PC Mods - Car Stereo?

[vskagentsmith]

One thing I think would be make a sweet mod for my computer would be installing a car stereo in my PC, then make a pair of speakers from stock stereo speakers, probably with acrylic cases, throw in a few LED fans and you'd have one crazy audio setup.

The only question is, anyone ever done anything like this though? I've been scouring the net for related mods, but not much has come up yet that offered any real information.

I've read that the car stereos run on 12 volts, and would require a constant source of power (is that really necessary?). And of course the antenna and then modding the case for the audio jacks.

(Sorry if this isn't in ther right forum, nothing else really fit the question)

Thanks in advance for the replies!

 

[r0bVious]

I heard it's not as bad as people portray it to be, but magnets + HDs = not fun. Just take that into consideration.

I saw an article on adding speakers to a case, and it went over the whole Speakers-around-HDs thing, but they went on and did it anyway. I'd give you the link if I could remember where I saw it. =/

 

[Cogman]

Originally posted by: r0bVious
I heard it's not as bad as people portray it to be, but magnets + HDs = not fun. Just take that into consideration.

I saw an article on adding speakers to a case, and it went over the whole Speakers-around-HDs thing, but they went on and did it anyway. I'd give you the link if I could remember where I saw it. =/

To be quite honest it takes some pretty powerfull magnents to do damage to a modern HD. The old HD were not so hard to do damage to. But new ones are generaly unaffected as far as magnents go.
Car speakers are fairly big, but as long as you dont put the HD right by the magnent on the speaker and rub it around a little, youll be fine.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

You'd definitely want a separate power source for the deck. Grounding might be an issue as well. But yeah, that could be a helluva setup.

- M4H

 

[NewBlackDak]

My cousin was running a car stereo in his room.
He used a 350w PSU to power the head unit, and a battery charger with a cap to run the amp.
It worked fine for over a year.

 

[vskagentsmith]

Well the speakers and subwoofer would be built into custom made acrylic cases. I've never really worked with acrylic sheets before, but I figure it can't be too terribly hard. They wouldn't go in on or around the case, they'd probably be on my computer desk somewhere or perhaps even put strategically around the room.

Some of the car stereos I've seen are seriously cool though, I work at a Best Buy and we're still building the store, but we've got the display and demo area for car stereos setup, and some of them are simply amazing. Color displays, I think one of them has an LCD display and plays through a sequence with 3D graphics and just looks very cool. Some of them have some wicked CD players built into them, when you press the eject the face slides out at an angle or the like.

Anyways, this is more of a pipedream right now. I still haven't got my GeForce 6800 Ultra, which is gonna cost me something awful, and some of the car stereos described above are easily $300-400. But it's something I wouldn't mind doing. I was just hoping to find a possible wiring scheme to kind of play around with.

Thanks for the replies though, glad to hear someone else thinks it could be a cool idea.

 

[drx9175l]

The constant 12V lead on a car stereo is to keep radio station presets and audio settings intact. As mentioned earlier you'd probably want to use a seperate "always on" power supply to keep the system's memory working. As others have also already pointed out, car speakers are unshielded. Hard drives aren't the only things to worry about when it comes to magnetic fields. I was using a pair of 6x9 speakers mounted in carpeted boxes along with a home receiver plugged into my computer's sound card and I had to hang the speakers 6' away from my monitor to prevent screen distortion. When within a foot, the display was unreadable and probably would have caused permanent damage to the CRT in a short amount of time. LCD monitors might not be affected this way.

 

[PumpActionWalrus]

You will need at least 14 amps on your 12 volt rail just for that stereo, as far as the speakers and hds go, it is a myth, you may however get some emi from it. Here is a link on how to build your own 12v power supply capable of about 18 - 20 amps for under 40 dollars. http://www.overclockers.com/tips1054/

 

[shilala]

Wow, weird.
I was just talking to my daughter yesterday about modding a car stereo and building a "dashboard" mod.
My thought was to carf the whole dash out, redo the optics in the cd player to burn dvd's, and use the grills for ducting. Mod the fan control and temperature slider to do the work it's supposed to do.
Better yet, use a dash with the digital temp readout (Buick stuff) to actually control the pc's temp.
It'd just take a walk through the junkyard to find a dash that's deep enough (sticks out into the seating space).
The whole deal would be a mod I haven't yet seen.
Dropping in a stereo is easy work. It shouldn't require any modding to the stereo at all. I think I'd output to a seperate amp, making a set of audio connectors up on a pci slot.
It'd look sweet.

 

[Zepper]

There is already a drive bay stereo deck for sale, but the price is absurd for a no-name junk box... As others have said, you will either need a high powered separate PSU or use a pre-amp head (with no internal power amps) and run the line outputs to a normal home audio amplifier.
.bh.

Where's the :sun: ?