Well, I'm kind of going against my own advice here. The speakers were the last item I needed to order for FLYNN'S, but I noticed that the 4" shielded speakers from HAPP I had intended to use were out of stock and wouldn't be available until 7/31. Being the impatient sort that I am, I started to look around for other suppliers. I deal a lot with an eBay seller who sells the same stuff as HAPP at much lower prices, but the ones they had didn't seem like the same model.
To cut a long story short, what I'm ending up with is a pair of PYLE car speakers. It still remains to be seen whether I'll hate them, return them, and still order from HAPP, but it seemed worth a shot. On the up side, my amp is made by PYLE so there's some continuity there, they're 4 ohm so I'll get the rated power output of 15W per channel rather than getting roughly half that with the 8-ohm HAPP speakers, and they have a pretty blue LED in the tweeter. Oh... yeah, they have a tweeter. The only reason I let myself do this is because there will also be jukebox functionality, so it makes sense to use something that might do well with music. Also, the monitor is SVGA, so it might seem a little weird getting a nice clear picture, but old-school muffled audio. I do worry that the games aren't gonna sound authentic, or even "right" at all, so it's something I'm hesitant about and nowhere near certain I'm gonna stick with.
Obviously the biggest potential issue is glare/light spill from the LEDs. There's already the marquee just above the speakers, but when actually focusing on the screen my eye line is low enough so it's out of my field of vision. The speakers will have the stock grills from the cabinet over them, and it seems like they'd let very little light through (just solid metal with slits rather than a mesh-type that would be virtually transparent). Worst case scenario is that I've got reflections in my monitor plexi, but I'm just a sucker for cool blue LEDs, especially given the TRON theme of my cabinet. I already gave in and ended up with a laptop cooler that has blue LEDs in the fans for the rear vent, so that coupled with the blue illuminated trackball does lend some sort of continuity to the whole design. In most places I've avoided illumination because it tends to highlight imperfections (and there are a boatload of those in this project), but when you think TRON, you think blue glowy stuff, right?
Maybe this is my way of compensating for the fact that I never got to do my Missile-Command-cabinet-based digital jukebox project. I really regret not being able to put all kinds of crazy lights on this thing like a color organ, "endless tunnel" effects like the Seeburg Entertainer has, etc. I do still plan to do all that in some other project, but I have to accept that using a full-size arcade cabinet, even a "lowboy" like Missile Command, is overkill for something that just plays music. The PYLE speakers are only rated to go down to 110Hz, so I also worry about bass response. No idea what kind of response curve the HAPP speakers have, and the top part of the cabinet should serve as a nice ported enclosure for them, so maybe the bass won't be that bad. I do have an old 12" powered subwoofer from my home theater system that hasn't been used in years, so maybe I could build my "crazy light show" project around that. It'll be a safe distance away from the computer in the cabinet, so that'll prevent hard drive issues.
Well, just kind of thinking out loud here... if anyone has ideas or advice on illuminated speakers (saw those on "The Blue Pill", although I'm not sure they're the same ones I'm getting), feel free to chime in.
UPDATE: Yup, the ones used on "The Blue Pill" are the same exact ones I ordered. They haven't shipped yet, so that's a bad sign. If they haven't shipped by the time HAPP restocks the 4" shielded ones I wanted originally, I'm cancelling my order and going with HAPP. Luckily, the IBM ThinkCentre I'm using as the brain of this project has like a 2" internal speaker that is not only for POST beeps, but all audio is played through it when there's no external speakers plugged in. Even at only 50% volume, it's loud enough just sitting at the bottom of the cabinet so that I barely notice there aren't any other speakers. The sound is in mono and a bit distant-sounding, but it's perfectly acceptable for gameplay until I can get my speaker issues worked out.
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Topic: Sound system for a MAME cabinet (Read 29445 times)
