IKEA Hack: Hemi Salad Bowl Speakers 
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A hemispherical speaker you say? OMG, it’s all kinds of awesome. So much more than the salad bowl speakers you’ve seen before (no offense to the Matt Blanda Salad Bowl Speakers seen on IKEA Hacker but these go beyond!), these hemispherical speakers have no less than 6 speakers mounted on the bowl. Holy salad holes, Batman! Says the hacker, Holland Hopson, “The speaker sounds good–punchy and more powerful than I expected, particularly considering the 4″ drivers.”
Edit: Thanks goes to @bruceturner on Twitter for clueing me in to this project and see the comments for Holland’s addendum – I mistakenly left out an important inspiration!
See the specs and find out how and why they were made after the jump!
Speaker specs
This fabulous speaker project was done by Holland Hopson to help Kristin Norderval build speakers for use in the ThinkDance production, Our Lady of Detritus (see details below). Says Holland,
Enclosure
We used an Ikea salad bowl for the enclosure. (Author’s Note: This is the IKEA BLANDA MATT Wood Serving Bowl, 11″, Article Number 400.572.59, $19.99.)
Amps
We pulled 3 Dayton T-amps
from their enclosures and mounted them on the inside of the bottom plate of the speaker cabinet.
Speakers
We used 6 4″ Inifinity 4022i
drivers.
Volume Pots and Connectors
The Dayton amps had combination volume and power pots, so we decided to keep them rather than source and wire up a 6-position potentiometer. A little Dremel routing magic made mounting the volume pots easier than I expected. A coaxial power jack and 6-pin Neutrik XLR jack and plug rounded out the connectors.
The Shopping List
- IKEA BLANDA MATT Wood Serving Bowl 1 @ $19.99 = $19.99
- Dayton T-amps 3 @ $44.80 = $134.40
- 4″ Inifinity 4022i
Plus tax and various bits and pieces that if you’re a speaker dude you probably have lying around. What’s that? About $460 for a one of a kind speaker that can be used in the kind of open air, public performances these were designed for use in.
The How To
See Holland’s site, The Field Guide, the step-by-step and for all the pictures: Hemi Speaker and Our Lady of Detritus
Our Lady of Detritus
Last chance to catch Our Lady of Detritus and hear these speakers in action! October 15th 12:30-2:30 PM at the Fashion Center BID (Manhattan).
Featured performance in the 2009 Fashion District Arts Festival; Between 40th and 41st St. on Broadway
Take the N, Q, R, W, S, 1, 2, 3 or 7 trains to Times Square/42nd Street and walk along Broadway.
Tags: Hemi Salad Bowl Speakers, IKEA BLANDA MATT, IKEA Hack, IKEA hacker, Our Lady of Detritus, Salad Bowl Speakers, The Field Guide
Thanks for letting the IkeaFans community know about this project. I should note that the idea to use an Ikea salad bowl comes directly from the Stanford Laptop Orchestra (http://slork.stanford.edu/) and the design for the electronics come from the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (http://plork.cs.princeton.edu/) Delorean speaker project. Both of these sources are credited in the original article. What few changes Kristin and I made were based more on our limited budget and time, rather than our expertise or creativity.
The Stanford group has since posted extensive instructions for their speaker design at http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~njb/research/slorkSpeaker/. Highly recommended!
Thanks, Holland for the addition! That’s my mistaken oversight. Writing too late at night for early morning posting! Excellent work still. Have you attended one of the performances? I’d love to hear about it and/or see pics! :D