Comment

Comment by Colin S on June 4, 2010 at 9:52am

Sorry to hear about the redundancy Carl,I was made redundant three years ago,it's not nice. I'm on the look out for some of these 5ltr Heineken Kegs to try an amp in, I haven't found one yet which tells me that Heineken isn't very good!

Comment by alan glass on June 4, 2010 at 9:49am

Iam so impressed with you guys so many talented people awesome .

Comment by Carl Robson on June 4, 2010 at 9:22am

There is a good possibility I might be made redundant next week, so I might need to go clear my local Halfords shelves, gut them and put them in interesting tins and boxes and ebay them for silly money as a second income/top up until proper job comes up. And get the tins and boxes from junk shops/car boots/charity shops.

Comment by Colin S on June 4, 2010 at 9:11am

Here's another Demo, no laughing I'm a novice and thanks to Bemuzic for the inspiration!

Comment by Colin S on June 4, 2010 at 8:58am

Here's a quick demo Brian.
I'm off to Halfords tomorrow, cheers Carl!

Comment by Carl Robson on June 4, 2010 at 8:31am

Get them while they are rocking. already half price.

Comment by MrRandomWritings (Backwater Bri) on June 4, 2010 at 7:41am

Cheers Mark - I am half hoping someone else will try out the 5w experiment first (hint! hint! Colin!) I have just remembered that my bro has an old Roberts kicking around so I might pitch up with some leads and plugs and see if that works as I think it may have an input socket of some sort.

Thanks for yoru input anyway - I don't understand impedance impudence and impediments so it would have to be pure trial and error in my case!

Comment by Mark on June 4, 2010 at 6:48am

Hey, I just learned another lesson - I'm a clumsy typist so I should write my posts in something with a spell checker and then paste them in here!

attemot = attempt
souldering = soldering

Comment by Mark on June 4, 2010 at 6:44am

I guess some of these things might work - some might even work really well - but there are a few things you might want to bear in mind.

First, although radios and megaphones certainly contain an amp connected up to a speaker in amongst the other gubbins, there's no guarantee that the input end of the amp is set up to be optimal for the sort of output you get from a pickup (ie. for the appropriate voltage and impedance). So, even if you can find where to make the connection, it might be a bit hit and miss as to what volume level you get and whether it's distorted.
Having said all that, I use the mic input on my laptop for all kinds of stuff that isn't mics and it seems to cope really well - so you never know.

Second, modifying a radio could turn out to be trickier than some of the other options - eg, if the connection from the tuner circuitry to the audio amp circuitry is all on a printed circuit board you might have trouble cutting one connection and souldering in another. On the other hand, if you're really lucky you might find a radio that has an external input socket (I vaguely recall having such a thing many years ago when transistor radios were hip and groovy...it was a 5-pin DIN socket but you could easily rewire the appropriate lines to a 1/4 inch jack socket). I read somewhere that Roberts radios were quite often good in terms of the ease with which you could access the internals for repair purposes.

Also, there's a trade off between power and battery duration with any of these things. I've found this with my experiments with homemade amps- 1w lasts a lot longer than 4w on the same type of battery. If you've really got a 15w device it either needs quite big batteries or you're going to have be prepared to change the batteries quite often. Personally I'm sceptical about the quoted power outputs for several reasons...this megaphone, for example, is described as both 5w and 15w at different points on the page:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/England-Megaphone-support-football-world/dp...

Either way, don't get too carried away with power outputs because they're not the same as loudness or sound level - a 5w amp is not 5 times louder than a 1w amp.

BTW. Those red and blue megaphones look they might be exactly the same thing only in different colours.

I'll be fascinated to hear how people's experiments work out - if I've learned one lesson on here it's that I should never attemot to speak with authority about what will and won't work...because if you say something won't work then some mad savant genius will come along and do exactly what you said and get a million dollar vintage tone from it.

Comment by MrRandomWritings (Backwater Bri) on June 4, 2010 at 6:10am

I love happy solutions!

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