Is it safe to place a speaker that size in a computer case? Has anyone done it and come out alive? Magnetic interference and all that... H.B.
It will be no problem magnetic-wise, but the main issue is vibration. You'll have to make sure all your riser cards are firmly secured and screwed down. and IDE/SATA cables firmly in, etc.
I would have thought it would be a very big problem magnetic wise.... at maplins i sell a fair few of those size and bigger, and they are constantly erasing the magnetic data contained on ym staff epos card, i would expect the same to happen to chips on a motherboard or a haddrive etc... You have to remeber these arent shielded at all, if barely, they are not like PC speakers which are in fact shielded and can sit next to the lieks of a cRT monitor with no probs dragon2309
even if they are magnetically shielded, which is highly unlikely, the vibrations could do a fair bit of damage, especially to hard drives...
Fastening a speaker inside a thin-walled metal box could give some interesting resonances; a "light metal" sound maybe. Hi-Fi, not. Computer chips, flash memory, optical and and hard drives aren't affected by magnets. CRT monitors, floppy disks and swipe cards are.
A HDD has its own magnets inside. Some people claim that they can be affected by oscillating magnetic fields, but I've never seen it so I've never really bought into that idea. I've not bothered to look for any more information or research on the subject, but Google is your friend, if you're really interested.
well, this pretty much clears it up - http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060728214036AAlNSRc Wow, learn something new every day...
That's why I keep my speakers in an old tool box, I'm a heavy metal type of guy. Joking aside, it's interesting to find out that magnets do not affect most computer components. It seems a lot of us were misinformed.
Thanks for taking the time people... No, I'm not thinking about sticking it on a metal case, no way! I like wooden cases. Case No.1
A magnetic field can theoretically affect a hard drive, but: i) There needs to be a sufficiently strong magnetic flux through the platters ii) The magnetic flux through the platters needs to be changing - i.e. if the HDD and magnet are stationary relative to one another, then the magnetic field needs to be oscillating. The strength of a magnetic field decreases proportional to the distance from the magnet cubed, too. The magnetic field strength needs to be greater than a certain threshold to have any effect on a given magnetic medium - this threshold is much higher for HDDs than it is for, say, floppies or magnetic cards. If you've ever seen a disassembled HDD, you know they contain extremely strong Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnets, very close to the heads and platters. The reason they don't affect the drive is that the field is static and constant, relative to the other parts of the drive, so it's basically a part of the known magnetic field background that the drive is operating within. In short, yes, HDDs are a magnetic medium, and theoretically, moving a very, very strong permanent magnet close enough - very close - to the HDD might effect it, but in practice, this will not occur installing a speaker in the case. No other computer components, besides a HDD, CRT or Floppy disk will be affected in the slightest by a magnetic field.
