Cabinet speakers
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Anyone have any good recommendations for small, yet good quality speakers that they’ve used or could see a use for with their mirrors? I’m not building a mirror, but a daily schedule board/calendar/lunch menu/etc. It’s got a touch screen and I would like to include the ability to stream spotify on it, and interact with it via voice commands. Having said that, I would like the sound quality to be pretty good vs tinny and crap like you get from many built-in monitor speakers or laptop speakers. Just curious if anyone had used something that produced a light to moderate amount of base as well as good mid and high range sound too.
Appreciate any input.
Adam
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@twillster My suggestion is to look into portable Bluetooth speakers. Something thin with decent dynamic range. Either mount them in the cabinet or just keep them nearby. The Pi 3 has bluetooth onboard and you could use that instead of trying to rig up something hardwired.
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Appreciate the input. My screen is going to be mounted in a custom walnut cabinet so I would like to have the speakers facing out the sides, but built-in to the cabinet.
My thought was to buy a decent set of computer speakers (cheap to test my theory), dismantle the boxes they come in and rebuilding the speaker boxes so they’re integrated into the frame/cabinet itself. Just didn’t know if there was a speaker kit ootb that I could use that would sound good vs having to Frankenstein something together.
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@twillster I did a little bit of speaker building a long time ago. A good portion of quality comes from getting the size of the enclosure exactly right to match the performance characteristics of the speaker. The speaker essentially thumps the air volume behind it and the difference between good sound and great sound is making sure that the air volume resonates well with how the speaker moves. You certainly can disassemble a computer speaker and mount it to your cabinet. You may even get some decent sound out of it. You probably will get better sound than you will out of the monitor speakers.
If you’re going to play around, I would look at Parts Express to source your speakers. They’ll sell you speakers of whatever size you wish and provide you with enough information that you can build enclosures into your mirror box if you wish. At the very least, the quality of the speakers will probably be better than disassembling something from Logitech.
Depending on the kit, Parts Express will also give you a PDF that will tell you what volume of air will work best with your speakers. If not, there are a few websites that will run the calculations for you.
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@bhepler Thanks for your feedback. I’ll be sure to check out Parts Express. In the meantime I did get a cheap set of speakers off amazon and will attempt disassembly for my cabinet. I may end up just modifying the cases they’re in rather than completely disassembling them though. And if all that fails I’ll look at doing a direct build off of parts from Parts Express.
