Victorian Boombox Mark IV

[J. Wilhelm]

So... I'm making a compromise.  I'm temporarily abandoning the concept of using a wooden grill, in favor of something more practical.  I want to explore the idea of going from Art Deco to something like a Neo-Deco more along the lines of Range Murata's industrial style. 

I started by retaining the poplar fluted mouldings that I had originally used, and I shaved two sets out of four plates in order to glue them together to match the frontal area of the boombox, like so:

The idea is to cut holes to match the speaker drivers and the port opening of the speakers. 

Working at a hardware store has some advantages, and one of them is finding strange hardware that can be adapted to any use.  I found 4 shower drain covers meant to keep and hair debris from going into your pipes at home.  They're perforated flat plates of zinc alloy with rubber bezels that would look perfect as grill covers for a 1970s-style boombox:

They're a bit larger than I would like however, they have many advantages:

1. They're made from a fairly rigid non-magnetic zinc alloy perforated plate
2. They have a rubber bezel that prevents vibration when in contact with a hard surface
3. The smaller drain cover is big enough to cover the tweeter and port of the speaker simultaneously

While I don't like the colour, I think that it's perfectly possible to use something like a Rustoleum epoxy spray with bronze finish. I still don't know what to do with the gray coloured rubber, but I can either try to stain it black with an alcohol + clothes dye combination (see various YouTube channels for dyeing the surface of plastics), or I could try to cover the rubber bezel with something else (including black Plasti-Dip liquid rubber).

The Configuration would be nearly identical to this. I need to paint the plates.

I just got tired of waiting for "the perfect Art Deco inspiration," and as I am now living in this room I don't have a setup to do any fancy woodwork.  A laser cut wooden panel would have been a good alternative, but I'm always short of money and time.

The fluted wood plate would have to be cut with a coping saw, but that is trivial work, and it doesn't have to be too precise, given that its covered by the zinc plates, so it's something I can do over my desk.  In the near future I may decide to send the project to a CAD/CAM or CNC shop to cut a pair of either metal or wood plates with whichever design I want.  This is the kind project that benefits  from using the computer to design and cut the geometric design if you really want to go full Art Deco. 

Either way the wooden plate will be suspended in front of the drivers by way of screws and rubber grommets used as standoffs to prevent vibrations. This would make the replacement of the "grills" rather easy just by unscrewing the plate and replacing it with another. This type of modular design also makes it a very attractive choice should this prototype ever see production for sale.  Kind of reminds me of the "skins" used for the Winamp players of decades ago, for those of you old enough to know what I'm talking about.

And speaking of Winamp... guess what I just found? Someone decided to make a 3-D physical version of the Winamp player of circa 2000 A.D. I guess if high school kids can go crazy about Walkman and 1980s compact cassette players, we can go crazy about Winamp, yes?

Tom's Hardware: Maker recreates Classic Winamp mp3 player in real life with the Linamp, llamas not included

[J. Wilhelm]

So this is the final configuration (ignore the pieces if wood I used to prop up the assembly for this picture).

The idea is to cut the holes in the fluted panels which will be oversized and which will be off center from the drivers themselves. It's not an ideal situation, but it's a good compromise and I believe the oversized strainer plates will be transparent enough to the sound. 

The fluted panel will be stained. I just don't know whether to use the light oak stain or the darker mahogany.  I found a thin piece of molding that I applied vertically to terminate the outer edge of the fluted plates, just to protect the finish on the sides. I may use another piece of wood between the center console and the edge of the panels, but it may not be necessary.

I'm playing with the idea of just spraying the strainer plates in liquid rubber. While I don't doubt that it would work, It's be a loss not to take advantage of the metallic nature of the plates. I need to find out is there's a transparent lacquer or tint that could bring out a metallic shine to create a golden or bronze finish over the zinc plates. Ideally the gray rubber would become black.  That could be done with black rubber spray, but I fear it'd peel off over time.

If anyone in this forum has ever tried to color or cover rubber in some effective way, let me know!

I honestly don't really know in what way this is Art Deco, as I have no reference for those grills.  It'd be a Jazz Age period style only in the industrial sense of the word, so the panel could be more 1940s than 1920s and look more realistic from that vantage point.  In gray tones like that the grills scream "Panasonic, 1981."  There were some Garrard 3-way speakers my grandparents had in the late 1970s that had a similar colour scheme (wooden cabinet with aluminium bezels).

~ ~ ~

In other news, I'm mauling over the idea of using my iPod Touch 2nd. Generation as an HD radio tuner for this box.  I just can't let go of the idea that I have this perfectly good HD Radio dongle, but it's useless unless I use it with my iPod with a broken screen.  Replacing the glass front end ("digitizer" as Apple calls it) is almost trivial, but getting a hold of a glass screen in good shape is hard.  It's absolutely mid boggling to see how small the iPod Touch 2G was relative to modern smartphones.  Honestly, I loved it. It didn't have a cellular phone, but I could use Skype as a phone with it with a Bluetooth earpiece.

https://www.ifixit.com/products/ipod-touch-gen-2-front-panel-assembly

[J. Wilhelm]

Progress Report, Monday June 24:

Sometimes you have to ruin something just to find out if this is what you should do.

I bought a set of two spray paint cans: 1. a Rustoleum black rubberized paint for automotive undercarriage - recommended by the all-knowing Internet, and 2. a copper Rustoleum hammer-finish spray. Both were applied to one of the drain covers (a sacrificial lamb, so to speak), just to study the behavior of said paint sprays on the rubber and nickel metal finished of the drain covers.

The black rubberized undercoating spray was terrible. I don't doubt that over time it might prove to be a very durable finish, but it takes forever to dry (hours), and the texture is basically uncontrollable. Obviously meant to never be seen as it is used for a vehicle's undercarriage.  On the other hand, I have nothing but praise for the copper hammer finish spray, and no complaints with regard to it's coverage and adhesive powers. That is one darn good paint.

However, in spite of the control and coverage of the copper paint, it very much looks fake at a distance. It makes the metal cover look like plastic, and the metallic flake dissapears from view just a couple of feet away from the painted surface.  I just don't know how I can incorporate this color in the grand scheme of things.

So out of desperation, I thought about what happens to the lids of stain and varnish paint cans over time: they get coated permanently with a "candy color" layer over the stainless steel of the lids.

Further, "One Step," or "all-inclusive" finish Minwax wood stain is actually comprised of a strong spirit solvent, wax and a solid pigment.  And the Minwax One Step can recommends the use of either traditional resin based spar varnish, or polyurethane based artificial varnish, the latter of which looks like it dries stronger than epoxy, judging by the way it clings to the steel lid of can of said product over time.

So the thought occurred to me that the solvent in the polyurethane varnish, being able to dissolve the wax in the "all-in-one" wood stain would happily blend with a bit of the wood stain, thus incorporating the pigment into the polyurethane varnish.  Technically, it should work, as the polyurethane finish is designed to stick to a waxed wooden surface by way of dissolving the wax away; otherwise the varnish would simply peel off from the stained wood (I know for a fact that epoxy glue does peel off from Minwax varnished wood, because I learned that trick from my Steampunk business days, and I'd take advantage of that fact during manufacture!).

So I went ahead and mixed a small 1/2 Oz. batch of old polyurethane varnish with about a teaspoonful of Minwax stain finish. The idea is to create a brown "tint" over the metal, and the amount of wax dissolved in the mixture should be small enough not to create any problems. In theory, it should work and create a dark brown "candy colored" bronze like finish over the zinc surface...

There are however several pros and cons to using the stain-polyurethane:

Pros:

1. Cracking is not an issue as polyurethane is a rubber-type material that won't crack like resin based varnish or epoxy.

2. You can build up layers of the varnish to achieve a desired tone.

3. Looking at a test the color is almost an exact match to the stained wood case of the
boombox: Dark Mahogany.  Its matches a very dark bronze shade.

Cons:

1. The varnish takes forever to cure. Not nearly as long as the black rubberized undercoating, which is tack free after one or two hours, but it will remain in a semi-liquid state for 15 minutes, and it will cure completely in no less than 7 hours.

2. The semi-translucent varnish looks SPLOTCHY AS HECK. The color is very uneven and dependent on the thickness of the layer you applied. Because the wood stain has a very low viscosity (much lower than water) it waters down the varnish and it tends to "run" everywhere, so having a constant thickness layer is nearly impossible at first. The pictures shown are only two layers applied in the space of one hour.  I'm hoping that I'll be able to even it out with less than 4 layers of the stuff.

3. The color can be very dark. It practically blends completely with the finished wood cabinet - if I can just make it an even color! I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad one. But at least it doesn't look like plastic the same way the hammer finish paint does.

4. It does NOT stick to the rubber at all. Some kind of magic is going on (probably the small content of wax), whereby the rubber will need some other finish (the hammered copper finish?). I haven't crossed that bridge yet.

But this is where I am. I have yet to determine the color of the wood stain used on the fluted panels, and I have to cut the circular holes on the panels.

I'm open to suggestions if anyone has any!

Cheers, and thank you in advance!

J. Wilhelm

[J. Wilhelm]

So a bit more drama at the speed of molasses (treacle for you Brits):

I gave up on the wood stain solution. I went ahead and I bought another can of Rustoleoum Hammered Finish and proceeded to paint the drain covers.

It all went well (mostly), and the color looks much better now, with a color like a mix of dark aged bronze and ash, inexplicably called "Burnished Amber" (their "Bronze" color looks very gray to me and I needed brown).

Rust-O-leum "Universal" Forged Hammer Paint in "Burnished Amber" color

But I did encounter a problem with the second paint: the paint over the gray rubber never cured fully, and after a whole week its still very sticky. In contrast, the paint over the metal bonded wonderfully and it looks fairly thick and durable.  The finish of the sticky part has a high gloss (because it never cured fully!). The same paint over the metal has a frosted finish.  Something is going on.

I suspected that the rubber was reacting chemically, as I had noted before that the varnish-stain mix wasn't sticking to the rubber before. Otherwise I experienced no problems with the copper hammer finish paint (which was an older Rustoleum formulation apparently).  It occurred to me that the rubber has some plasticizer in it, that is, a class of substances used to make rubber soft and prevent plastic from cracking. It's typically some oil or spirit that is absorbed by the polymer, be it rubber or plastic.

And it turned out that I was right. After some research over the web, I found that the gray rubber is most likely vinyl, which has an online reputation for using a strong plasticizer to keep it soft and pliable. Plasticizers for vinyl are infamous for "leaking" and displacing through plastics, usually resulting in problems with PVC pipes and PVC tape, for example.

So now I have a problem.  I can't get rid of the plasticizer.  I have to figure out how to make the rubber edges "non-sticky." Conventional wisdom online says that I should just strip the paint and start over again.  But I really don't want to do that. I performed some experiments with water soluble acrylic paint and it seems to stick and cure just fine.  But I worry that over time, the plasticizer would continue seeping through, and turn the acrylic paint into mush. So I did some tests with black and white water based paint I had from the Victorian Boombox Mk II Project. I knew from the Mark II, that white acrylic had poor coverage (applied with brush), and if I use black acrylic it gives you decent coverage and a very flat black finish - but it looks very dull to me.  It may be a last resort.


Another way to deal with the situation is to accept that the surface over the rubber will be sticky forever (or until the rubber runs out of plasticizer) and just use some inert powder, such as a paint pigment, mica, or charcoal powder to give those edges a new finish. I even thought about doing something like gold leaf (you can get other metals in fine sheets as well). In theory it could work, provided the powder is inert, but the hammered finish is too nice to cover up. Most of the hammered effect is over the rubber, because the finish over the metal cured well but gave me a very matte crinkeld finish. 

So as a last shot, I applied a thin coat of clear polyurethane varnish, to see if the varnish will react the same way as the acrylic paint.  I'll wait overnight to see how the varnish looks tomorrow. If it's still sticky, I may go look for some powder, or just resign myself and hand paint it with black acrylic paint.

The white acrylic paint has very poor coverage. The black looks much better, but looks like old rubber. I'm also testing the effect of plasticizer on cyanoacrylate, which I'll need to glue the covers to the wood panels.


The holes are not fun to cut.  This is very slow if you don't want to damage the fluted finish too much.

[J. Wilhelm]

The wood varnish over the sticky hammer finish paint worked out perfectly! But I knew I wasn't going to enjoy cutting those holes!  The fluted plate broke apart in four places - naturally along the fluted profile - as I was finishing the larger hole's cut. 

I had to glue the five pieces back together with cyanoacrylate and then I had to immediately glue the drain covers to give the structure the extra support that is missing. So the whole thing is kept together by a few drops of Crazy Glue... I'm not sure that these fluted panels could be used in a production version without some sort of backing. The fluting makes the wood panel too fragile, and poplar has very straight grain which is perfectly parallel with the fluting (that is in fact why poplar wood is preferred for millwork such as mouldings and lathework such as dowels).

On the other hand, the speaker covers are relatively lightweight on account of said holes, even considering the relatively heavy perforated zinc alloy of the drain covers and vinyl rubber.  All in all, you can see below how the cover functions by way of the off-center perforations in the fluted panel relative to the speaker drivers and port.

The coverage is not ideal, and will have some acoustic dispersion issues due to the off center holes, but I trust the perforated plates will be relatively transparent acoustically. The large hole doesn't have to be off-center, but being larger than the driver, you can't see from outside and it reduces the mass of the speaker cover

As faulty as the fabrication is, the color combination turned out to be good and the fluted panel fits the color scheme perfectly. Alone each of these colors wouldn't be very attractive, but the combination looks good, with the golden orange dominating the front of the boombox, and the fairly odd brown-ash hammer finish making a good contrast while not being a flat black. I think the hammer look is compatible with an Art Deco palette, as many types of textured and spotted materials, such as granite, were typically used as part of the avant-garde designs of the era.

I'm not sure how much "Art Deco" there is on this piece, but I'm satisfied with both the color palette and the design of the front.  I'm thinking as fragile as these covers will be, that the only practical way to attach them is to use Velcro strips.  I'm not a fan of Velcro over other forms of attachment, but I can't see myself drilling more holes on these wooden plates.  And it occurred to me that Velcro would be excellent to prevent vibration between the speakers and the speaker covers. Perhaps four Velcro dots for each speaker cover. I might be able to glue them over 4 flat discs permanently glued to the speakers (perhaps even use that as a magnetic mount of some sort in the future!). I will do the other plate tomorrow and varnish both of them accordingly.

Art Deco? While this is not what I was originally envisioning, it looks pleasing to the eye. I would even call it pretty! At least it's a vast improvement over having no covers (ignore the piece of wood used to prop the cover in front of the drivers).

[von Corax]

It's really starting to come together.

[J. Wilhelm]

It's really starting to come together.

Thank you.  Today I've finished the speakers' front ends.  The end result is stylistically consistent with the projet, albeit not the most elegant solution acoustically and still not as "Art Deco" as I wanted. But I could change that in the future.

I ended up using 3/8 inch square dowel to make two rails for each speaker cover and the attachment method was Velcro square pads.  The reason is that the large driver's suspension "lip" gets too close to the edge of one of the holes I carved in each cover. The maximum displacement for the woofers is 5mm. so I had to implement some spacing, a total of 0.5 inch (1.25 cm), including the thickness of the Velcro pads. The rails also give structural strength to the wooden plates, since these are split in two parts and held together by the zinc drain plates add a little bit of wood. The holes I carved are too big to maintain the structural integrity of the plates by themselves. The back of the plates was painted in water soluble black acrylic paint which is extremely flat, just about as black as using India Ink (aka "China Ink"), which I did in many past projects. You can see four Velcro pads wrapped around the rails. Not very elegant, but in line with most Hi-Fi speaker cover construction. 

The installation method allows the speaker covers to be adjusted and they appear to "float" in front of the boombox, which is an interesting effect. The Velcro is surprisingly strong and makes the plates easy to install and remove. The idea is that in the future, I may make another pair of speaker covers to mach whichever center console I decide to build for the boombox (remember Mark IV is also a modular test mule for other derivative projects).

From here, I have to move to the Radio and Television segments of the build. I'm still debating whether to include HD Radio and ATSC 3.0 aerial broadcast HD TV. ATSC 3.0 tuners already are out, but they're expensive and absolutely no one is using them. The format is in high danger of being Dead on Arrival (DOA), due to public rejection. I may wait until the government "forces" the public to make the change and issues $100 vouchers to the public for the purchase of two HDTV tuners per household, like they did in 2010 for ATSC 1.0 

[SeVeNeVeS]

I admit to not paying attention on this one and I apologise....

Clever use of plug strainers as speaker grilles, like it!

[J. Wilhelm]

I admit to not paying attention on this one and I apologise....

Clever use of plug strainers as speaker grilles, like it!

No worries mate!  I'm very happy with the results.  Everything I do with this box seems to work well. It's got moxie™

I kind of feel that I should print a small  blue square sticker that reads "Moxie™ Inside" 

EDIT:
Maybe start printing a bunch of anachronistic Jazz Era logos, like "Zigurat Technologies" with the image of Maria, the robot from Fritz Lang's movie, Metropolis...

[J. Wilhelm]

Alright, so I lied.  Well, I didn't lie, I changed my mind. I tackled the optical drive first and I'm still thinking about the radio/TV segments.

Partly, I decided to go with the optical drive first, because it's by far the easiest part of the peripherals to build. I just had to install the power USB hub inside, drill a hole through the back for an external USB jack, and then use the rest of the USB ports in the hub inside the box to connect whichever peripherals I need, including the optical drive. For the external USB jack housing I used the base of a wireless external Wi-Fi card I had somewhere in my electronics box. It looks very funky, but it's very strong, and I sort of like it (see picture below).

The only thing I don't like about my current setup is an external cable that does a loop with an ancient-format Mini USB plug into the back of the optical drive (see picture above). These types of USB jacks are hardly found outside of camera equipment, even though the optical drive was manufactured as early as 2023. This particular cable I'm talking about uses the mini USB plug for data coming from the optical drive, and then inside the boombox the same cable splits into another USB jack that connects to the deWalt power supply (this "Y-cable" is my "common rail" +5v voltage supply for all the peripherals and the hub, so it's rather important). The solution to that ugliness is to obtain a 4 wire flat ribbon cable and solder to a right angle Mini USB connector (if there's such an animal), and the other end of the Y-cable. I hate having to make special USB cables, but I've had to do it several times already, and it's rather simple because you're only dealing with 4 to 5 wires which are always color coded.


The approach to the installation of the disc drive was minimalist.  The idea is that sometime in the future either I'll have to replace the drive due to wear and tear or maybe adapt another drive, such s a laptop optical drive (yeah I know they don't exist anymore- well, they do if you don't mind installing a refurbished drive made in 2012).  Laptop drives have their advantages and disadvantages. They tend to be older, but they're slightly more durable, have a rather beefy 13 pin (mini?) SATA + power connector, and there is a cornucopia of brands that made laptop drives in the same format, so you're always able to find a replacement like the other one I have (see below and notice it has a Y cable as well).

I decided to mount the optical drive by gluing to its sides a pair of rounded molding pieces.  I went out of my way to isolate the drive from possible vibrations from the bottom of the boombox by using four minuscule rubber washers, and a double layer of heavy duty 3M mounting tape. Four brass screws are used to secure the side molding to the boombox case.

Theoretically, this drive can be replaced sometime later on in the future (crosses fingers).

Which brings me to my next point: this whole boombox peripheral setup has proven to be remarkably sound in terms of heat and power management. If you remember, these were two big issues in the middle of the build, and the computer was rather sensitive to both heat and lack of power. I solved the two issues by isolating heat sources from one another, basically by mounting the peripherals externally, rather than inside of the box, by thinking "out of the box" quite literally. The computer and screen are isolated from the amplifier. The disc drive is isolated from everything else, and there are multiple redundant power connections all interconnected with the same "common rail" voltage. This is a novel approach that you don't see in traditional commercial devices, where the tendency is to pack as many components, as closely as possible inside a single box.  So overheating is inevitable without proper ventilation.

Mk. IV with the optical drive tray open. The computer power switch doubles
as a lamp bright enough to illuminate the tray and disc.

[SeVeNeVeS]

Amazing stuff, far too technical and beyond the likes of me, I can wire a plug 

Looking great me old mate!

[J. Wilhelm]

Amazing stuff, far too technical and beyond the likes of me, I can wire a plug 

Looking great me old mate!

Thanks mate. I'm having loads of fun building this, and wondering why this isn't "a thing" nowadays.

WARNING: Old Timer Rant ahead!

Off-Topic: ShowHide

At this point it's basically just assembling an early 2000s style PC.  I did a lot of running around just to find out I could only use a basic PC hardware setup with Windows or Linux, but that's Google's Android failure. I only wish that I didn't have to deal with the HDMI interface between the PC stick and the screen, because I derived exactly zero advantage from it. It's necessary because of how the PC stick is made.

Intel and Microsoft (+ Ubuntu Linux) should capitalize on this issue and start making smartphones again and more importantly they should market full-size touchscreen flat panel home theatre PCs with all the bells and whistles, and why not? -old style boomboxes. Sony Vaio Boombox? 60 inch MS Surface "Glass Desk"? Why not??

On the flat panel smart TV's, I can't fathom why MS never envisioned that.

Why not get together with Sony to make a high end wall HTPC? Apple came close to doing it that with some Mac computers, but they were never anything more than vertical all-in-one computers.

Android TV/Google TV is a really crappy OS for smart TVs, made much worse by the Google policy of not supporting large format touchscreen, or any kind of external drive, save flash disks (and they'll probably ban those too, soon enough).

You need a mouse to use some apps on a smart TV or an Android Stick like Roku

Mouse? Mouse?!? What year is this?

They want to force you to buy a tablet or smartphone to get the touchscreen. You'll need to buy a new one every couple of years, of course.

When it comes to hi-fi, smartphones can only get you so far because they're always too small, unless you connect them to something else via Bluetooth. Even then the battery life is an issue. The phone will overheat, and Bluetooth limits your sound quality. There's no Hi Def.  Sony just pumped out a hand held Hi Def device, I believe. That tells you something.

Google doesn't want the high end market, I guess, but I bet Sony, Samsung and infinite number of Japanese and Korean companies could make money out of restarting the mass consumer hi fi market with PC formats, if they just rework whatever licensing issues they have with media conglomerates.

[SeVeNeVeS]

I think you are the only "maker" left here, you enjoy doing it and I for one enjoy seeing it.

I would contribute but the total lack of interest and replies from both members and some Mods nowadays makes it not worthwhile to take the time and effort.

Please do keep the updates coming.

[J. Wilhelm]

I think you are the only "maker" left here, you enjoy doing it and I for one enjoy seeing it.

I would contribute but the total lack of interest and replies from both members and some Mods nowadays makes it not worthwhile to take the time and effort.

Please do keep the updates coming.

You know what they say, the fun is in the process.  For me this is a cathartic exercise.  Also I'm getting the satisfaction of seeing how younger people who could easily be a child, or even a grand child's age relative to mine (!!!) are gravitating back to the type of music hardware I knew when I was young.

I just read this article today:
https://www.musicradar.com/music-industry/cds-up-downloads-down-latest-data-from-the-states-suggests-a-revival-for-every-physical-format

It's not even compact cassettes making a comeback.  Reports from America show that compact discs are coming back en force!  Most of the buyers are Generation Z or younger!

"That's the message from the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) mid-year report. CD sales in that time period totalled $236.7 million, nearly three times the income generated by downloads at $87.8 million.

In 2023 there were 36.83 million of the things sold, an increase of 2.7% from 2022. It seems that after years of falling sales, their decline has been reversed" -Will Simpson for MusicRadar.com

Part of the reason is that .wav format CDs easily have superior sound quality to most typical .mp3 streaming formats, and certainly are better than "Lo-Fi" compact cassettes.

This may be just the right time for a PC+CD boombox after all.  It has the old school charm in a format and language young people understand...

[SeVeNeVeS]

Yeah, I don't get the resurgence of CD and physical forms of music, vinyl record sales have increased in demand as well.

For me, a total technophobe, Spotify is an absolute god send, One account all my music in one place and available on multiple devices without having to require half a room and shelving to store all those CDs and records.

 

I am currently toying with the idea of replacing the radio in my old van from CD FM to something a little more up to date that allows Spotify and DAB, no more rummaging around for a CD in the glove box........

If I do, the radio would probably be worth more money than the vehicle itself

 

[J. Wilhelm]

Yeah, I don't get the resurgence of CD and physical forms of music, vinyl record sales have increased in demand as well.

For me, a total technophobe, Spotify is an absolute god send, One account all my music in one place and available on multiple devices without having to require half a room and shelving to store all those CDs and records.

 

I am currently toying with the idea of replacing the radio in my old van from CD FM to something a little more up to date that allows Spotify and DAB, no more rummaging around for a CD in the glove box........

If I do, the radio would probably be worth more money than the vehicle itself

 

I can see why streaming is more attractive.  But in order to make it fulfill the promise and replace storage and the air transmission radio, it needs to be a satellite service like Sirius, otherwise you're beholden to your Internet Service Provider.

Being a communications purist, my beef with that is twofold:  it's a paid service (in America we're used to free service sustained by advertising or donations), and electric outages or natural disasters automatically isolate you, because the radius covered by cellular towers is short. 

Aerial radio fulfilled the promise of wireless transmission over hundreds of miles if not thousands and even around the World (shortwave radio).  The only modern equivalent is satellite.

I don't know if this is remotely interesting to you, but I stumbled upon a British chap on You Tube who repairs and reviews older music hardware such as stereos, video and audio recorders of all types and mostly concentrates on vintage hardware.  The name of the channel is Tech Moan.  It's nice to see older hardware come to life, and shows how much quality in sound reproduction quality was lost after the introduction of the iPod and smartphones (hint: we can't even reproduce today the quality of 1980s hardware when we try to build, say, a modern version of a cassette deck, or , appropriately, a boombox).

[SeVeNeVeS]

A lot of radio stations in the UK are abandoning AM FM and switching to DAB DAB+.

I hate the adverts and DJ's anyway.

I think as long as my mobile works I should have music wherever I go, although I do pay for ad free Spotify, I can create a playlist of hours (endless if required), one press of play and off I jolly well go, no switching out discs etc (there is only a certain amount you can burn onto a CD).

I love my old tech, my PC runs into a 90's (30 years old, ish) Technics amp and graphic then pumps out to Mission and Tannoy speakers.

[J. Wilhelm]

A lot of radio stations in the UK are abandoning AM FM and switching to DAB DAB+.

I hate the adverts and DJ's anyway.

I think as long as my mobile works I should have music wherever I go, although I do pay for ad free Spotify, I can create a playlist of hours (endless if required), one press of play and off I jolly well go, no switching out discs etc (there is only a certain amount you can burn onto a CD).

I love my old tech, my PC runs into a 90's (30 years old, ish) Technics amp and graphic then pumps out to Mission and Tannoy speakers.

The equivalent of DAB in America is the HD radio I've talked about above, but like I wrote above, HD Radio is about to die without government intervention.  HD Radio is now limited to car stereos only - by corporate design from the owners of the format. 

Often hyper capitalism will kill technology, and both air wave digital transmission formats, the 20 year old HD Radio, and the brand new ATSC 3.0 Television AKA "Next Gen" are both endangered species at this point.  Really sad, if you ask me. Leaving corporate conglomerates to self regulate is the problem in both instances. It's a Federal Communication Commission's failure to regulate, standardize, keep open and promote the technology as it was done in the 20th century.

[J. Wilhelm]

Good news! This was a very productive Sunday. I have captured a new brain for the Mark IV at a reasonable price.  If you remember, support for Windows 10 will not be extended beyond Autumn of next year. I run Windows 10 Pro in the Mk IV. That left me in a situation where I'm forced to ditch the present Azulle 3 PC stick I used, because it's not compatible with Windows 11 due to hardware issues. 

I could try to turn it into a Linux machine, but there's a major obstacle for dual boot systems using Windows 11:

Modern PCs (including the Azulle) use a bootloading system called UEFI (instead of the older BIOS you knew when you were younger - think of BIOS as the crank used to start the engine of an old Ford Model T - computers do something similar), and that UEFI runs a booting standard protocol called SBAT, which was developed jointly between Microsoft and the Linux community as a way to validate every binary executable when the computer is just cranked into life, so to speak. Supposedly this is all for safety against bootable malware etc.

Anyway, the latest versions of Windows 11 screwed up the firmware used in the UEFI, and actually rendered Linux unable to boot, unless the SBAT feature is turned off. Microsoft has not issued a patch for this error (and something tells me they don't want to fix it). So bottom line, Linux and Windows 11 are for the moment incompatible in the same machine, unless you do some clever hacking (which I'm reading and learning about at the moment).

But since I resolved to use Windows 11 in the Mark IV, I made up my mind to buy a new Azulle 4. The problem?  The darn things cost around $300-$400 new.  The good news is that I just found a new open box Azulle 4 for less than $70 on eBay.  Fingers crossed, but this is what's coming over the mail this October:

The specs are not that exiting, but they're equivalent to the Azulle 3, save for the newer CPU chip which is compatible with Windows 11, so I'm hoping this will extend the life of the Mark IV for years to come.

Are there bad news? Unfortunately yes. If you have a sharp eye, you will have noticed, that the Bluetooth antenna for the Azulle 4 (see below) was moved to the opposite side where the Azulle 3 USB jacks were located and now there are only two USB connections. One for power on USB-C format located where the antenna used to be, and a single USB 3.0 jack and the audio jack literally hiding underneath the antenna . This means 4 things:

1: I may have to break the antenna or move it out of the way, or use a specialized right angle USB ribbon connector to connect this port the USB 3.0 hub instead.

2: As a corollary of having only one USB connector, the touchscreen will now have to connect to the USB hub inside the Boombox. Not really an issue, but if the hub fails to be recognized during boot-up, the computer will boot without touchscreen control (not good).

3: I will have to carve a long groove around the PC stick to connect the USB-C power jack on the top side of the case and run the cable to where the USB ports were.

4: As a corollary of 3, it may or may not be more convenient to make an entirely new wood front panel to accommodate the Azulle 4, instead of just carving the heck out the current one. I won't know until I get my hands on the USB cables online and try it out myself.  Thankfully the sleep/on button seems to be in the same place as it was on the Azulle 3 stick.

Azulle 3 geometry and setup


Azulle 4 geometry

My only other alternative was to jump directly to a ready made Windows 11 tablet, but that would mean more money and a new host of issues trying to adapt the tablet (internal batteries, ventilation, a completely new front panel, etc).

As it is I will have to develop the next generation Mk. IV using a tablet anyway, but I want to take my time to make sure that the system is compatible, has the right quality, etc. I can't afford to make a mistake right now when I'm so close to finishing the Mark IV prototype.

I will however, start shopping for and designing the next generation of Mk. IV production boxes, this time aiming for a saleable product right away. I know that the basic model will be a streaming model with maybe an optical disk only, to keep it cheap.  I want to give it a 10 inch tablet instead of a 7 inch made from scratch module, and I may incorporate ready-make bookshelf speakers from Dayton Audio, if I can -just to save on labour.

Basically for a first generation device, I'd be making a piece of portable furniture in the shape of a boombox to contain the DVD drive, the tablet and the amplified speakers - sounds trivial, but when I started this project I had no idea if I could even put it these components together at all.

As you saw earlier in the project, the system uses a lot of electric current if it needs to consume ~ 50W of power at 5 V. Ten amperes is out of the power range for most USB and HDMI connections. And just connecting things together and expecting them to work is not the right way to go.

An Android based boombox would be nearly useless with only a remote control, mouse or a keyboard (!), and the Android TV stick and LCD screen circuits would most likely overheat and burn prematurely due to the constant image resolution conversion and the very-dumb power sharing HDMI scheme which is unfixable in Android systems.

Sounds easy, but most people don't know these limitations, because absolutely no one is attaching small screens to TV sticks, and everybody takes it for granted that a TV stick is useful only for streaming and pay-per-view on a giant screen. That's what Google wants you to believe in spite that your smartphone is essentially the same thing.

[J. Wilhelm]

Ugh!  Disaster has struck, not me, but Microsoft, and now I'm reconsidering the use of Windows in the boombox project.

At issue is a series of severe bugs or errors in the automatic security patches for both Microsoft Windows 10 and 11.  Patch after patch released since the end of last year has broken some functionality in various computers, almost as if Microsoft didn't make use of beta testers before releasing the patches.

Some of the patches had minor bugs (rotating cursor (?)), and some had very serious consequences, like incompatibility with video cards, operating system not booting, permanently disabling motherboards' ability to have a dual boot PC (Linux+ Windows).

But the patches that affected me the most, were those related to audio.

In both Windows 10 and 11, the patches for January broke the USB Audio connections and for Windows 11 the 24H2 update broke Bluetooth connections as well.

Tech Radar: Windows Admits Bug That Kills...

In the last few days, Windows 11 got a new patch that fixed all the aforementioned problems, but broke something else: file explorer is now disabled!!  I'm going to assume they're going to fix that too, but it's been 4 months of problems for Microsoft and I'm now reconsidering the possibility of turning to an Azure module loaded with Ubuntu instead.

I've already mentioned why I've been avoiding Linux: basically because the user needs to be a computer geek to feel comfortable with Linux and solving all its issues and also because I don't have an engineering support department to go along with the product.

But I have to wonder what is worse, customers pissed off about their boombox being partially disabled for months, or limiting my customer base to people comfortable with "getting their hands dirty" in updating and maintaining their operating system.

In the meantime, the Windows 10 audio problems haven't been fixed at all, and it's likely they won't before October, when support for Windows 10 ends.  So I've set the local policy to stop automatic updates including security updates altogether, since I can't afford to break a perfectly good operating system now.
Ugh!