Arcade Cabinet Audio
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I recently ordered some speakers for the Bartop cabinet I am building for my RPi3. The problem is they cannot mount flat to the grille of the panel pointing down to the monitor. Any suggestions on speakers that will mount flat against the board?
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@GreenHawk84 I used the Z120 speakers from Logitec. See
video. They are very low cost but have excellent sound for a bartop when placed in the marquee. Good dynamic range. The problem is hacking them as there are no screws. If you are careful, they come apart brilliantly though. Look at the video then imagine having just the black sections. They sit flat and the speakers are glued permanently in them already. You can pull off the volume dial and access the amp inside which is a surface mount board. I removed the LED and replaced it with a rainbow colour changing one and positioned it inside the back of the bar top such that it illuminated the inside through the air vent grill. I chose them because they are usb powered which means I can power them directly from a hub within the cabinet. They are available here. I could supply more details on how to get in them if you would like. -
Thank you for the tip @rbaker . I already purchased a small amplifier to power the speakers. Someone at work told me to use a spacer so I can mount them flat. Sounds like a pain. I been searching for another pair that will mount totally flush to the wood facing down.
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I have a similar situation but don't worry. If the speakers are not flush with the wood, then simply use some spacers (preferably soft material or rubber) to put in between the mounting holes on the speakers and the surface it's attaching to... this will raise it up a bit but it should mount fine.
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@GreenHawk84 Ahhh, so for speakers alone, look for ones with mounting tags like these. There are many similar ones that will do. Make sure that the impedance matches the amp so 4-8 ohms is typical. The issue will be screwing them to the cabinet. Screw heads are likely to poke out and ruin your build if you go from the inside towards the outside. That's where the spacers and bolts come in. Bolt from the exterior of the cabinet like when mounting joysticks and you can adjust the speaker position with spacers or washers. Then, when you are happy, cover the speaker and the bolt heads with a nice grill.
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@rbaker said in 2-Way Speakers for Bartop Cabinet?:
@GreenHawk84 Ahhh, so for speakers alone, look for ones with mounting tags like these. There are many similar ones that will do. Make sure that the impedance matches the amp so 4-8 ohms is typical. The issue will be screwing them to the cabinet. Screw heads are likely to poke out and ruin your build if you go from the inside towards the outside. That's where the spacers and bolts come in. Bolt from the exterior of the cabinet like when mounting joysticks and you can adjust the speaker position with spacers or washers. Then, when you are happy, cover the speaker and the bolt heads with a nice grill.
I got the Kinter MA-170 Amplifier to mount on the build so I can easily do volume and have some decent sound. I got these to go with it but I am having this mount issue: link text
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@GreenHawk84 I can see your issue. With those, I would get some
quite easily that the speaker fits in then build up towards the screw holes. The actual speaker would sit in the harness of mdf and you can screw to it and glue the harness in place. Also, with that amp, you will probably using the 3.5" jack? I had terrible trouble getting a hiss free output with a similar amp and ended up returning it. It seems that during periods of silence, there is an annoying noticeable hiss and this is to do with the Pi. If you edit your config.txt and set:disable_audio_dither=1It solved the problem for me.
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@rbaker thanks for all your help. Yes I have been looking around at flush mount rings. I was considering a local audio shop that may have some on the cheap for me. I need to wait until I get my cabinet in the mail and take a look at what I am working with for clearance. I think I have enough time to sit on these speakers before returning them.
With the MA-170 I am going to use the AUX jack on my RPi3 to the red and white audio inputs. If I get the hissing I will use your suggestion. I hope everything turns out well. Hopefully I made good choices for an audio system.
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@rbaker, I have the speaker system up and running with the Kinter MA-170. At first there was awful hissing, you were right. I went in and added the dithering and it cleaned it up immensely. I am trying to understand all the .cfg files. I read that I can possibly have better performance by setting 44100kHz sample rate. I went into retroarch GUI and I cannot change 48000kHz. Nothing I press works. I went in and switched to the ALSA sound card (I think), but I forgot which menu that was (so many damn menus). I am trying to setup optimal audio so when I install this in the cabinet, everything runs well. So far so good. What is your preferred way to edit files for settings?
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@GreenHawk84 I prefer to avoid all menus wherever possible and edit the files directly. For this I use WinSCP. This allows you to access the pi directly and remotely using a windows drag and drop style. You can just navigate to the relevant folders and alter the required config files. I always make sure that I backup the files that I am altering before the edit starts. There is one thing that you will need to do first though and that is to tell winSCP to give you root access so that you don't get the access denied message when trying to modify a config. See this on how to do that. You will need the pi connected to your network to do it this way either via ethernet or wireless. I'm on a pi3 and find that it works great wirelessly. You can sit next to your build with a laptop and modify the whole setup remotely. There is an even easier way if you don't like winSCP. Retropie appears on your network and the most useful locations are accessible direct from windows such as the config files. Using Samba shares, if you go START>COMPUTER>NETWORK your pi should present itself with access to the main folders. More info here.
In order to edit the file to adjust the sample rate, I edited retroarch.cfg which is located here:
/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.configThis is what the audio bit of my config looks like:
# Audio output samplerate. audio_out_rate = 44100I have also selected sdl as the driver:
# Audio driver backend. Depending on configuration possible candidates are: alsa, pulse, oss, jack, rsound, roar, openal, sdl, xaudio. audio_driver = sdlHope this helps! Good Luck!
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@rbaker, yes I can access my RPi3 on my network easily. I was looking at files and it was asking me what to open them with. What do you use to open your files?
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@GreenHawk84 In winSCP, when you double click a file, it just opens in a window. If you are using Samba shares then it seems to default to notepad which displays a jumble. If you open in Wordpad then the full file is displayed in all it's neatness.
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@rbaker, thanks, I got it now. I selected regular wordpad instead of Office Word haha. This is a breeze now. I am still not hearing much of a difference though. Retropie has a "default" soundcard and then the selections such as ALSA and sdl. If I go over to Audio options in Retropie, I can select the mixer and choose between default and ALSA. Otherwise I have to go into the .cfg and choose from the other sound drivers. Very weird stuff.
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@GreenHawk84 I dont' know much about the different drivers but I chose sdl because it maintains audio quality when the emulator can't emulate at full speed. I may change back because this is less an issue now I have a pi3. The alsa option works but only if emulation is at full speed. I experienced echoes and static when playing games which stress the pi. The sdl driver seems to keep away the odd sound issues when playing the more recent titles.
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I recently had to return a monitor that would not mount properly in my cabinet so I ended up going with this AOC G2260VWQ6 http://aoc-europe.com/en/products/g2260vwq6.
Turns out it looks to have an AUX out, so I can run HDMI audio from RPi and then use that to my components. This should allow me to have the audio back to the way it was. I will post results here when I have it up and running. This was a nice bonus I thought.
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I'm slowly building a cab and I have my stereo amp hooked up via USB audio.
I had audio issues using the 3.5 mm jack that I suspected was caused by a ground issue. The USB audio didn't actually help, but I have read that it provides better bass and treble than the 3.5 mm jack. Anyway, what did clean up the sound 100% was running a wire from the amp to the HDMI input on my TV so that the ground signal no longer goes down the RCA cable.
I've reread your posts so I don't really understand what audio issues you're having. You already say you got rid of the hiss, so what is the problem?
If that monitor converts the digital audio to analog, then that does solve some problems. Just be aware that the conversion isn't instantaneous, so it would add some audio lag. Doubt it's noticeable, but worth noting.
USB audio dongle is like 10 bucks, so might want to add that to the ol' amazon cart and experiment with it. Then choose which option works best.
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@Concat For what it's worth, I have had lots of issues with USB audio on the pi--not so much about getting the sound to work, but getting the ALSA configured exactly how I want it to work. For example, I can get USB audio playback working fine, and for most cases, everything appears normal. However, with my dongle, the mixer device is named "Headphone" instead of simply "PCM" which makes setting volume level digitally a challenge. Many applications and indeed, the front-ends I have tried all want to use the built-in mixer method for volume adjustment--and why wouldn't they? Well, with the USB dongle, I would get errors on the screen because my setup had no "PCM" mixer control. Note that this is NOT PCM audio, it's ALSA. Anyway, as much as I enjoyed the higher-fidelity, I ended up going back to the 3.5mm jack because of the configuration challenges. My display doesn't have audio, or else I'd be using HDMI audio. YMMV, but I thought I'd throw a few words to the wise here about USB Audio.
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@rbaker, my new monitor has the AUX out jack so I can do the HDMI sound to the monitor and AUX out to the amplifier. I say it sounds a lot better and I removed the dithering line from my config. I have a question though, isn't there a way to access sound drivers in the EmulationStation UI (through the RetroPie menu) instead of going to retroarch.cfg and typing in the driver I want? I thought I stumbled on it through menu surfing.
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@GreenHawk84 Not sure about EmulationStation but I found that there might be options Settings>Audio Options in the Retroarch GUI?
"RetroArch supports loading audio DSP plugins to add effects such as reverb to the audio output. This has been in RetroArch for a long time, but was recently reworked to be easier to use and more accessible from RGUI, and are available in the main RetroArch repository now. Now you can load DSP filters using RGUI under Settings\Audio Options\DSP Filter, where you can load a DSP preset with .dsp extension, which is a text file similar to a shader preset that lets you chain DSP filters and specify their options. The DSP filters themselves are dynamic libraries that are loaded according to the .dsp file. Each DSP filter has a standalone preset that documents the default options, and there are some example presets that combine more than one filter."
....Souce of this -
@rbaker
Hi rbaker,Could you provide some info on how you got into the Z120 speakers. I bought a pair a while back to put into the bartop cabinet I am making by doing the exact thing you mentioned. Any tips you may have about dismantling the speakers without damaging them would be gratefully received.
Thanks.
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