Tiny speakers?

Disassemble a cheap set of dynamic earphones??

Walt Palmer wrote:

Ok. I can get 8 ohm, 0.5 Watt, 20mm diameter, full range speakers, from China, on eBay.

1) Does anyone here know of a source for even smaller ones? Say 12-14mm (1/2") diameter?

2) I'm interested in building a tiny "sound room" that could slip into a camera hot shoe and would have a 3.5mm microphone input connected to a tiny speaker. I'm thinking someone with 3D printer design knowledge could fashion the box to fit in the hot shoe slot.

Thoughts?

What do you mean by "sound room"?

Are you trying to make a camera-mounted amplified audio playback system? If so, why do you want a mic input (or did you just mean that type of connector, not with mic amplification)? How do you want this to work?

There are tons of powered/unpowered phone amplifier units -- you could just mount one on a shoe (doesn't need to be hot)....

Walt Palmer wrote:

ProfHankD wrote:

Walt Palmer wrote:

Ok. I can get 8 ohm, 0.5 Watt, 20mm diameter, full range speakers, from China, on eBay.

1) Does anyone here know of a source for even smaller ones? Say 12-14mm (1/2") diameter?

2) I'm interested in building a tiny "sound room" that could slip into a camera hot shoe and would have a 3.5mm microphone input connected to a tiny speaker. I'm thinking someone with 3D printer design knowledge could fashion the box to fit in the hot shoe slot.

Thoughts?

What do you mean by "sound room"?

Are you trying to make a camera-mounted amplified audio playback system? If so, why do you want a mic input (or did you just mean that type of connector, not with mic amplification)? How do you want this to work?

There are tons of powered/unpowered phone amplifier units -- you could just mount one on a shoe (doesn't need to be hot)....

Many cameras do not have microphone inputs. The GX85 I have is a prime example of a camera that has been trashed for not having a mic input.

Since it seems impossible to add a microphone input to the physical camera, I am thinking it might be possible to add a mic input to a tiny "room" that would sit in the hot shoe and extend out over the speaker holes. A bit of foam around the edges and the inputs on the camera could be hearing ONLY what was "piped into" the tiny "sound room".

Not as perfect as a real microphone input, but by eliminating wind noise and ambient sound the sound quality improvement should be quite substantial. I wonder if this could be done at a price point that would make it easy for people to add it to their cameras to upgrade their video sound. I think many would.

Interested?

Quality would not be very good that way....

Walt Palmer wrote:

Quality would not be very good that way....

Based on what? This has never been done. How do you know what it would sound like? The only existing improvements to the GX85 audio involve building a partial version of this, trying to limit direction to the front. This encloses the front as well.

What do you suggest that could be better?

Recording reproduced audio always takes a big hit.  I've tried that sort of thing more than a few times and it's never been good. Passive shrouding of a built-in mic might help, but is likely to interfere with imaging (sound location cues).

It probably wouldn't be too hard to open the body and wire to the mic inputs, but I think the best answer is simply to get a camera that has mic inputs or record audio separately -- which is actually a lot easier than it might seem.

As you probably already know from my other posts here, I'm not at all hesitant to modify things, but there has to be sufficient expected benefit to justify the effort... and I just don't see that here. Feel free to prove my gut instinct about this wrong.