BassX - Vintage Looking Bluetooth Speaker
I inherited this old radio from my Grandfather, he'd hoarded it for many years, and so have I now, I couldn't bring myself to throw it out. In it's current condition it isn't worth much. The case was warped and split where it has had something heavy placed on top, there are a ton of scratches in the varnish and it could only manage a crackle when switched on. It would cost far more than it was ever going to be worth to repair it, and then it wouldn't really pick up any channels I'd actually want to listen to.
In a true 'I already have enough things to do' way I decided to turn this into a project. When the days are warm here in the UK it's nice to sit outside in the garden, less so to have to suffer the sounds of all the neighbours dogs barking endlessly, so the requirement for an outdoor speaker of some kind was raised, anything decent though costed more money than I could bear to spend on something that would get knocked about outside, so a few weeks went by cursing the barking dogs until I stumbled across the old radio again in the attic, as soon as I laid eyes on it a plan was hatched.
First things first was to break it down and see what was what, the great thing about older radios is that they are put together properly with screws, none of those plastic clips that break as soon as you look at them. This being mostly wood it was pretty sturdy, but when opened I could see the top was warped. The interior looks like something Indiana Jones would crawl through in one of his movies, I cleaned it up pulled all the components from the inside including the speaker, I sold those on ebay and made back about £20 to put towards new components.
Measuring the speaker panel it was just the right size for some 10cm car speakers, I had some laying about but they weren't great quality so bought some new JVC ones off Amazon, although not the best sounding, they were okay for the price I wanted to pay, i.e very little, the speakers can be reviewed at a later date once we're up and running. For a Bass speaker I found an old 13cm Pioneer unit I had laying about, it's a "two way" speaker as it has a slightly smaller paper cone in the middle but the amp I had wanted had a separately controlled bass output so those frequencies could be dialled out. I've now found a much better quality and larger bass speaker to replace it with.
I had been looking around for an amp and bluetooth modules for a while for something else I had in mind, and had come across what I thought was the perfect combination. The Bluetooth module output just plugs directly into the amplifier circuit so it was just a case of getting power to both. The Amp required anything from 12-24volts, the higher the voltage the better the performance apparently, so I found an old laptop charger supplying 19volts and used that, but for the Bluetooth module it required a 5volt supply so I had to buy a voltage reducer. All of this stuff is available online in all the usual places and for the most part is plug and play.
I had a set of phono sockets that were used on a previous project that were no longer required so I planned to fit these so I could easily plug in a portable CD player or Minidisc, well anything with an output that doesn't have Bluetooth. The amp not only has a socket for Bluetooth input but also has a 3.5mm line-in input socket so an old pair of broken headphones gave up their lead so I could solder that to the phono socket and fix that to the back panel and just plug the lead into the amplifier.
I recycled an old piece of plywood for the back panel and built a place to mount the Pioneer speaker. It's all pretty much rushed together, got far too excited building it and I'm not a carpenter/joiner so it's a bit of a hash for now. I had some wood stain laying about so I sanded and coated the new back panel.
The trickiest bit was unsoldering the pot controls from the amplifier board and resoldering them on wires so that I could mount them in the front panel and add the old knobs to the front. This needs to be re-done as I'd just used some old ice cream tub plastic to mock them up until I get a piece of aluminium to mount them on. The amplifier only came with three pot controls so I found out another pot I'd removed from an old TV or something just for something to mount the fourth control know onto. The Bluetooth module was mounted up on the inside of the wooden cabinet using doublesided sticky tape. The amplifier board came with some mounts so I drilled holes in the bottom of the case to fit those and then the amplifier onto. The power supply was initially stuck to the inside of the case with doublesided sticky tape but when it heated up it fell off, so a slightly more permanent solution was to stick it with hot glue.
I also added a small strip of LEDs at the top rear of the glass dial to illuminate it.
So why BassX? Well I was hoping for a heavier bass sound than it currently gives, but there's a scratch on the top middle of the case that has been there years, but looks uncannily like the X on the SpaceX logo.
How does it sound? well, better than any £40 Bluetooth speaker you can buy at the moment! I know it's about twelve times the size of a bought speaker, and it's currently limited in travel by the length of the power lead, but it wasn't intended to be carried off to a field for camping or anything... yet...
Plans are afoot to sort he mounting for the pots and I now have a 17cm bass speaker to cram in, maybe with a port so the bass sound comes out between the main speakers.
#BluetoothSpeaker #VintageRadio #RetroRadio #Upcycle
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