SPEAKE(a)R: Turn Speakers to Microphones for Fun and Profit [pdf] (2017)

EEridanus2 about 3 hours ago 31 commentsRead Article on usenix.org

RU version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

50% Positive

Analyzed from 710 words in the discussion.

Discussion (31 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

rf15•21 minutes ago

As a kid I accidently plugged a mic into the speaker port and was surprised that, when I put my ear close to the mic, I could hear the computer sounds! It made sense in hindsight, and since then I knew they are kind of functionally equivalent.

fipar•6 minutes ago

My first “electric guitar” as a kid was my acoustic with an earphone taped to the bridge and plugged to the mic in of my boom box.

It was also my first “fuzz pedal” because the sound never came out clean :)

dickfickling•about 3 hours ago

I have vague memories of iPod Linux (or Rockbox, I can’t remember) having a feature where you could record voice notes using your regular headphones using the same technique

maqp•about 2 hours ago

Some DJs use this principle when they need a hacky stage mic. They plug their headphones to the mixer's mic input, and shout to the speaker element.

jpc0•about 3 hours ago

A magnet in a coil operates both ways, this is non intuitive but perfectly sound.

Not sure if it's mentioned in the article but microphones can be speakers too...

userbinator•about 2 hours ago

Not sure if it's mentioned in the article but microphones can be speakers too...

Only dynamic mics, which are relatively rare and seldom encountered without an attached preamp. The vast majority of mics for PCs are condensers and electrets.

Anything can be a speaker, briefly and only once, if you apply enough voltage to it...

atoav•about 1 hour ago

Huh? The standard stage mic, the Shure SM58, certainly is dynamic and has no preamp.

But you probsbly think about smaller form mics like found on headsets (Electrets).

yen223•39 minutes ago

I recall when I was a kid decades ago, being able to plug a speaker directly into the microphone jack and use it as a microphone, without any modifications whatsoever.

We could do the reverse too, plug a microphone into the speaker jack and hear sounds coming out from it.

bigbugbag•about 2 hours ago

same with solar panels, they can be reversed to emit light.

d3Xt3r•about 2 hours ago

Same with LEDs, they can be reversed to generate electricity.

kqr•about 2 hours ago

What's their spectrum?

DoctorOetker•about 2 hours ago

near infrared

akoboldfrying•about 2 hours ago

> perfectly sound.

I hear what you did there

userbinator•about 2 hours ago

Not all speakers work well as dynamic mics; and in fact turning on mic mode may enable the bias voltage, which could either burn out the voice coil or hold the diaphragm against the stop, making it even less likely to pick up any sound.

Jack retasking, although documented in applicable technical specifications, is not well-known, as was mentioned by the Linux audio developer

This could be a "bubble effect"; the Realtek codecs mentioned have a Windows utility to configure the jacks, which countless otherwise non-technical users would've seen and interacted with, so awareness of this feature is probably higher than they think. Fun fact: the "ALC" prefix in their codec names stands for Avance Logic, which was acquired by Realtek and they just kept that prefix well into the HD Audio era.

m4lvin•about 3 hours ago

Okay, but how do I use this as a replacement when the mic is not working on Linux?

Se_ba•about 2 hours ago

Tbh it's crazy that you can do it in some of the microwaves

me_jumper•about 3 hours ago

This needs a (2017), I was so confused why this was published again, seemed so familiar.

saagarjha•about 3 hours ago

Fixed

BFV•about 3 hours ago

That’s actually a pretty wild concept—turning speakers into microphones sounds like one of those “this shouldn’t work, but it does” kind of hacks

ijk•23 minutes ago

I feel like this is the kind of hack that made early radio tech exciting to play around with. The basic parts are incredibly simple to assemble from scratch, so it feels like magic. Speakers and microphones are the same thing in reverse. And so on.

vidarh•about 3 hours ago

I hadn't thought about whether this would still with modern speakers, but this was the common assumption for several older types of speakers and microphones.

One of the first "science experiments" my dad showed me was the other direction: Dismantling our telephone and demonstrating that the carbon microphone (yes, I'm old) in the handset would also work as a (really bad) speaker.

atoav•about 1 hour ago

It is basically the same as turning a motor into a generator.

hecanjog•about 3 hours ago

This shouldn't be downvoted. Transducers being reversible is a neat and non-obvious thing.

dnnddidiej•about 3 hours ago

Motors can be dynamos too

maqp•about 2 hours ago

and many LEDs are weak photo-diodes, i.e. you get weak current when you shine a light to them.

saagarjha•about 3 hours ago

It's probably downvoted because it sounds somewhat nonorganic.

3form•13 minutes ago

Even with the em-dash. New account and other comments seem to be here-and-there. Maybe LLM with some editing after.

AmmarSaleh50•about 2 hours ago

don't let the CIA see this one

villgax•about 2 hours ago

If this or an accelerometer based recording is what Meta uses to eavesdrop on in-person talk then color me pink

murderfs•about 2 hours ago

It's pretty unlikely that Meta is actually eavesdropping on your conversations, because it'd be immediately obvious from battery usage. The ability to turn speakers into microphones doesn't help if the speakers aren't actually connected to an ADC, and both of the modern smartphone OSes limit you to on the order of hundreds of samples per second, so it's rather difficult to get anything sensible without either doing a bunch of local analysis or exfiltrating it, both of which would be visible.

slow_typist•about 1 hour ago

It can be done with neural networks [1]. Also, speech doesn’t need much bandwidth to be intelligible. You would need control of the analog filter between the accelerometer and the ADC. With 250/s acceleration samples you can reconstruct a signal of a bandwidth of more than 100 Hz anywhere in the spectrum. That is called undersampling.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3478102