 Here is a picture of how I probed wires into the CD player cable of the same
boom box. The resistor you see here is merely being used as a piece of wire to
reach inside the ribbon connector and has nothing to do with accessing the
amplifier. I used the same process here to get my audio
source to play when the boom box's selector switch is flipped to CD. As long as
your box has a sound source (DVD, tape, radio, etc.) it will have a cable
cluster going from that to the amplifier. So you can see
this is a pretty universal technique. When you are addressing a boombox with only a single printed circuit board
as mentioned at the start of our how-to, you can still use this same
process to find your link to the amp, but it is just a bit harder to determine where to tap
in and could be considered an "advanced" technique. Most PCBs will be designed with its "components" in groups. Although do keep in mind this is not always the case.
To do this, you will use the capacitor to probe around the wires between the tuner and the preamp end of the PCB. Without experience it is a bit of a guessing game. When you think you found the
left, right and commons you will need to break the PCB "trace" that
interconnects the single input with the others that may be integrated together. To do this you can use a hobby knife to slice the copper
trace on the circuit board. You can now solder your wires to the board on the preamp side of the cut. It is
necessary to cut these traces in order to keep the radio tuners signal from playing. Just like when we cut the wires on the demo boom box.
You've done it!! Now all that is left to do is make the connections permanent.
One way to do this is to drill a hole in the case of the boom box and run your
audio test cable through and solder directly to your predetermined connections. After soldering the wires, they must be individually insulated by either wrapping them in electrical tape or heat shrink tubing.
The cable is now ready to plug into your external audio source.
Another suggestion is the addition
of an audio jack to the boom box.
Pictured here are a few different ways you can add an audio jack to the casing of your boom box. Take a section of audio cable and solder the wires to your left
 and right channels as well as your audio common as described above. After soldering the wires, they must be individually insulated by either wrapping them in electrical tape or heat shrink tubing. On the other end of your section of audio cable, solder the wires to the audio jack. The audio common wire
 from the cable will be soldered to the tab on the casing of the audio jack. Solder your left and right channel wires to the remaining two tabs. Then simply drill a hole into the boom box or radio casing and install the jack in the hole. Make sure your jack is mounted in an area of the boom box where nothing will touch the exposed connections. You're done!
...Bryan Patterson
And there it is. Congratulations to Bryan for this super handy hack and
becoming the first person inducted into the
How-To
Hall Of Pain and becoming the very first person to also become an honorary
member of
Creep Crafters!
Let us know if you have any trouble using this technique on
your boom box!
Rest In Pieces,
Death Lord
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