured software. I'm sure this wouldn't be too difficult for someone to develop...

Directed sound

[deanj]

Fork out the bucks to put a few of the directed sound systems in. You won't have stolen equipment, and you'll serve the same purpose. Getting something that patrons will handle will cost you a lot more long term.

Re:Mp3

[bobdotorg]

Have the MP3 player repeating the single track, with the big red button attached to the 'skip forward' or 'skip ahead' track button.

The only shortcoming of this simple plan is that the audio is always playing.

Re:All about user interface

[MoonBuggy]

Get arcade machine buttons - they are available for a few $ on eBay, usually sold to people building MAME cabinets. Since they're designed to withstand years of drink spills, cig burns and general abuse I'm sure they'd be fine in a museum for a few months. You should be able to find a bag of 10 for less than $50. Wire them into the play connections on cheap 16MB MP3 players as mentioned above, hook up some el-cheapo portable active speakers, seal it all into a box with a power lead coming out the back and you're good to go.

Re:Lazy you

[Black_Logic]

I guess you were probably just trolling, but don't you think that's a little bit ridiculous? Assuming that this guy is getting paid for this, which he could certainly not be (i.e. volunteering for some non-profit organization) regardless, he obviously followed the guidelines for asking a public, technical forum a question. Polite, showed that he'd done the required google research.

As an aside, why do people so often get pissed about the ask slashdot sections? Google does an excellent job for most things, but if you're considering building some project or doing something technically interesting google doesn't always have links to all the pitfalls or the interesting storys that go along with a project from someone with experience in that area. These often end up being the most interesting threads, IMHO.

Been there, done that

[steve buttgereit]

Hi--

I use to work for Virgin Entertainment Group, Inc. (the Virgin Megastores in the US) and other retailers where listening stations were involved.

Really you have to consider how many people will comoe through the exhibit, average age, how long the exhibit will run etc. to understand what solution is best or to really cost it out.

So if you go with $15 dollar headphones, will they stand up to being put on, taken off, people tugging on them, etc. or will you be replacing one set a day due to breakage? This naturally means each set doesn't cost $15, but each station costs somewhat higher than that. You really need to think along these lines to compare costs. Especially given your condition of minimal oversight; that means people will be more inclined to abuse them (or rather less inhibited to, and yes even the queit museum crowd will abuse equipment as we saw in our classical departments.)

You could source the sound from a single computer, but you would need multiple output channels (probably multiple sound cards) and software to support it. Other than the pre-packaged solutions, I'm not so familiar with what's available in this category.

If you want to go cheaper could you not use actual speakers, with partitions and volume settings such that there isn't too much bleed over from one sound space to another? Disney actually puts this same kind of concept to effective use on many of their themepark rides. This would eliminate the 'touch' element which usually cause headphones to die in these situations. Of course, not seeing the exhibit, it might not be practical.

Some Problems with the Problem Statement

[mmurphy000]

These should be able to play back a few minutes of audio, should have an obvious Play button (and no other buttons: less confusion for the elderly and less to break for the kids), and should be able to work with an absolute minimum of supervision for three months of constant use. There are fancy ready-made solutions to this problem, but at $350, it would be too expensive to buy 10 of them. Similarly, there are cheap solutions ($20 CD player + $15 headphones), but this is probably not reliable or user friendly enough for this exhibit.

Various questions and food for thought:

• Don't forget the money value of time. Unless all staff working on this project are volunteers, staff time costs money, and the time spent fussing creating some custom solution may blow all your apparent cost savings on the equipment.
• You don't indicate what the exact scope of your between-$35-and-$350 problem is. For example, are you including a stand and mounting hardware in that budget? The more you gotta spend on those things, the less you have for the smarts.
• Does "minimum of supervision" include staff time to turn things off? If not, are power draw or battery charging be included in that $35-350 budget?
• Are you sure you need a Play button? If the audio is short enough, go with what other posters have suggested and do continuous-loop, with a sign indicating that the audio repeats every N minutes. I've been to museums that have taken that approach.
• Are you better served by finding donors for the $3,500 for the commercial-grade stations than in finding a technical solution that avoids them? Heck, all you need is one sponsor per station, where you can attach a "audio content sponsored by" sign. $350 for a concrete promotional outcome should be relatively straightforward. You might even consider going with audio-related sponsors to increase your odds of getting the donation (radio stations, car audio stores, sound studios, etc.).

Re:No, it can't be done on the cheap.

[fmaxwell]

I call troll. Why can't he do it cheap and himself?

Because the ruggedized equipment needed is not available at a low price -- and producing it entails plastics molding, machining, design, testing, prototyping, etc.

Let the exhibit start with this and then upgrade as they go.

1. You are mistaking initial purchase price for total cost. If they have a dozen consumer-grade headphones and three go out per day due to breakage and theft, the real cost is huge. That's not unrealistic with kids, people used to industrial-quality equipment in public places, etc. The commercial stuff with the big ticket price is less costly than consumer stuff in the real world -- especially when you factor in costs for museum staff to maintain the fragile consumer stuff.

2. A museum is unlikely to get much money to upgrade an exhibit that's already open. It's not like a start-up business. A bunch of consumer-quality headphones, many of which are broken at any given time, is unlikely to generate enough income to ever fund proper equipment.

Just becuase something is from a name-brand company doesnt mean that he can't make it for cheaper himself.

It has nothing to do with the brand name. It has to do with the cost of manufacturing ruggedized audio devices in low quantities. There are no headphones at Best Buy, Circuit City, or Fry's that are going to hold up to kids yanking on cords, people dropping them multiple times per day, the cord being pulled tight, and so forth.

It may not come with whiz-bang feature X but if it gets the job done, stop complaining how a wal-mart phone will put pay-phone companies out of business

It won't get the job done and I'm not complaining about anything. Put a Walmart phone outside of a convenience store in place of a real pay phone and it will be broken, vandalized, or stolen with 12 hours. Same thing if you put consumer-grade headphones and CD players (or MP3 players) to handle a museum exhibition.