Vintage headphone mod

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By Gareth Branwyn
Posted 2008/02/21 @ 10:00 pm
Category Music

Over at the Steampunk Workshop, Jake inaugurates a new Guest Artist Project feature with the wonderful Molly “Porkshanks” Friedrich as the first artist in residence. Molly shows how to update an antique Cannonball Empire headset with modern headphone innards.

Porkshank’s Dieselpunk Headphone Mod – Link

Related:

The Ambiance Enhancer (retro MP3 player) – Link

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Raspberry Pi Starter Kit - Includes 512MB Raspberry Pi

3 Responses to Vintage headphone mod

W8FG on February 22nd, 2008 at 6:42 am said:

It’s a real sin to destroy these high impedance antique’s! Users of vintage radio equipment spend great efforts to preserve their old radio’s and often need to find quality set’s of these old high impedance head sets to get proper enjoyment of these old radios. Don’t destroy antique electronics in the name of something stupid. There’s no good reason to chop up a good old set for the sake of making your $1.00 poor quality toy’s sound better.

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Jake von Slatt on February 22nd, 2008 at 10:18 am said:

Antiques have value for two main reasons; they give us a connection to the culture that created them and they have monetary value in the marketplace. There is no doubt that singular hand crafted works of artists and craftsmen demand preservation as they give us unique information about past cultures. However, vintage mass-manufactured goods hold little unique cultural information, they have value only in the marketplace.

While modding an antique may destroy it’s monetary value, it also transforms it into an object that now preserves unique cultural information about the present. So it all depends on what you feel is important.

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Kaj on February 22nd, 2008 at 7:37 pm said:

I point out that one of the headphones pictured in the website (top left) are a set of WWII US Army headphones. I don’t mind the others nearly as much as the loss of a hard-to-find relic of the past.

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