Hifi on A Shoestring

[Beobloke]

I was challenged to do this for a magazine article a few years ago. I came up with:

- Dual CS-505-3 (£32 from ebay)
- Yamaha A-300 amplifier (£12 from car boot sale)
- Wharfedale Diamonds (£5 from the dump!)

It all sounded depressingly good for £49, frankly!

[AlexM]

I was challenged to do this for a magazine article a few years ago. I came up with:

- Dual CS-505-3 (£32 from ebay)
- Yamaha A-300 amplifier (£12 from car boot sale)
- Wharfedale Diamonds (£5 from the dump!)

It all sounded depressingly good for £49, frankly!

That's a quality system for < £50. I think dumpster diving for the speakers is cheating slightly, but the Yammy and the Dual are great buys!

[Beobloke]

That's a quality system for < £50. I think dumpster diving for the speakers is cheating slightly, but the Yammy and the Dual are great buys!

No dumpster diving involved - they were sat in the 'for sale' area, waiting for me to come and rescue them!

Of course, this doesn't happen now, due to WEEE regulations.

[Sherwood]

If the system has to travel, what about a solar powered one? DC powered equipment fed via compact NIMH batteries, charged by a folding solar panel or two. There much DC powered gear, including obviously ICE stuff, which is necessarily compact and can be very good.

I actually ran the system I mentioned as a battery powered system when I was working in Vietnam. I was based in Cao Bang Province just a short distance from the China border. There was very rapid growth taking place but this was outstripping generating capacity so there would be frequent and long power cuts, most often at the weekend. Sometimes I would only have power for a few hours from Friday to Monday. One of my early purchases was a high capacity 12v SLA motorcycle battery and a high quality trickle charger. This allowed me to power the 12v Nuforce Icon amplifier which was highly efficient. Amazingly, Vietnam was an early adopter of 4G somobile broadband was pretty good quality: it just didn't make commercial sense to lay land lines in highly mountainous sparsely populated areas. In fact, many people had traditional looking telephones with cradle and handset but running from a sim card.

The capacity of the battery was sufficient to play music the whole weekend either from my phone or tablet, or from my mp3 portable player. In fact, I could even run my high efficiency full range driver Omega 3xr floorstanders. I guess, I could have charged the battery with some solar panels, but the battery was usually able to see out the outages with some reserve juice left over!

Geoff

[alphaGT]

A small system with a T class amp, or perhaps powered speakers, should be easy to run from one of those power inverters that plug into your cigarette lighter in the car. Or one of those pocket jump start batteries. Have you seen these? Lithium batteries that fit in your shirt pocket that can jump start a car! I've been wanting one.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[alphaGT]

https://www.revzilla.com/motorcycle/...1-power-supply

Here's one I've seen demonstrated, they started a truck with it! So it should power a portable stereo for a good while.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Sherwood]

A small system with a T class amp, or perhaps powered speakers, should be easy to run from one of those power inverters that plug into your cigarette lighter in the car. Or one of those pocket jump start batteries. Have you seen these? Lithium batteries that fit in your shirt pocket that can jump start a car! I've been wanting one.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

I've since bought a couple of 20000mAh lithium polymer batteries (Anker). I have a USB to 12v power cable adapter that allows me to power 12v equipment from these batteries for ages.

Geoff

[alphaGT]

I've since bought a couple of 20000mAh lithium polymer batteries (Anker). I have a USB to 12v power cable adapter that allows me to power 12v equipment from these batteries for ages.

Geoff

Very cool! I recall a camping trip many years ago where we had small house speakers driven by a nice 12 volt stereo, it was capable of real bass and volume! It may not be, "Outdoorsy", but we had a great time rocking the campsite! Today's equipment is so much more economical and small in size, good sound anywhere is very possible. And affordable!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Sherwood]

Very cool! I recall a camping trip many years ago where we had small house speakers driven by a nice 12 volt stereo, it was capable of real bass and volume! It may not be, "Outdoorsy", but we had a great time rocking the campsite! Today's equipment is so much more economical and small in size, good sound anywhere is very possible. And affordable!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

In fact, I've used one of the Anker batteries with my Beresford Caiman SEG DAC. Although the Anker battery outputs 5v through the USB port, the cable I bought converts this to 12v. The SEG definitely sounds better on battery power but it is just a bit of a faf to keep it recharged between uses.

Geoff

[Arkless Electronics]

Very cool! I recall a camping trip many years ago where we had small house speakers driven by a nice 12 volt stereo, it was capable of real bass and volume! It may not be, "Outdoorsy", but we had a great time rocking the campsite! Today's equipment is so much more economical and small in size, good sound anywhere is very possible. And affordable!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Many years ago when I was a "new age traveller" (we never used that term... and I guess our friends from over the pond will need to google that...) I rigged up a couple of old disco type speakers, 12" dual cone things, to an amp I built using a 12V soldering iron which gave about 40WPC from 24V from two lorry batteries. Sources were a cassette deck and FM tuner both with their PSU's bypassed to run straight from 12V. The speakers were more about quantity than quality but would certainly go loud as they were probably around 97dB/W. We rocked the forest

On some bigger sites there would often be someone with a generator and probably a reasonable PA system but we were a small enclave "over wintering" and had nothing more than a ghetto blaster before this!