Paper Plate Surround Sound System

With the holiday season, you might turn to paper plates to cut down on dishwashing after having family or friends over. But what do you do with the extras? If you are [TKOR] you make some speakers. The process is fairly simple and if you know how a speaker works, you won’t find any surprises, but there are some neat techniques you might pick up. You can see the video below.

A drill and a steel rod help with the coil winding duty. You can probably adapt the technique to make other kinds of coils and we’d rig up an encoder to count revolutions, too.

In addition to paper plates that act as transducers, paper bowls form the back of the speakers. They wound up with 16 speakers which would have been expensive to buy, but it might not be very attractive, depending on your sense of fashion.

In the end, they used an insulation foam board to make a giant speaker, although they used an off-the-shelf driver which, you’d imagine, has better sound than the homebrew ones they were using.

How does it sound? Hard to say since you are hearing the audio over a video, but it didn’t sound bad. We liked how they suspended the foam board over the ceiling to make a full-room audio system. A little paint and some LED effects would fit decor better than the paper plates. They even cut some of the board into decorative shapes and made a logo that plays music.

These might not suit the audiophiles, since there is a lot more to a speaker than meets the eye. You can also do some speaker magic with 3D printing.