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BALL OF SOUND

Construct a low-cost spherical speaker array. By Michael F. Zbyszynski

Acoustic instruments radiate sound in a wonderfully complex, 360° fashion, while conventional loudspeakers project a boring spotlight of sound. You can spend a ton of money on a fancy spherical audio array, or you can build one for cheap out of 2 IKEA salad bowls and 8 surplus car speakers.

Photography by Michael F. Zbyszynski

1. Cut the hole for the top speaker. I would love to say that I was smart enough to have found a speaker and bowl combination that worked out like this, but it was luck. The speaker fit exactly inside the rubber ring on the bottom of each bowl, after I cut along its inside edge (Figure A).

2. Make a template.

Since the hole for the top speaker was the perfect size, I used it as the template for the other 3 holes.

Trace it onto a piece of paper, and use scissors to cut out the template (Figure B).

3. Mark the side speaker holes.

Use your paper template to trace the other speaker holes onto each bowl (Figure C). The holes should be cut evenly around the sides of the salad bowl. To make sure they are exactly 120° apart, use a piece of heat-shrink tubing (or the like) to measure the bowl’s circumference. Then divide the circumference by 3, cut or mark the tubing to that length, and use it to mark where the center of each speaker should be.

For one hemisphere, I centered a speaker on the handle and measured from there. For the other one, I started by centering a speaker on the spout. That way, the speakers are offset when you put the hemispheres together. Make measurements from

Make: 141