Put that old stereo of yours to good use

If you are like me you spent all of your teen years listening to music like mad, with your best friend from the past: a big, bulky and weirdly shaped stereo system with speakers. Here’s mine.

My old stereo system

I never use it now: all my music is on the server or on my macbook, and thinking of CD’s and tape decks looks so retro these days. But what to do with it? I’ve turned mine in a fancy pair of bluetooth enabled speakers. With 10$.

I’ve bought a bluetooth headset from Hong Kong, off ebay. The quality is what you should expect: plastic feeling and headphones that break upon the moment you put them in your ear. But who cares: the headset is the important part. Even more important is that the headset you buy off ebay is A2DP capable, that is capable of delivering stereo sound.

Second step is making sure your hardware (phone, PC, MAC) supports the A2DP protocol as well. My black macbook does, and most likely your average 2-3 years old mac does too. And also make sure that your old beast has an auxiliary audio in port, but, again, most of them had this option.

Third step is to have a RCA to headphone jack cable (YMMV according to your stereo model), in order to link the headset to the stereo.

A junk headset and an old cable.

Finally it’s a matter of pairing the headset with the computer, plug it into your stereo and enjoy wireless music with a decent quality.

Well… to tell the truth quality is not the best feature of this setup… but surplisingly not because of the headset: I realized just how bad sounded my dusty stereo after years of in-ear headphone crystal-clearness. No dinamycs at all: I just had to shut it down. Probably its place is the junkyard now.

But I have also an iHome with a more decent sound output: the sound quality came back ok after trying the headset with it, and now I’m happy with my new bluetooth speakers. Next step is to integrate everything in order to keep that piece of plastic from HK always on, leeching supply from the iHome. But that’s for another time.

Sorry, old bulky dusty stereo, but modern tech has beaten you off one more time.