Making Speakers? Any Suggestions [Archive] - Audio & Video Forums

PDA

View Full Version : Making Speakers? Any Suggestions



mona979
02-27-2005, 10:06 AM
Hello,

I wanted to see if any one out there has made speakers before? Was the experience good? bad?

Peter Duminy
02-27-2005, 11:41 AM
It will be 33 years of making and designing Loudspeakers next month. To tell you the truth, I would never do anything else. It is like painting - but with sound. :)

topspeed
02-27-2005, 11:50 AM
Ed Frias of EFE Speakers is a member here. You might try pm'ing him. Kexodusc has built a few of his AR.com DIY speakers and speaks very highly of them. Kex is into DIY big-time now so he would be good person to ask about potential pitfalls you'll want to avoid. You can get well regarded kits from Madisound (http://madisound.com/) and Parts Express (http://partsexpress.com/).

Hope this helps.

kexodusc
02-27-2005, 12:23 PM
Ed Frias of EFE Speakers is a member here. You might try pm'ing him. Kexodusc has built a few of his AR.com DIY speakers and speaks very highly of them. Kex is into DIY big-time now so he would be good person to ask about potential pitfalls you'll want to avoid. You can get well regarded kits from Madisound (http://madisound.com/) and Parts Express (http://partsexpress.com/).

Hope this helps.

Before I start I'll just let everyone know that I'm still very much an amateur at this.

I'd recommend to people new at this to start with a proven, existing design before trying to come up with your own. While working on these designs, learn as much as you can about WHY they are good designs....the internet is a great resource, but I think sooner or later you'll have to buy a few books. Of course, if you can follow instructions, building a kit is easy enough, and you don't need to learn a thing.

Making speakers is a really fun hobby, and a good way to build a good system for cheap.
I've had some good experiences with a few speakers, I've also had some outright miserable failures too, though. I had a friend who insisted on building me some speakers when he heard I wanted to buy some. After that I got hooked. I made another pair of speakers from a popular DIY design, then got greedy and thought I could just design my own. This was my first real lesson at the importance of a good crossover. Just screwing high quality drivers into a box doesn't necessarily make good sound. Now I know why some speakers take years for development.
Recently I made some of the EFE DIY's by Ed Frias. This is an excellent beginner project. If you're interested, there's lots of people who've done these and can offer help in the DIY forum. These are appealing because you can buy all the parts (including cabinets) and basically just assemble these in an hour or two.(not much fun if you ask me).

I'm currently working on a sub, and some transmission line towers...we'll see how those go! Then probably a few clone projects, the Totem Arro and Focus Audio FS-688. I doubt mine will sound quite as good, but they will be a lot cheaper.

Madisound and Parts Express have pretty good kits. I'd ad GR-Research to the list as well, though I haven't heard any of their speakers.

www.speakerbuilder.net has a lot of excellent designs and good information.

I would stress that this should be considered a hobby, not just a way to build speakers cheap. If you factor in your lost time (at whatever wage you'd pay yourself) I doubt you'd be further ahed than buying commercial speakers.