Early projects: A dual channel stereo system

Music has always been an important influence. For as long as I can remember, as a kid, I wanted to build a stereo music system with the unadulterated goal of blasting the guitar solo from Gun’s and Roses, November Rain. The summer my friend got a high end stereo system, I was maybe, fourteen years old. Man, did it sound great. The bass was deep and the treble was crystal clear. That was the tipping point. Determination to build something louder and clearer became my goal. Man on a mission.

For the next year or so, major amount of my time was dedicated in gathering specs for an amplification circuit. Printed circuit boards were cheap and soldering was easy. A basic single channel amplifier circuit board was created. Two of these were paired up and it would play stereo music. The cost would be about 2,000 times cheaper than the high end Philips stereo. So the search for components began. For the tape deck, a junkyard car's broken cassette player was revived. After several minutes of mouth to mouth resuscitation, it started turning the spools and the cassette tape moved. A transformer and couple of diodes and capacitors were soldered together for the rectified power supply. The soldering iron kept me busy and my fingers burnt while a child discovered, for the first time, what it meant to convert alternate current to direct current. The first sound that came out of the system was a played over speakers that were ripped out of an old pair of headphones. The variable resistances, hooked up for volume control were turned all the way up and the sound was so feeble that one could barely hear it. The expectation was lead melting screams. This team of one headed back to the drawing board.

Research and troubleshooting in many iterations happened in no particular order, it was determined that there existed something called a pre-amp. The wicked tape player deck, rescued from the junk yard had played one final trick on me. Its magnetic head was not producing enough power to feed my hungry amplifier circuitry. In the meantime, two cone subwoofers, two twitters and two mid-range speakers were in my possession. Enough ply wood had been collected to make the speaker boxes. My father, being a mechanical engineer, had so much tools in the garage that he could probably have built a ship. So a bit of hack saw and sandpaper polish later, the speaker boxes were ready, cut in pieces but not yet put together. There was one puzzling piece that hindered progress. How does one cut a circular hole in the middle of a piece of wood? Off to the big man I went. Hey dad: "How do you use a hacksaw to cut a circular hole in wood?” I asked. Turns out there is a special tool for that, which is probably the only tool the ship maker didn’t have. Next day, he took to his friend’s furniture shop. Circles were already marked on the panels where the holes would be. It took them, under five minutes to cut those holes out. Oh! The importance of using the proper tools. Soldering continued, the final circuits were being put together. All the months of failed attempts lined up like guardrails, keeping me on track.

It was about a week after that, my little tape deck player started playing music. Loud it was. Workhorse of a music player, it played on for as long as I lived in my parent's house. Nightmare for my sister, my parents and a few neighbors. For me, my first real project.

My parents are retired now and moved to a different house. They have downsized but they kept the stereo with them. It’s stowed away but still exists. As evidence of torture via audio. Next time I go home, I will take a few pictures.

Key Learnings: Knowledge and drive can bridge the gap between impossible and possible. Choosing the right tool for the job is key. Being able to re-use and componentize a system can save a lot of money. A thousand failed attempts seem alright, provided one working solution comes out of it. There is no replacement for passion, without my love for music and decibels, I would have been happy with the tape deck, boom box.