Bluetooth Vintage Speaker Upgrade

In this Instructables I will cover how I upgraded an old vintage speaker to a wireless bluetooth one. It's a very simple project and shouldn't take any longer than an hour, and surprisingly cheap, especially if you already have an old speaker laying around.

Now I am no electrician, and this is my first ever audio project so I am sure from a audiophile point of view I've done is a crime, but it works fine for me, I just use it for Audiobooks & Podcasts, and have another pair of really good speakers for music. I do plan in the future to upgrade the actual speaker inside and put a brand new one in.

For this project you will need;

• Bluetooth Mini Amp
• 12V Power Cable

I picked up this super old speaker off eBay quite cheap. I had no idea if it was going to work or not but wanted to do this project for a while and finally just thought I'd take a risk. First thing to do was open up the back and clean it out. There was about 50 years or dust and dirt built up inside so I spent some time cleaning this all out.

Next I wired up the amp. This is a super cheap and simple amp that I bought off Amazon for around £10. I first wired up the speaker cable. This amp is designed for stereo speakers so you can wire up a pair if you have them. However as mine was just mono I just wired up the one. Next I put in the power cable and was happy to hear the speaker come to life with the bluetooth connection noise.

I found a 12V 2amp power cable laying around which fit the spec on my instructions. But always read the manual that comes with your amp to make sure you don't break it by plugging in an overpowered plug. Check the photo above to see where I put each cable. I also adjusted the gain settings to the lowest settings as the speaker was more than powerful enough, I also noticed the sound quality wasn't great when at full. I just used a flat head screwdriver to adjust this.

I put a couple of screws in to hold the amp in place. But I will probably put a new speaker inside at a later date to get a better output, and find a better solution to this when I come back round.

I hope you enjoyed this project and hopefully inspires you to dig out those old speakers and bring them back up to 2017!