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1.
Music is a big part of your life. It's a big part of all of our lives. You've been listening to it since before you could talk. Your parents introduced you to it, then your own taste developed and you started making your own decisions about music—what genres we liked, artists we liked, songs we loved. Some of you even tried making your own, whether that was a mixtape handed out in high school or a song you made up with the only two chords you could play. To some degree, the music we listen to defines us.
But do you have any idea how it works? Any idea how someone sings into a lump of metal and years later you can still hear exactly what they sounded like through some twisty metal stuck in your ears? No, and neither did we. But here at Complex UK we like to inform ourselves and then, even better, pass that on to you. And to understand anything you need to start from the very basics. Without those, nothing else comes.
Wanna know more about your music? Learn about what sound is. Wanna learn what sound is? Build a speaker.
2.Build It Yourself
Sure. You could read some books and just buy some awesome headphones pre-built like a baby. OR you could take apart that technology, you could rip each wire from the board and see what it does. Instead of learning how to think for solutions, learn how to know instinctively what any issue could be. Learn with your hands.
Those suburban dads out in their front yards fixing up old cars with their sons aren't just teaching their boys about engines, they're teaching them the importance of knowing how things work, about being able to fix things yourself. We're not saying they're gonna call you out in a club when the speaker breaks like a doctor on an airplane, but you're gonna save a hell of a lot on rental insurance and repairmen.
3.Know the Basics
Right now you don't need to know what a subwoofer is but you need to get the basics down.
Sound is essentially vibrations traveling through air. It's buzzing energy. In a speaker a coil of wire is electrified to either repel or attract a magnet, as it does this the coil contracts and elongates, vibrating an attached cone (the speaker cone) that sends out soundwaves.
But what to make your speaker out of? Why not find an exciter (pictured above)—a device that will send sound vibrations through most any surface—and find out for yourself?
4.Know Your Materials
You've probably seen auditory waves before, maybe when you were big into Winamp, so you should have a vague idea what those flowing lines look like, though maybe not what they signify. The taller the wave the louder it is. The closer together the waves the higher the frequency and frequency gives us the difference in musical pitch.
This becomes important because different materials can handle different waves. Some things will be better at shallower simpler music, other things will bring out that perfect bass. If you've got yourself an exciter you can work out what gives you the sound and quality you want. And really try everything, even if you've got a tiny exciter you can get some impressive sounds coming out of anything.
5.Solder On
... like a toy solder... there are plenty of puns to be made. Jokes aside, you're gonna need to solder things to other things. Soldering is the process for holding something in place in a circuit board. Place a hot soldering iron next to the piece you want to attached while that piece is in its particular hole, then take some 'solder' (different metals work) and hold it against the iron (as shown above). If you've got your technique down—this takes practice—the melted metal will fill the gap and lock in your piece.
Obviously it's super hot so like be careful. Actually.
6.Check Yourself before You... Solder
Seriously. Check connections before you solder things over things. We know from experience. Or at least, the one brash writer who made the failed experiment pictured above taught us all. (Fine. It was me.)
Patience is what to take away from this. Rushing through each step, not learning what you're doing and how you're doing it, is just going to cause you problems in the future. If you're lucky they can be undone with a push and a solder-sucker, if you're unlucky you end up with what looks like a working speaker but in fact makes Taylor Swift sound like Iron Maiden with the distortion turned up.
7.And the Music...
If you've followed instructions, heeded our advice and kept with it, you should have your very own homemade speaker. Now, to test that bass....
8.
If you wanna be a builder, get on Technology Will Save Us's site and check out their DIY kits.