Hard Disk Speakers
‘First I got 3 dead harddisks. A small one that used to be my Amiga’s, a normal sized one, and a bigass ancient one. I did this just for the fun of saying I have a harddisk sound system with woofer, midrange, and tweeter drivers ;). I ripped the drives apart. I took sound (in electrical signal form) from the output jack of my sound card. I fed it through a Velleman 30 watt audio amplifier that I bought from Parts Express here and soldered together. I took the amplified signals and fed them through the coil that controls the movement of the HD drive heads. I also connected the amplified signals to the platter motors of the ‘midrange’ and ‘tweeter’ drives, so you can actually see the platters spin sometimes. I determined which places to connect the wires by studying the drives and poking wires around in random places. Hey… they were dead anyway. Anyways, the sound that is being produced is from the rapid vibrations of the heads/platters due to the ‘sound’ signals passing through them. With lower frequency sounds being passed through the drives, you can see the heads move quite a lot. For the high frequency ones, its invisible to our inferior human eyes. This kind of fun isn’t just limited to harddisks… I also got low frequency sounds to come out of an electric motor, and even standard cooling fans will make some sound. Girls can try even making music come out of their vibr… *cough*… The 3 harddisks are connected to the amp in parallel. It’s like ghetto raid with groove ;)’