Hey ya Fett's!
Been a few minutes, but I thought I would provide an update to the MiCom situation. I attempted with using a low profile speaker called the Esquire 2 by Harmon Kardon.
View attachment 234222
This is an 8 watt speaker that I strategically placed right under the abdominal armor. It was very discreet, but what I found was that in noisy settings (
e.g. a very large con) it was difficult for people to hear the voice. In an outside setting with few people it worked great, it also worked great inside my home. My local community center has a large reception/lobby area where many people gather before events. And in that setting, again, found that folks could hardly hear me.
And so.....time for a speaker upgrade. I searched high and low for that low profile, yet powerful speaker but had no luck. I turned to VoiceBooster and picked up the MR2300 - which is a 20 watt speaker.
View attachment 234220
Another thing I kinda liked about the Harman Kardon Speaker was the fact it had built in Bluetooth (V4.1), which I used for the MiCom. On the MiCom side I used this as a way to push the audio.
View attachment 234223
The cool thing about this device is that it has a slider switch to enable either TX or RX (
Transmit or Receive) This Bluetooth device is very tiny making it ideal to conceal inside my Boba Maker Gauntlet. In fact, the entire MiCom kit is inside my Gauntlet. Since the VoiceBooster MR2300 Speaker is not Bluetooth capable I bought another one of these devices to go along with it.
Sadly, I couldn't place the MR2300 speaker under the abdominal armor. I thought about the hip pouch but it just felt weird having the voice projected outwards from my side. So in thinking about it, I thought why not use the front thigh pouch? Sure, it's a low speaker placement but if it's loud enough I didn't think it would sound too bad.
The ECCC...
View attachment 234221
...is coming up here in the next couple weeks so I thought that may be a good time to give it a test. But last weekend I was summoned once again by the community to suit up to help promote the upcoming events for 2023 including the annual Halloween event. Since it was going to be in that reception/lobby area that is quite noisy, I thought why not try it out there. I will say it is
much improved, having the power of 20 watts is just what I needed. In fact, it wasn't even at full blast the little amp still had more to power to push out if needed. I did find it nice that if an adjustment was needed it was a simply matter of lifting the flap and having the volume controls right there.
I will say that the speaker is not as big as the thigh pocket, so to overcome that I used a little bit of foam cut in such a way so that the controls were at the top of the pouch. Also, I know it looks bulky, but it honestly doesn't weigh all that much and when walking around with it in my thigh pocket didn't even notice a big difference.
In short, here is a diagram to my current setup...
View attachment 234224
And so far, I'm pretty happy with it!
Here's a crazy idea, Now I'm not a huge Audiophile or Speaker Engineer. But why not build out the little center chest piece of armor to be a mini 25 watt speaker?
View attachment 234225
Cheers,
-Iron