Bowls are commonly used for eating food, but given their half-sphere shape, they make a great starting point for maker projects. One possibility: Create speaker “boxes” constructed out of bowls, or at least objects that could have been used as bowls if their builders were less creative!
White IKEA Salad Bowl Speaker
This pair of bowl speakers is nearly unrecognizable from its humble origin as wooden salad bowls thanks to its excellent white paint job. Each speaker uses two bowls back-to-back with the seam filled in with putty and sanded before painting. The legs are made out of drawer knobs.
[via Reddit]
Dual Speaker Sphere
Unlike the last pair of bowl devices, this design puts both the left and right speakers in one sphere. Though one would have to wonder if this configuration would affect the sound quality, the resulting orb is nice and compact. Also of note is the brass draw hasp used to connect the bowls which should make it easy to take apart.
Speaker “Box” from a Lathe
Turning bowls or pens on a lathe is a pretty standard practice, but why not instead turn a “bowl” sized especially to accommodate a speaker? As shown in the video above by Carl Jacobson, there is really no reason, though he uses sealed speakers so the size of the “boxes” doesn’t affect the sound quality. If you’d like to see even more, he also made a version with legs.
The Ball of Sound
In a much different take on the idea of back-to-back bowls, this design uses a pair of 6 quart salad bowls along with 8 speakers to project sound in a multitude of directions. This simple design is meant to act similarly to the speaker arrays that you might see at a sporting event, but on a much smaller scale.
Glass Sphere Speakers
As seen in this Make: writeup, these speakers are made out of glass spheres, as well as a few made out of glass cylinders. These were optimized for aesthetics over sound quality, but the sphere design was at least acceptable for background music.
Concrete Speakers
Although not bowls themselves, these speaker enclosures are instead made with concrete formed using bowls as molds. It’s a really clever method, and according to its Instructables project, concrete has some great advantages “structurally, acoustically, and aesthetically.”
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