Category: Boombox

Followup roundup

Written by Fergal Hainey

I am thinking of reviving this blog. I am hearing from all angles why I should be publishing: in case what I share is useful, regular writing is supposed to be good for me, and because maybe “personal branding” is a fairly good idea after all.

The first thing I want to do is a draw a line under the old topics from 2012 while I was still at University of Aberdeen. I actually enjoyed reading them again, the topics are so unrelated to what I do now that they aren’t cringe worthy.

Boombox

My JVC ’80s boombox has had a good run. It has developed a hum on the tape deck that I can’t fix with my usual routine of poking the contacts with a spoon to ground them and twiddling the knobs to get static and dirt out. I don’t want to have to throw it away next time I move flat, so writing this has spurred me to contact a repair shop before I finished this paragraph.

In the end I used the FM transmitter, tape deck connector, and blank tapes pretty evenly depending on the circumstances. The FM transmitter if I needed to use my phone at the same time, the tape connector for better sound quality, and tapes for relaxing.

I have noticed an increased number of battery-powered small Bluetooth speakers that actually sound good. Finding something portable that sounded good without being too expensive is what drove me to buying a vintage boombox in the first place. The UE BOOM is the one I’ve heard the most of and I’m impressed by it. Some others sounded OK and there have been others that I didn’t think sounded good enough, but I didn’t take note of what they were. They seem to be in the £100 plus range still.

Node.js filtering proxy

I was really happy with how fast it is to get up and running with Node.js. I realise that forwarding all of your browser’s traffic isn’t a high load situation, but is more than Flask’s debug server would take with default settings for example. I appreciate that Node.js’ standard pattern worked so well out of the box, it’s evented and has a fast VM. Python is my first language now and I love it for how it encourages team maintainability, but often needs extra consideration to reach production performance. Python’s async syntax and PyPy should bridge the evented and VM gaps respectively. The new language features in ES6 should make JavaScript more attractive. Exciting times! I like to think of ease of maintenance by a team and performance as different facets of working at scale.

The code I wrote probably doesn’t work with 4OD anymore. I don’t have a television now so I don’t see adverts for shows, so I haven’t used any of the catch up services in years. It was a fun exercise though and gave me something to talk about in a job interview.

SD to HDD copier

I never tried it. I don’t hear the complaint of full SD cards so much anymore. I think the cloud and even lower SD card costs have solved the problem. I’m still excited about what new products these education focused electronics will lead to. The Arduino is still a great microcontroller. The Raspberry Pi is a great embeddable full computer and the new models are really powerful and still cheap. The new BBC micro:bit is awesome for experimenting with the components in modern mobile devices. I was worried that the micro:bit would be stepping on the Raspberry Pi’s toes, but after getting one at EuroPython 2016 I was won over. The micro:bit definitely has a focus on mobile devices, which makes a lot of sense as most people’s first computer is a mobile.

Universal repair USB stick

I feel guilty that I didn’t document my steps properly. I still have the one USB stick, but I’ve not had to use it in years. Modern Macs and Windows computers have built-in repair partitions. Upgrading to the latest OS is a lot more common now the upgrades are free and can be downloaded, so there seems to be fewer people with messed up systems. I myself hardly ever use a laptop anymore and do most of my work on a tablet. When a tablet goes bad, you just wipe it. That sounds like the worst case and evokes memories of reinstalling Windows. The reality is all the apps, settings, and documents are backed up on the cloud and starting from scratch again isn’t a big deal. With app stores for most platforms and Microsoft and Apple both peddling cloud storage, desktop could be going the same way. I’ve been considering trying to Dockerise my whole dev environment so even trickier installs are easier to reproduce. I’ve not seen anyone using Docker that way yet so could be interesting.

Clipboard sharing with Dropbox

I got a lot of use out of my little Dropbox app. Eventually messaging apps got better at accepting different sorts of pasted content and I stopped using it. I read the help page linked from my Public folder and it appears that only Pro and Business users can use Public folder simple URLs now, so my app may no longer work. If I were to make it now I’d probably have to use Dropbox’ API to make tokenised URLs. The help page also says that as of 2016-10-03 HTML documents won’t be rendered in a browser, I guess they’ll change the content type. My app relied on that for sharing rich text content.

The future

I do hope to keep this blog somewhat up to date now. Everyone in the tech industry has moments when they feel they were the first one to get a particular combination of parts working together, so I will try to share those times at least. I work mostly with Python, Docker, and AWS now so things could be more focused in that direction. That said I want to start making and computing as a hobby again not just work, I think about it so much.

Boombox follow up

Written by Fergal Hainey

Just saw this on the Maplin website http://www.maplin.co.uk/low-noise-stereo-preamp-kit-220053 . A lot cheaper than a CMoy and has the right impedances. I could split my 1/8″ jack to DIN cable and put this in the middle with a 9V battery and it could work maybe.

My friend with the tapes also gave me an old stereo audio transformer from RS he said could work. Sounds like some sort of magic bullet, a passive one component solution to clean boosting. I may give it a go but am a bit worried about the arcane stuff about impedance matching and also that I may blow something in the boombox if I’m mistaken about it’s power output.

iPod to ’80s boombox

Written by Fergal Hainey

I first started looking into vintage boomboxes when a friend got one those BOSE iPod docks. I thought a small set set of speakers that sounded good and could fill a room was a great idea. My first thought was that the new wave of iPod docks were made small so they would be portable, except they had no batteries and no handle. All the ones that were actually portable were passive (driven by the iPod, so quiet and bad sounding) or very expensive and in sort of a wheeled flight case format.

I was getting into golden age hip-hop at the time so quickly thought of old boom boxes, but assumed they were all the massive ones you see on album covers and not up to todays audio standards. A bit of research proved there was actually a very comprehensive range of sizes in manufacture before they fell out of fashion. There is also a large boombox collectors community on the internet who have a lot to say about the sound quality. It turns out that a competitive market and a consumer demand for loudness resulted in boomboxes that I’m sure would outperform atleast passive speakers. I also realised that consumer audio equipment doesn’t include all the detail and new technology of studio equipment, and now that headphones and speakers are more of a commodity that gap has probably widened. I also have my own suspicions that a generation used to listening to poorly encoded MP3s on YouTube are probably less discerning of audio quality, and these iPod dock manufacturers have could have taken advantage of that to cut costs.

So I took to eBay and am now the owner of a JVC RC-656LB for around £40! It’s about a foot and a half in length and has a very classic ’80s look to it, which makes sense as apparently they started manufacture of that model in 1982. I first tried it by tuning the radio and how loud and clear it could get really surprised me. It was a much better system than I was anticipating, especially the bass response!

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To begin with I was content to make tapes. I inherited a Hi-Fi with a cassette recorder from my old flat and had some fun learning about the different types of tapes and recording methods, such as Dolby noise reduction. I bought the last box of cassettes from my local Currys and burnt through them within a month or so. I quickly found the attraction in making mix tapes. Selecting tracks and matching the lengths of each side was very cathartic, I soon had more mix playlists than cassettes. I put some whole albums on  tape too, and was taken back to the days of CD players, where you couldn’t skip around between albums and artists. Generally limiting what I could easily play gave me a much better appreciation for the tracks I was choosing, and also made me think a lot more about what tracks to put on tape, what music I really liked and could listen to all day.

I was lucky enough to have a friend who had a lot of PA equipment going back decades, including boxes and boxes of TDK chrome tapes. Chrome tapes (Type II) have a different frequency response to normal ferric (Type I) tapes,  so the recording and playback equalisations could be changed to give a better dynamic range in the high frequencies (assuming your tape player can adjust for them). Due to his generosity I now have a practically unlimited supply of tapes of a higher quality then the ones I can find in shops!

The boombox was going everywhere, the kitchen, shower, garden, picnics, beaches and camping trips. It could last a good few weeks of every day use on 8 D cell batteries (around £10 as long you can find a bulk pack of 8, unfortunately it chewed through cheap batteries when I tried so they weren’t an option). On longer trips my friends contributed to battery costs when it ran out, so it wasn’t too uneconomical. While at home it runs of the mains. Being the only one who could make tapes I was enjoying having complete control of the music. One thing I hate is skipping between different tracks to appease different people, especially before a track has even finished. It makes it impossible to get into what you’re listening to. Once a tape is in the boombox it’s a hassle to put another in and wind it to the right spot, so the music is left alone. I don’t think I’m too malevolent of a music dictator, the only tape which seems to cause any consistent consternation is “Jazz hour (and a half)”…

I did look into playing music from an iPod as well. It has an analog input, but with a connector I haven’t seen before, described as “5 pin DIN”. I managed to find some specs on the pin layout and bought a cheapy 1/8″ jack to DIN cable. On first try I thought it wasn’t working, but when I turned the boombox all they way up I could hear music just faintly. I’m assuming that the DIN input expects a much higher line level than modern standards. The level is so low I’m sure some sort of preamp would safely boost the signal to a suitable amount. Some googling showed that as preamps are normally for audiophiles they are much too expensive, even basic headphone amplifiers. From there I read about the Chu Moy design of DIY headphone amplifier, but prebuilt kits are again, needlessly expensive. It looks like I could get the parts cheap enough, so it could be a future project…

In the end I settled on a cheap FM transmitter for my iPod. The sound quality can be iffy, depending on interference, but it’s good for a quick fix, and has the handy side effect of being able to control what’s playing without having to walk up to the boombox.

So all in all, I think I managed to put together a system that outperforms these modern iPod docks, and at a much more affordable price. It also has a huge amount of retro cool and gets looks and people asking about it. It’s also offered a great deal of fun, learning how to best use it, the history of the iconic boombox, and putting me more in touch with my favourite music and helping me share it with other people. It could be the start of a new hobby.