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How to build a stereo - Part OnePosted by Andrew Poelstra on May 5, 2006.

This will be a three-part series, due to the length of each stereo version. Version 2 introduced very little, but it took a lot of work, and I nearly died several times. Version 3 came with a lot of new features for asthetics, efficiency, safety, and maintainability. Let's start off with Version One, because I made it first. It is much more difficult to build than the current one, and maintaining it was a real pain. Here is the parts list: Contents:

Optical disk drive with a play button on front
Power supply
Styrofoam
2 stereo speakers
Floppy drive power extension cable (female-female)
Male-male 3.5mm headphone cable
Dental elastics
IDE cable (sliced up)
Various small wires

Unfortunately, I can't give you a pictoral tutorial of this, as I didn't have the blog when I first built it and didn't think to take pictures. Here's the finished product: [link broken] Here's the step-by-step tutorial. If you don't understand anything, perhaps you should try version 3, which will be posted eventually.

Plug the drive into the power supply and place it on top. You might want to tape it in place.
Short the power supply's on-off switch. To do this on an ATX power supply (most new ones), connect the green wire on the motherboard plug to its neighbor on the right. For older PSUs, find the 3-wire plug and connect two of those. I don't remember which ones, but it won't hurt the thing if you do it wrong.
Plug in the power supply to make sure that it is working; you should be able to hear the drive spin up. Now, unplug it for safety reasons.
Now we need to make some cabling.
1. Slice the IDE cable so that you have two wires in whatever length you think you need. I recommend a foot. Make two of those.
2. Strip the ends of those and put them both into one end of the floppy extension cable, so that all four ports are being used.
3. Take four small wires and put them into the other end of the floppy extension cable, and twist two together like so:
```
  Spkr_1 ------ [--------]------------ Wire 1
  Spkr_1 ------ [ Floppy ]--\/\/\/\__  Combined Wires 2/3
  Spkr_2 ------ [  Cable ]--/\/\/\/
  Spkr_2 ------ [________]------------ Wire 4
```
  That is, the two speakers end up connected by one wire.
4. Use the dental elastics to connect the three wires to one end of the 3.5mm headphone jack. You'll note that the jack looks like this:
```
  <=|==|===||||||||
```
  the double equals signs). Connect the combined wire to the last section (the triple equals sign).
Now we can plug this in. Put the untouched end of the 3.5mm headphone jack into the stereo, and the other end of the IDE cable into the speakers.
Test. Plug the power supply in and wait for the CD to spin up. Press play, or forward, or whatever button you have and listen. Play with the volume control. If you don't hear any sound, check your wiring.
Now that it is working, you can make a styrofoam chassis. I drilled a hole in the styrofoam with a screwdriver and a pencil, and ran the headphone cable through that.
Once again, here is my picture, which unbfortunately does not show the wiring. [link still broken].