A sound system for the shed ideas?

I would like to hook a sound system of sorts to listen to some tunes in the shed.

I have small radio which is crap.

I want a tuner / radio which I can attach external aerial.

I listen to classical or talk radio.

I would like to be able to have some speakers outside as well as inside the shed.

I'm building a house in front of the shed so not sure if I turn up the radio in the shed or have some portable speakers.

I'm in the bush so reception is an issue but no neighbours to worry about sound.

Wish list would be to hook up my pc so I could play some of the songs.

I want nothing fancy or expensive.

Something cheap off ebay I was thinking not sure if new or old but good.

I did get an old amp from a school fete that worked for a week but stopped.

Also picked up some very cheap speakers.

I still have the speakers but no amp.

This is something I have no idea about but need to do something NOW.

Your suggestions and ideas would be welcomed.

Budget was not that a big of a deal but thinking around $200 - $300 to get some noise happening.

Cheers

Pulpo

What's the radio reception like in your car?

If it's acceptable, then why not fit a cheap car radio in your shed, running off a small 12VDC transformer? If the shed roof is gal/colourbond, then you can simply fit a car aerial to it without needing to worry about a groundplane.

What a great idea Skew.
Common sense prevails again.
Kevin

Good Morning Pulpo

My wife is deaf and gets sick of wearing hearing aids all the time - she says they make her ears sweat - so she uses Sennheiser cordless headphones when listening to the stereo or TV. Sound quality is better than quite expensive stereo speakers and much better than TV speakers.

The headphones have a range of up to 100 metres so I often use them when working in the shed or garden. They are great. Cost about $300 each.

More expensive model includes a noise suppression option that will literally cancel out the noise of saws, planers, etc.

Cheers

Graeme

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Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

If it's acceptable, then why not fit a cheap car radio in your shed, running off a small 12VDC transformer?

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That's what I did originally. I used a spare car battery and charger so that it would remember my radio presets, and drove two pairs of speakers, inside and outside.

If you hunt around in op shops or Saint Vinnies or places like that you should be able to pick up an old tape deck/radio or similar for next to nothing. Doesn't matter if the tape player works, all you want is the radio.

That's what I use. Mine is one of those 3 in 1 units - it has a record player as well. It has a terminal on the back for attaching an antenna, so I just hooked up a bit of coax and stuck it up on the end of some plastic conduit. It also has an Aux input, so I connected the line out from my sound card to it and I can play tunes from my PC as well. Or I could hook up an MP3 player to it.

Total cost: $0.

Shame you're not local because I've got another one the same that you could have had. But I bet if you ask around, someone you know will have one in their spare room or under the house.

Most midi hifi's have mp3 capability, I have a LG midi which plays DVD's... 4.5gb of mp3's put your music collection on one disc!
Many of them have a Ipod dock too, the only disadvantage is none of them will run 2 sets of speakers but that can be got around very easily/cheaply.

I've even have a subwoofer connected to mine... neighbors must hate me! :D

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Originally Posted by Harry72

4.5gb of mp3's put your music collection on one disc!

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*cough* 9 DVDs *cough*

My current shed system set me back just $38. All from the local tip shop. Set-up is a Pioneer am/fm tuner, Hitachi integrated amp and a couple of LG surround sound speakers. I have a spare DVD player if I'm inclined to play CDs and the like but mostly couldn't be stuffed....so I don't.

Huge quality and practical improvement on the previous car radio/battery/charger setup I had previously.

And highly recommended...

I bought a $50 music box from K Mart last year because it had an iPod dock and a radio.

Now I can play more than 60 Gigs a music.

Mostly I just like background noise or keep up with a some sport.

Volume isn't good enough to out do the machines and power tools.

I would like to be able to shake the shed occasionally!!

This one cost me $50. It didn't look like that when I picked it up but the hot summer didn't agree with it. No CD's in the shed for now... but the radio still works. If I want to listen to it outside the shed I just turn it up louder:rolleyes:

Yeh! I reckon any old thing from the kerbside pickup or the local op shop together with some equally cheap speakers. After all how can you judge quality when you have a compressor on one side and a saw at the other?

Even in one of my old four wheel drives I found that the best improvement to the quality of my sound system (again a cheapie), was when a friend in the business decided to soundproof the vehicle with some of the most impressive lead and foam soundproofing imaginable; ghetting rid of roadnoise I reckon was better than installing a $1000.oo sound system.


Denn

If there was ever an ideal speaker design for a shed it must be the array or column speaker,

http://billfitzmaurice.net/images/cabs/SLA.jpg

line arrays have been around for 50 years but for reasons of fashion have never been popular except for the last 5-10 years in public address situations, and now pretty well every sound reinforcement company make them, the principle is that you have many speaker drivers of the same type producing the same frequencies, the benefit is that each driver has to do a lot less work than if there was only one driver for the same volume and the resultant sound is amazingly clear, no really it's stunning,
the drawback is that there will be a frequency where these drivers will interfere with each other, in an effect called combfiltering, but it can be mitigated by keeping the drivers small and mounting thems as close as possible to each other,
another benefit is that they have a very narrow vertical projection, that means that they firstly don't waste energy going to the ceiling or floor, but the reflections from the floor or ceiling also can't interfere with the original signal, another reason why they sound cleaner,
and the third big reason and why they are so popular with PA companies is that the sound carries further than a normal speaker, ie there is much less diffference in the sound volume when you are close or far away, there is a difference of course but much less than with a normal speaker. All this really helps in cutting through power tool noise, I have a single column of 4 really cheap paper 4" drivers (without tweeters) to listen to ABC AM in my 15x12m workshop and they are just superb.

My shed is the downstairs under a raised Queenslander that has slats around it, so its somewhat exposed.

I run an old Yamaha amp stored in an old office cabinet to protect it from dust etc. I sit my laptop onto of the cabinet and hook it up to the amp using a 1/4" single socket from the headphone jack, and the other end are left/right stereo jacks that plug into one of the component inputs.

The speakers are a set of outdoor speakers I picked up from Dick Smiths. I have a bit of length in the speaker cords so I can either have them hanging from the beams above the cabinet and under the house, which is lockable and secure, or i can quickly reposition them on a couple of screws outside under the upstairs deck. I use them this way for backyard BBQ's or when doing a day in the yard.

I also have a wireless router set-up upstairs.

With this i can access my full itunes catelogue on my laptop, and also stream live radio via teh internet. The ABC are good for that.... Triple J, Classic FM, Grandstand local radio etc.

It also has the added advantage that I can look up this site or any other woodie site to look at plans, tips, techniques etc.

Tom

There are three popular approaches to shed sound.

1. power up any old carp you can lay your hands on, something retired from the house, off the tip or the council clean up or garage sale.

2. go and buy something..book shelf systems are cheap... But I have to agree that a car CD radio has to be the best option and some 30 watt 8" twincones in boxes made from scrap :2tsup:.

3. have heaps of sound gear and leave something set up between shows....most of my mates do this.....I used to but havn't bothered for ages.

Believe me you have no problem getting over the saw bench ( even with muffs on) when you have 4 x 15 & horn boxes powered up of 1200 watts (real ones).

I was doing some work in a mates shed once...a couple of days of wiring.....was comming down with a flu...so right behind my stool, I set up a pait of 18" subs & a pair of 15& horn boxes powred up of a 1000watt amp (crown psa2)( biggest amp we had at the time)......put my best peltor muffs on.....that shifted the flem off my chest...:D...one of the other boys ended up in hospital for week with pneumonia:no:

cheers

Soundman, I want one!!!

Can you put that is simple terms for me?

Hang 10 for 11 days and get a cheap (under a hundred bucks) digital radio. I cant wait.

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Originally Posted by Scally

Soundman, I want one!!!

Can you put that is simple terms for me?

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In simple terms....speakers as big as a fridge and an amplifier that weighs as much as a small saw bench:D...a good way of getting the dust off the rafters.

cheers

Many thanks for the suggestions

I dont think the laptop sitting in my workshop is going to happen but will run a lead to the amp from it.

Will continue down the road of finding a cheap amp with radio and see how we go.

I just had a week off working in my shed and around the abode.

Not only do have no radio or sound system in the shed my car radio stopped working.

Just the birds singing in the back ground.

I would reccomend a cheap second hand pc and a free crt moniter. You can get boxes from online auctions in capital cities for around $50 with a windows licence and crt (tube style) moniters are everywhere for free or near to it.

Run a system with just windows and winamp and even a 40 - 80 gig drive will take a ton of music in MP3 format or plays discs in the drive. Alternatively you can network it back to the house and just access what you have inside. If you can get semi fast net access then the world of internet radio is your oyster. Stations from up the street or around the world. My preffered station plays non stop music with one ad per hour (usually the price of tomatoes at home depot lately). If you want to get really flash you could run Mediaportal and have tv, radio and all the rest.

Having had a lot of different speakers over the years the best bang for buck would have to be a 2.1 Logitech set available at Big W for $70 - $80 - not sure of the model number. Supprisignly big and clear sound + very cheap and ready to go straight out of the box. Tiny and easy to mount on the wall (1 screw or a big dab of silicone or blue tack) and put the sub under a bench. No other amp required.

$120 dollar solution in total and no fear of losing discs or needing to find them in the first place. A bit of stocking over the fan inlets with a knot in the middle keeps the dust out. Every so often just flick it and your super sensitive wiz bang Hepa filter is cleaned.

I wouldn' t bother with a laptop. In a dusty shed this offers a disposable and replaceable solution.

two big problems with running an old PC..... very hungry on the power... and they pump them selves full of dunt in no time.

cheers

Quote:

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Originally Posted by soundman

two big problems with running an old PC..... very hungry on the power... and they pump them selves full of dunt in no time.

cheers

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And they sound crap!

Cheers

Graeme

Dunt

Hence the stocking filter. It really isn't hard to tie a stocking in a knot and flick the knot once in a while....and i am sure you have a compressor somewhere soundman for a gentle de-dusting.

Power

In a shed full of major machinery you are worried about the pc??

Sound

Yes most pc speakers sound crap but the ones I have aren't too bad. Massively improved by locking them down so they don't vibrate with something like blue tack to the desk (microwave it first) and are we really going for studio moniters in the shed? Other post here were about landfill and cheapies from K Mart. Parity people.

It's only my suggestion and a solution i like. No discs, no tapes and an infinite amount of music and choice for very little $$$. Plus the other benifits like plans and news on the web or the TV I stream out to it over the network (a bit more flash). If box dies I replace for peanuts and reaccess same files accross the network. Nothing lost.

I went the car stereo route in my last shed. To get past the dust issue I put it in a marine enclosure. Looked a bit like this one: http://www.ryda.com.au/Fusion-F-MCH-...sing-p/fmh.htm

You can also get covers for just the front if you want to make your own housing. I just mounted it under a bench. It still plays CDs just fine.:)

Hi Pulpo,
I bought a $60 sound system (cd and radio) and made an inlayed dust proof box for it, then ran cables to the speakers mounted at optimum points high in the shed. The speakers are mounted onto inlayed supports which angle down to where I am most when playing with wood.

These items impress people who come in to discuss commissions with me. BTW, I have inlay disease.

I will post some pics next few days or so.

cheers
conwood

Bloke

I had one of them cheap radios too, took the back off and soldered on a car ariel extension then fixed a car ariel to the tin roof to get a better reception. Was ok but I wanted more noise, louder, louder as when machining I cant hear the music.

I bought a car radio/cd player with a cable for an iPod out the back, made a case for it then hooked up some big car speakers. Made special boxes for them too, mounted the speakers on scrap steel frames I welded up. Hooked the car radio up to a car battery that is connected to a solar cell and I have sweet music, radio or just plain CD's. Works a treat, I am very happy.

DD

I once hooked up a car stereo to a 12 volt supply - only to blow the crap out of it - one puff of smoke is all I got and my beautiful alpine system was gone.

So if anyone else is thinking of using a car stereo system, please make sure that you use a DC supply and not AC.

Denn

Get and old car radio. If you have a MP3/MP4 player get the accessory that allows you to plug the MP into it and produce a radio frequency you can tune to and away you go.

My BOSE Lifestyle 3 system works well.CDs, AM or FM (usually on 3LO):)

Actually i must say the tune in to an mp3 player would be my next choice after an old PC. MP3 is just so conveinient.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dennford

I once hooked up a car stereo to a 12 volt supply - only to blow the crap out of it - one puff of smoke is all I got and my beautiful alpine system was gone.

So if anyone else is thinking of using a car stereo system, please make sure that you use a DC supply and not AC.

Denn

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That surprises me actually. Most head units have a fail safe for incorrect connection of the power cables which will also work for AC current. My old Sony (which I used in the shed for a time) would simple beep at me if I connected it backwards. I guess te Apline's don't :doh:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by kman-oz

That surprises me actually. Most head units have a fail safe for incorrect connection of the power cables which will also work for AC current. My old Sony (which I used in the shed for a time) would simple beep at me if I connected it backwards. I guess te Apline's don't :doh:

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If only it had !


Denn