All about iPhone speakers for MRR sound

[ON28]

Kaylee Zheng's excellent recent NMRA clinic on installing iPhone speakers for sound. She also talks about other cellphone speakers. I use iPhone speakers for my locos, they're cheap and easy to install.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSoEVfvxxAU&list=PLBbDHVLodgxn8otpnudMsHdQMucCzcTWD&index=10&t=0s&fbclid=IwAR3EKEuFKyvdcnT0x3KwB__xqXuUlSxUCpAm6rhzJXsqVY3en_u4qdkluKQ

[G8B4Life]

Interesting presentation. Thanks for posting it.

I've been doing some speaker comparisons recently, factory fitted and some sugar cube in enclosure types I bought from a company here (Unfortunately buying JT's ScaleSoundSystem speakers is pretty much out of the question ). If I can find my last few iPhone4 speakers I'll test them as well. I might even look into some of those other mobile phone speakers, the iPhone4 speaker is too long for most of my stuff.

- Tim

[ON28]

The iPhone 4s speaker can be trimmed to size, but it's important to retain as much of it as possible, for best sound, especially lower register.

[Orlando]

Digikey has a good selection of speaker. All my models have speaker from digikey. Here is a link AS01508AO-LW25-R
8 Ohms General Purpose Speaker 700mW 550Hz ~ 20kHz Top Rectangular 84dB

Cheers
Orlando

[Orlando]

Sound is from dual pui speakers from digikey.

[G8B4Life]

Yes, the mega electronics and other parts companies like DigiKey do have a good selection of speakers, but many of them just might not be very good for our purposes. I remember a couple of years ago buying some sugar cube speakers from RS Components (they at least have a physical warehouse in my country, unlike DigiKey). I built some enclosures and tested them in a loco. Suffice to say the sound was less than spectacular. I will admit that it wasn't ULT sounds I was testing and the chassis was just a copy of the Proto E8 type designed for 2 round speakers pointed down but even so I tested an iPhone speaker in there as well and got better sound from that than the speakers I had bought from RS.

Now I know some of the things to look for in speaker specs thanks to the video I could look again and see what's available. I'm also interested in trying some of the other phone speaker types as well. The best part of the speakers from modern smart type phones (and tablets) is they are designed by proper engineers to reproduce the widest range of frequencies possible (seriously, who would want to listen to their favourite song on a tinny phone?), the bad part is they don't design them in a nice handy flat rectangular block to just drop straight inside model trains.

I found my last two remaining iPhone speakers so I'll have to wire them up and test them in the test loco and compare.

- Tim