This looks like someone watched the Obsolete Technology Band, and had to have one of their own. It appears to be a dock, driving several different sizes of old hard drives. While the concept isn’t new, we thought they did a decent job of putting the whole display together. It could be fun to have that mounted on our wall, waiting for geek friends to impress.
Would be cool if the input was filtered and sent to different HDDs. Maybe that’s what’s happening? A cool write up for this would have like Frequency response for each HDD and the filters for greatest sound quality. Then maybe a Frequency Response for the whole system, see how flat you can get it.
Posted at 1:34 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by Bushi
Reminds me of the commodore 64 days, there was a program that used to bounce the 1541 disk drive heads in time to the song daisy, by the end of it the chance that the drive woud fail was about 80% ..lets just say the school wasnt happy with us that week..;p
Posted at 2:05 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by sprocket2cog
Direct link (in english with more videos):
http://www.afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeakers.htm
Posted at 2:28 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by Matt
It would be cool to make a kind of VU meter with a bunch of drives. It should be as simple as rectifying the signal going to the disks and smoothing it with a small capacitor. For a better effect, the signal could be filtered into separate channels then rectified. A scale (green yellow red) could be painted on the disks as concentric circles, and the disks could be spinning for added effect.
Posted at 2:34 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by Matt
bushi read my mind
Posted at 3:18 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by NatureTM
Been wanting to do this for a while. Nice setup!
Posted at 6:04 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by Parker
more info, photos & videos here: http://www.nerdnews.it/lab/hard-disk-ispeaker/
thanks
Posted at 7:19 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by Johnny Rizzo
Diasy-singing 1541 Commodore drive:
Posted at 8:42 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by Rob
These projects are fun, but can we please hear something other than Radiohead? Why is that like the music staple in geek culture? I’m sorry, but I can’t STAND Radiohead anymore. I want to watch these videos because I am interested in the project, but I can usually only make it through a couple seconds because of the crap song they chose.
Posted at 10:03 am on Apr 15th, 2009 by djlspider
URGGG!!! Remove the platters, you get better sound.
Posted at 8:56 pm on Apr 15th, 2009 by HomerGonerson
This looks like a middle school science project gone wrong….. I have turned Harddrives into Piston type transducers and have produced some high level SPLs… These linear motors han handle much more than your Radio shack Shitty amplifier…… sorry dude you FAIL
Posted at 10:58 pm on Apr 15th, 2009 by callmemaster
Yea man do some research and do it right. You just come off looking like a lame ass!
Posted at 11:02 pm on Apr 15th, 2009 by billhates
i bet obama likes radiohead
Posted at 6:42 pm on Apr 16th, 2009 by bungholio
Saw this originally on the BBC program TopGear. It’s a Renault Formula 1, car playing ‘God Save the Queen’ on its engine. They start of the youtube video is just random revving of the engine, but give is 30 seconds…..a long way from the CBM 64 disk drive days.
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At the very least, it does use up those old hdd’s.
Posted at 1:29 pm on Apr 14th, 2009 by tikimexican