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Blown Speaker Simulator – Turn your browser into a cheap car subwoofer
Have you ever wanted your high-end laptop to sound like a 1998 Honda Civic with a blown-out subwoofer? Probably not, but now you can!
Blown Speaker Simulator is a novelty Chrome extension built to test the absolute limits of Chrome's Manifest V3 and the Web Audio API. It captures your active tab's audio, isolates the low-end frequencies, and applies heavy digital distortion in real-time.
How it works under the hood: Since MV3 service workers don't support AudioContext natively, the extension uses chrome.tabCapture to send the media stream to a persistent Offscreen Document. Down in that layer, a BiquadFilter isolates and boosts the bass (+28dB), and a WaveShaperNode applies real-time clipping without perceptible latency.
I built this entirely with the help of AI, experimenting to see if I could create a complex audio graph without any prior audio engineering background.