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Building A Museum Listening Station?

Posted by timothy on from the use-ogg-too-but-how dept.

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?"

9 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Mp3 by Dward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You can find 16Mb mp3 players for about $20.
    Toss in a cheap pair of speakers and a power supply and mount the entire unit in a box with a single button.
    Load the audio you want as the only track and it should work just fine.

    --
    What do you mean trout doesn't make good underwear?
    1. Re:Mp3 by davebarz · · Score: 4, Interesting


      But you wouldn't connec the button to the play/pause button, that would be silly. You'd connect it to the next track button, and just leave it on repeat with that as the only track.

      --
      barzelay.net
    2. Re:Mp3 by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Interesting

      you dont need any electronics tinkering...

      A simply big red button with a pastic rod that pushes the play button on the CD player will do the job. this is how MANY audio kiosks are done.

      have the headphones plug-in easy to replace with new headphones as they WILL get damaged.

      the general public likes to damage other people's things.

      and you can't get ANYTHING more reliable than a $20.00 CD player. those things are engineered well nowdays, and if the player is always sitting still and has a power wart running it. I'm betting it would outlast any custom job.

      --
      Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
  2. Radio-based solution by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You could do what they do at the Stonehenge site in the UK : they have a cheapo radio receiver thingy, and buttons to tune in to one of the several languages they offer. I assume they have a base station that broadcasts on several frequencies.

    So essentially, what you could do if you want to do it on the cheap is to get several low-power FM transmitters (that won't emit outside the building, presumably, I don't know how the FCC would like that) and lend cheap FM radios with preset stations to receive your broadcasts, with a little "program" sheet, perhaps glued to the receivers.

    Just an idea...

    --
    "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
  3. Build a box. by natmsincome.com · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'd get some nice headphones but not to nice (people break them.) and the CD player BUT put a box around the CD player and rig it so that it has a big red button on the front that users press. Time the audio and make the red button stay red for that amount of time.

    Alternatively you could get a boom box (more stable) or a flash stick mp3 player (no moving parts and smaller).

    You'd want to make it so that if you press the button a second time it resets the timer on the light and rewinds and plays again.

  4. Re:Listening posts. by Chordonblue · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Couldn't a multiple output sound card like an Audigy be used? God knows there's a lot of outputs on there - even more were you to use mono sound and split left/right.

    --
    "...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
  5. Build one yourself from old computers. by danamania · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Go to goodwill, and grab some mac LCs. $5 for the LC, $5 for the monitor, and set them up behind a box. something simple, anything. Then have one huge "play" button that when pressed, hits Any Key on the keyboard.

    Have an applescript running and make it play the audio you need with quicktime whenever any key is pressed. Simple, cheap, and besides old macs you could use ANY old computer. I mention the macs only because I know those particular ones are common, cheap, MacOS 7.5.3 is a Free(beer) download, and you have the audio recording and playback hardware all there.

  6. Old telephone handsets by Registered+Coward+v2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For the listening end, why not try to find 10 of teh old heavy duty Ma bell telephone handsets? You could run 2 wires to the speaker inside of it (coiled if you want to be fancy) and have a rugged earpiece. alternatively, you might be able to hack some of the cheaper wall plug phones sold in stores today.

    As for players, look for closeout MP3 players - you could wire a switch across the play button. Another thing to look for, if teh duration of teh sound is short enough, are these "voice on a chip" thingies used in greetin cards - you might find one with enough memory for your needs at a specialty electronics parts house.

    Good luck

    --
    I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
  7. Cones of silence by pongo000 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been to a museum (Los Alamos) and a library (Dallas public library) that use parabolic reflectors, mounted above and pointed downwards, to generate very well-defined sound patterns. They're pretty amazing: You hear nothing if you are standing just outside the "pattern." The other plus side is that you can use a low-output speaker, since the reflector will "amplify" the sound by focusing it to a small footprint.