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ridiculous 50 watts for each
Wednesday, May 25 2016
It was a relatively hot day (at least by recent standards), and the laboratory was on the edge of being uncomfortable. Adding to my discomfort was weirdness with The Organization's mass emailing system, which I will soon be inheriting. Neither I nor Meerkat (the guy who built it and will be departing at the end of the workday on Friday) had any idea why it kept stalling.
Today's mail delivered a car stereo with a built-in MP3 player (price: $25) that I made some progress installing over the course of little breaks that I inserted into my day. To get it into the dashboard required removing some panels, but they all just popped out, since it seems any screws that should have secured them had all been removed and lost my a previous owner. Still, though, it looked like the stereo component's face was too wide for the provided gap in the panel. So I opened the stereo up to perhaps make some modifications and was surprised to find that it was mostly empty inside. All it had was a display with some digital circuitry and connectors at the face plate and then a single board parallel to the back of the box with some analog circuitry, including an amplifier chip attached to a modest chunk of aluminum (the heat sink). I doubt that heat sink was really designed to handle the labeled power of the unit, which is a ridiculous 50 watts for each of the four channels.
I soon discovered that only one of the Subaru's four speakers (mounted in each door) were functional. I needed at least two speakers for a positive car stereo experience and would be taking the car on a somewhat long drive tomorrow, so after work I immediately tore the driver's side door apart (it wasn't difficult once I watched a YouTube video) and swapped out the dead speaker with a nearly-identical one I happened to have on hand (salvaged from some previous vehicle we've had). Fortunately, the wiring was all still good.
The best thing about the new dashboard-mounted MP3 player is that it remembers where it was in an MP3 when the car is turned off. This makes it possible to listen to podcasts without having to keep finding where you last were in the middle of one.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?160525 feedback
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