This Speaker Upgrade Will Have You Singing in the Shower

Hacker and YouTube creator GreatScott! enjoys listening to music in the shower. However, his Bluetooth speaker setup consisted of just a simple clip-on, battery-operated unit. While reliable, this wasn’t quite good enough for ‘Scott!’ and he decided to manufacture his own overhead setup instead.

The build process is laid out in the video below, where he breaks things down into several design steps. First, the speaker needs to be able to at least withstand a humid environment, with potential liquid water exposure. However, after some internet searching, he went with an IPX6 unit that should even withstand powerful water jets. Perhaps one might see this as overkill… until there is a real problem with the plumbing!

From there he needed a power supply, which was manufactured and upgraded based on a design that he made years ago (and he found to be problematic). While you never want to make mistakes, it’s an interesting exercise to go back and see where your engineering knowledge has increased. The revised design also uses a new Bluetooth unit, which is a good upgrade as the technology has advanced in the last decade or so.

Finally, ‘Scott! spec’d out a new audio amplifier, using an LM4562. While rather expensive, it has a very low THD (total harmonic distortion) value. As with many things, you apparently get what you pay for. If you’re going to go to all the work of enhancing this type of system, you might as well ensure it sounds great. The upgrade reportedly does work quite well, and the video does a nice job of outlining the design elements that you might want to consider when taking on such a project!