Ask Slashdot: Cheap and Fun Audio Hacks?

An anonymous reader writes: A few years back I discovered that even a person of limited soldering skills can create a nifty surround-sound system with the magic of a passive matrix decoder system; the results pleased me and continue to, It's certainly not a big and fancy surround system, but I recommend it highly as a project with a high ratio of satisfaction to effort. (Here's one of the many, many tutorials out there on doing it yourself; it's not the long-forgotten one I actually used, but I like this one better.) I like listening to recorded music sometimes just to hear how a particular playback system sounds, not just to hear the music "as intended." I'd like to find some more audio hacks and tricks like this that are cheap, easy, and fun. Bonus points if they can be done with the assistance of a couple of smart children, without boring them too much. I have access to Goodwill and other thrift stores that are usually overflowing with cheap-and-cheerful gear, to match my toy budget. What mods or fixes would be fun to implement? Are there brands or models of turntable I should look for as the easiest with which to tinker? Are there cool easy-entry projects akin to that surround sound system that I could use to improve my radio reception? I'm not sure what's out there, but I'd like to get some cool use out of the closet-and-a-half I've got filled with speakers and other gear that I can't quite bear to toss, since "it still works."

Comments

Build your own O2 headphone amp

[steveha]

The O2 headphone amplifier is an extremely clean amp that can drive almost any headphones. It sounds great. Pair it with a clean DAC, rip all your CDs to FLAC, and you can listen to your music from your computer with the very highest in fidelity.

If you can solder, you can build the O2 amp for $30 to $40 worth of parts.

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/08/o2-summary.html

The guy who designed the O2 also designed a really good DAC. He wanted to release it as a DIY project but the realities of the DAC chip business mean that it was only practical to sell a complete DAC board. But you could make a project out of building an O2 amp in an enclosure with the DAC board built-in. (I have such a device but I can't solder; I bought mine from JDS Labs, pre-built.)

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2012/04/odac-released.html

I am friends with a world-class audio expert, and he agrees that the O2+ODAC is the best way to spend your money. It's as clean as $1000+ solutions.

P.S. Article about the guy who designed the O2 and ODAC: "the audio genius who vanished"

http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/nwavguy-the-audio-genius-who-vanished

Re:Oscilloscope from a sound card

[Anonymous Coward]

The TRS-80 CoCo 2 had software to do this. It's not all that new or interesting.