How to Build Your Own Speakers: Step-by-Step DIY Tech. The electronic components inside a loudspeaker are actually quite simple. The drivers and crossovers pictured here are available in a $369 kit. (Photograph by Chris Eckert) It was back in 1924 that a couple of researchers from General Electric, Chester Rice and Edward Kellogg, patented what remains the basic design for virtually all the world's loudspeakers. In the 84 years since, engineers and enthusiasts have invested a lot of thought and energy in the refinement of Rice and Kellogg's concept, creating a valuable knowledge base for the do-it-yourself crowd.
I should know--I recently built the speakers pictured on these pages, and in the process I learned quite a bit about the art and science of a good speaker. At its core a loudspeaker is a surprisingly simple device. Hardcore speaker hobbyists take delight in figuring all this out for themselves, designing and building the crossovers and enclosures from scratch to see what comes out. The Jasper Circle Jig: A lifesaver! Box assembly. Most Popular Linux Downloads and Posts of 2012. We tacked some great Linux subjects this year, from building home servers to finding the perfect Linux distribution and even fixing some Ubuntu annoyances. Here's a look back at our top Linux downloads and posts from 2012 (with a little FreeBSD thrown in for fun).
Create a Kickass, Seamless, Play-Everything Media Center: The Complete Guide DVD players are so 1999. In this day and age, a custom media center running XBMC is the only thing you really need hooked up to your TV-whether you're watching movies you've ripped, streaming your favorite TV shows from Netflix and Hulu, or even playing video games. More » Turn an Old Computer into a Networked Backup, Streaming, or Torrenting Machine with Ubuntu You've heard the word "server" thrown around a lot, but usually in the context of web sites or big companies that have a lot of data to store.
Five Best Linux Distributions How Can I Build a Quiet, Low-Powered Home File Server? First Look at Ubuntu Linux 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" Create a Kickass, Seamless, Play-Everything Media Center: The Complete Guide. Candy Coasters. Microphone Turns Any Surface into Touch Interface. Bruno Zamborlin collaborated with Norbert Schnell to use a contact microphone connected to a system that processes sound in real time to turn any rigid surface into a touch interface.
There’s no way to explain it adequately in words, so just watch the video: In Zamborlin’s own words, here’s how the magic is accomplished: Through gesture recognition techniques we detect different kind of fingers-touch and associate them with different sounds. In the video we used two different audio synthesis techniques: - physic modelling, which consists in generating the sound by simulating physical laws; - concatenative synthesis (audio mosaicing), in which the sound of the contact microphone is associated with its closest frame present in a sound database. It’s an ingenious approach, especially because Zamborlin has made the system clever enough to recognize the sound of particular gestures, so that the interface can accomplish more than just triggering actions when it “hears” a tap.