Building The Slork Speaker Array, Part 1



Several months ago I was looking at Apple's webpages for info on one-of-a-kind book publishing and came upon an article featuring the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, a project of Ge Wang at Stanford's computer music center. I became drawn to a revolutionary design for a small 6-speaker spatial array the group uses. Made from an IKEA salad bowl, 3 stereo triamp chip based micro-amplifiers and 6 car speakers, the design creates a sound source that I quickly felt matched my inner idea of an appropriate personal amplification system, and I decided I had to build it for myself.







There is a lot of good information about this project online, between the Stanford Laptop Orchestra pages, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra pages and various DIY audio boards where audiophiles discuss modifications of equipment, including the little amplifiers used here. The laptop groups use triamp chip amplifiers, which are tiny solid state amps about the size of a credit card and quite affordable. These were most likely made for use in flat screen tvs and other small speakered gadgets, but audiophiles got hold of them and found they have, with a few modifications, very good quality sound.






Over the next several months I acquired parts and studied the online materials. I was lucky to get 3 Sonic Impact V2 t-amps for 30$ each and good prices on the 6 speakers used by Stanford in their array. I added some 16v 2200uF capacitors to the power rail cap and cut out the volume pots, replacing each with a 10k ohm resistor, as per GW's suggestion. Building the input saddle or jack block was challenging, using radio shack and home despot off the shelf materials. An original pine base was discarded for a hardwood base as suggested again by GW.






This was a remarkably useful project besides the purpose of creating a usable amplifier-speaker for presenting live electronic music. I finally found a project that taught me the basics of amplifier electronics and I learned to solder. I had soldered before but was never satisfied with my work. Today I got very close to being completely finished with the speaker array, tied everything together and mounted several of the speakers into the bowl, screwed the bowl on to the base. I'm looking forward to hearing the completed unit in the next few days, testing it out with playback of a 6-channel recording in ProTools, and then preparing a piece for public presentation. The first live event may be a recording for pocketradio.org