Bought a Maxell Carabineer Mini Speaker, began to hack it. Film at 11.
EDIT: Disassembly of the mini speaker unit.
In its package. Paid $10 for it, manager's special. Judging by the outdated iPod on the package (they probably had to pay to put it on there) I'd say they want to blow these out because they are old. The speakers are small, maybe too small but this is the closest to what I want I've seen so far. They sound kind of cruddy, but they get pretty loud. I'd rather have quiet and good. The speakers will do, though. It takes 2 AAA batteries and has an amp built in. I can't use it though, you'll find out in a bit. Five screws, one in the battery compartment and one on the grey thingy, hold it together.
Inside the device. The speakers are small, around an inch in diameter. Now they pulled a dirty trick here. There's two speakers. The cord (which is too short) has a stereo plug. So it's stereo, right? Wrong. The engineers at Maxell seem to have found a better (read: cheaper) way of doing things. The inputs are mixed together, fed through a tiny SMD amp chip. The two speakers are connected in parallel. That also explains the 8 ohm speakers and 4 ohm impedence in the specifications. Mono would be fine for a NES or Atari, or for someone who doesn't really care about audio, but YAP64 needs stereo. Which means I'd better finish building that amp. I'm using the TI chip (forgot the part number) and I might make a PCB for it, but I'll probably just ghetto-freeform it.
Also, I'm beginning to wonder which will get here first- the Dreamcast or the battery. The battery is from the US, and UPS Standard took way longer than 5 business days last time. On the other hand, the Dreamcast is coming out of Manitoba and Canada Post is always really good. The thing is I ordered the Dreamcast like 4 or 5 days after the battery.
