Yes, even the venerable Technics 1200 turntable can be improved. This simple, completely reversible, modification removes the automatic pitch lock from the mk2 model. If your decks have seen a lot of use the true zero point has probably drifted from the one marked on the scale. This is easy to tell by observing the strobe. If the large dots aren’t stationary when the zero is locked, you’re out of adjustment. The other nuisance is that you can’t do minor pitch adjustments when you are close to zero because it constantly wants to lock. Even if you don’t want to mod your turntables this article does show you where to go to move the zero pitch back to the actual zero.

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Ah, yet another clever persistence of vision project. I think this is my favorite so far because of its interactive nature. Rickard provides the schematics and discusses some of the technical hurdles he encountered while putting this project together. All of the display and processing components are mounted to the rotating arm. The gamepad signal is transfered through ball bearings mounted on the shaft. He’s got it to play Tetris and Pong, display a clock and text from the serial port. It would be interesting to see a game that took advantage of the full 360 degree display; maybe an infinite side scroller. If you’re looking for a commercial POV game system you should read up on how the Virtual Boy worked.

[thanks kolwon]

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I think I love this project solely for all of the little bits that are required to put it all together. The write up describes the construction of the necessary parts: laser unit, galvanometer scanners, servo amps, and controllers. All schematics included natch.

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Braiding 108 individual copper strands together is not my idea of fun, blistering my hands in the process isn’t a bonus either. If you’ve spent enough money on your audio system to even begin to think that the cables are the weak link in the chain, this is the project for you. Chris VenHaus starts with 14 lengths of Cat-5, strips off the jackets, and then braids the twisted pairs three at a time until the whole mess becomes one cable. That’s just one though, you’re going to have to do another one for the negative side. It does take some time, but it will get you out of paying the huge premium on audiophile quality cables and you’ll end up with very competitive sounding cables. I would try this, but my Aiwa shelf system with the masking tape across the changer tray probably wouldn’t benefit that much from an upgrade. Of course if someone makes a DIY braiding machine I’d be all over this.

[thanks sine~language]

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oh yes folks, just what you’ve always wanted. the foxblocker is a little piece of metal that screws into your coaxial cable on the back of your television (or cable box) and will block out the news channel, FOX News. this is a very interesting concept because in theory, you could start to daisy chain these together and filter out whichever stations you wanted. i think it’d be fun to see these made into “nickelodeon blockers” or something to that effect. whatever will make your little brother cry.

it’s available now for $8.95 from the official website. thanks to off the hook for informing me.

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roy leamon just wasn’t satisfied with 5.1 discrete audio channels, so he went to work hacking together a 24 channel sound system that he calls the lsd (laemon sound device).  the 24 seperate speakers are controlled over firewire by a mac g5.

it’s a bit difficult to imagine what is possible with this system.  you could realistically have a seperate sound source for each instrument in your recording.  you could move a single source around the room in a way that a 5.1 system can only attempt to imitate.  there are a lot of possibilities.

this one is not for the faint of heart or light of wallet.  though it’s constructed from off the shelf components, roy estimates that it would take $12-15k to reproduce his system.  that figure just shattered any hopes that i had of being a true audiophile.  this is probably ok — i don’t have the skillz to juggle 12 turntables anyway.

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