Convert Your Backpack Into A Boombox

Boompack

forget dropping $200 on one of those backpacks that allows you to hookup a cdplayer or something similar to blast music around the streets at 2am. you can make one yourself on the cheap! you’ll need an old boombox very similar to the one he has (it’s pretty straightforward) and a backpack you don’t mind tearing up a bit.

“mobius9” gutted the entire boombox, then secured the speakers on plexiglass or something similar and even added a subwoofer he found lying around. it took quite awhile but the result is really cool.

20 thoughts on “Convert Your Backpack Into A Boombox

  1. wow! thanks for the mirroring there. i love that mod! makes me want to break out my old philips boom box which is around somewhere and do something similar.
    Only 2 problems i figure tho, is itd be easy to damage the skin on the speakers
    and there is no back wall sound deadener – i dunno the techincal name – it stops the speakers sound bouncing off the wall behind it, resulting in weird distortion effects. it has to be carefully calculated!

  2. Another problem in your design is that you don’t have any cabinets to resonate and produce the low frequiences. The larger driver out of the subwolfter isn’t much good to you without the box that it was designed for. Speaker cabinet design is complex stuff, requires alot of math and physics. Cool hack tho.

    Oh one more thing… what are you using as a crossover to split the high and low frequences?

  3. This was a really popular concept in high school. It started out with sono tubing (used to pour concrete pillars) and 8″-10″ subwoofers. and a portable cd player (late 90’s) It later grew in to full curciut boards from recently deceased componet systems.

    at some point it was almost “let’s see who could get a bigger system in thier bags”

    At one point some kid (I may have been involved)
    just totally stopped carrying around books, got a huge duffel bag, made a 12v/120 ac converter (poor high school kids) and with the help of a car battery had a half decent system.

    It all ended the day administration saw one and thought it was a bomb (For a tech school…the teachers were great but the admin was pretty clueless…sort of like enginears and managment)

  4. How about a 4″ woofer and a piece of ABS tube?
    Wouldn’t it just be a matter of figuring out the depth by doing some math or tinkering?
    The electronics would go inside the tube, of course.
    A couple of smaller tubes on either side for the stereo drivers, and you end up with a sub/speaker setup that Boba Fett would be proud to wear!

    Seriously, if you use plastic cone drivers and some good speaker grilles, you end up with a rugged weatherproof rig that could simply be put into a backpack, or removed for use. No backpack hack (ack!) required.

  5. #9, yeah, you could make a lot more than just school or snowboarding interesting. The way I did it was with a free backpack I got in california for free. Its one of the preppy ones that has one strap that goes across your body, but on the strap is a mesh compartment perfect for my zen micro or an ipod shuffle or ipod mini. It also has one of those headphone holes, this can be used to input music from the mp3 player on the strap to your speakers. It did have a cd player compartment in the bag, but that was about it. The speakers I used were just some crappy computer speakers that didn’t really matter but are loud as crap anyway. Since there were no compartments to keep the speakers from sloshing around, I got my mom to stitch fabric pouches to the two opposite sides to blash music from them, in the middle is another pouch for the amplifier. I ran out of miniature boxes, so I made one out of cardboard which serves its purpose since the mod is completely hidden. I also made the USB recharger mod and I found that u can easily fit the whole thing the box from a pack of cards. The only thing I have yet to do is construct a battery pack for the amp. I tried using a 9 volt because that was the carge it required but a 9 volt is small and the speakers couldn’t even reach half volume before severe distortion set in. 2 batteries didn’t even do it, I guess cuz the equalizer on the zen micro can go so high it would require more capacity and I thought why not use 6 D batteries like big boom boxes do. So if anyone has any ideas on how to construct a battery pack for 6 D batteries, post it. I was trying to think of ways to get it down to the size of a cd player so I can use that compartment to store the batteries.

    -Peace

  6. tht mod looks sooooo kl, this really makes me want to get a pure sine wave inverter and put my 100watt hitachi HA-5700 in my bag and somehow put my 1.5 by 3 ft speekers on the outside. it would be propper funny lol

    rory

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