OontZ Angle 3For my final project, I would like to make a portable bluetooth stereo system powered with a tube amplifier. The idea is to substitute my current cheap speaker system, which looks like this
with something that would similarly allow me to enjoy my music playlists from the Spotify app, but also being much more appealing in terms of quality and aesthetics:
Monoprice 25 Watt Stereo Hybrid Tube Amplifier
I have been always fascinated with vacuum tube devices. Tube-based amplifiers have their spot in the High-End electronics. Their linearity and "warmth" result in a quite unique sound signature, which cannot be reproduced with digital amplifiers.
Another audio-object that always surprized is a loudspeaker. For the same type of speaker, one could switch from a terribly sounding system to a nice and rich sound, by a simple change of the speaker enclosure shape or by varying its materials.
When I was a child, I tried to implement these pieces as DIY projects. They, however, always ended up with a partial success and very ugly forms due to my lack of experience and knowledge way back then. I then later switched to completely different directions (mathematics, physics, materials science) and only now decided to go back to those old projects of mine.
In this class, I would like to unify these pieces together in fabricating an essentially a (semi) hi-end portable bluetooth speaker. I would like it to be visually appealing, with a few elements of modern and/or steam punk (vacuum tubes already give it a good old school feeling).
This Hi-End boombox project will require a number of skills that will be covered in the class:
I would like my "boombox" to have a modular structure, with pieces that can be connected to each other:
The amplifier should be capable of high speed wireless connection (bluetooth or wi-fi), which would eliminate any unnecessary losses in sound. I would also like to be able to power either my headphones or any loudspeaker system. My initial sketches of the system looked as follows:
Boombox, initial sketch
Boombox, more compact sketch
For this project, I would like to impose the following constraints, which, hopefully, will reduce the number of variables:
Though it would make sense to build this system as cheap as possible, I, for now, will not put limits on the final price tag. I will surely try to be as frugal as I can, but this project requires ordering components, like vacuum tubes and step-up transformers, which might be quite pricy. Also, even though I might eventually fail in even approaching the quality of high-end amps, I will try to ensure that connectors and internal wirings are made of high quality materials (in order to remove unnesessary rate-limiting steps).
For modeling of my sketch of the project in 3D, I chose Blender. This is a very powerful tool, which in addition to being complete free, allows a complementary scripting with python code, and also incorporates very neat features such as sculpting, node editor, cycles, and post processing. For the actual models, I will probably use tools that are more common in prototyping, but for now, here are what my rendered models look like in Blender:
Vacuum Tube Amplifier
Speaker
I would like these elements to work as standalone, but also would want to be able to combine them into a single unit:
Hybrid Portable Vacuum Tube Sound System