# Home made soundbar



## Ubernoob (Jun 14, 2010)

Howdy people, seems my membership still works after many years absent so here is my first home speaker build.

I had a listen to a few soundbars and couldn't really justify the money you have to spend to get okay sound and some fancy algorithm for pseudo surround.

I had some Audax mids and Vifa tweeters and a Earthquake SWS8 kicking around so I figured I'd buy a couple of Ebay amps, a BT module, a radio and a preamp and get to building.












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## ruizal (Aug 4, 2015)

Are all the images broken? I'm curious to see how this turned out!


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## Victor_inox (Apr 27, 2012)

ruizal said:


> Are all the images broken? I'm curious to see how this turned out!
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


I can see all 6 images just fine.


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## Victor_inox (Apr 27, 2012)

what is that display shows?


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## Ubernoob (Jun 14, 2010)

I had trouble getting the pics to work, had been a long time since I linked something from photobucket.

The display is part of the preamp which, for the money seems quite good. There is another display to the right but that is a modded pocket FM/DAB+ tuner.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Ass...lt&btsid=5caf753a-081c-4903-8cd3-79580bd7513d

That was my first Ali order and it came fairly quickly and extremely well packaged.

As expected the separation is pretty rubbish but I am yet to give it a proper listen as the second amp has only recently arrived. It was originally going to get a L-Pad attenuator for the tweeter but bi-amping seemed like a better solution.


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## Ubernoob (Jun 14, 2010)

I sort of misread the display question, it just shows which input you are on and current volume. The reasons I went for that model was that it had the best remote of the bunch, there were others with the same preamp but with crap remotes.

Finished mounting everything today(BT module not installed in this pic) and I only had a few mm to spare, I had to put the bridge rectifier under the caps as there was no room for it elsewhere. The recesses for the NFC tags can just be seen at the top, if you tap your phone on the left side of the amp it brings up BT settings and the right fires up Pandora. It currently only works for Windows phone but can be rewritten if I go back to Android.








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## Ubernoob (Jun 14, 2010)

Well, seems I'm an idiot. My sleep has been pretty rubbish of late so errors have been happening. I hooked two amp inputs in parallel but I managed to cross the channels and my preamp loaded down like crazy and made some smoke.

I also rather stupidly took the blue markings on the buttons' legs as the negative for the LED but it is just to show that it has a blue LED, one light up, hahaha! I also accidentally melted a surface mounted resistor off the board and lost it so I had to use another buck convertor which is a lot bigger, was over 100deg F in the garage today,solder was taking quite a while to set.


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## Ubernoob (Jun 14, 2010)

Well, I feel a bit better, seems the preamp needs an isolated power supply as it doesn't play nice with other components.

There was also an issue with dry solder joints on a chip so the relays weren't always working. I am pretty rubbish with diagnostics or anything electrical really but he did mention the sneaky Chinese a few times in regards to doing things cheaply, hahaha.

So it goes, but I'm now going to add a relay to switch the transformer off when the preamp gets switched off, couldn't really do this with a single power supply.


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## Ubernoob (Jun 14, 2010)

Fairly happy with how this came up, timber was all cut with a panel saw, holes were done with hole saws, oddly I had exactly the sizes I needed. It's far from perfect but it's good enough.








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## Ubernoob (Jun 14, 2010)

I was about to put an axe through this thing but I thought and I'm glad I did.
The sound is not perfect but it is quite good, I had no idea having a speaker in a corner could do such bad things to midrange.

I have quite a bit of hum, so I will try moving the transformer to see if that makes a difference. I'm have been thinking of going to a laptop powerpack, I have a spare 100W one. I'll check the thing at full volume with an amp clamp to check current draw before doing anything.


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## trenion (Feb 23, 2017)

Well done, I'm happy for you. We'll look forward for your new home made sound bar project. One of these days, I'll start mine too.


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