The DIY route allows one to try so many combinations. My wife gave me a closet in the guest bedroom which is now full of different drivers. No way could I store more than a couple of pair of speakers in there. No suspicions are aroused when a small box of drivers arrives in the mail but when a freight van drops off some hundred pound floostanders it would be a different story for many of us.

My DIY skills are very limited. I wish I had taken shop courses in high school but college prep didn't allow for that. I did take a one day course in building kitchen cabinets a few years ago which was a huge help. Building a kitchen cabinet is not unlike building a speaker cabinet. I learned to use a Kreg jig to drill pocket holes and join plywood together at strong right angles. I still struggle with precision cutting and usually have Home Depot make my cuts which they do for free. I learned to use a router to cut driver holes by watching Youtube.

Open baffle speaker builds are IMO the best sounding and by far the easiest of all as you are often using flat boards in one dimension. Enclosures OTOH require Bondo and lots of sanding to fill in any spaces where sides don't meet perfectly.

What is probably hard to accept by those who spend megga bucks on commercial designs is that with DIY you are almost always assured of better drivers. Zu speakers can sell for many thousands yet I can buy those same drivers retail for under $100 each. My Tang Band drivers retail for as much as $500 a pair but to find a speaker with a driver of that quality could easily cost over 20K.

The main cost of commercial speakers is in the cabinet and not in the drivers. Companies built to a price point and can not afford the drivers I can afford to use in DIY. OB speakers will always be a niche as there's no bling to market in so basic of a design.

Any of you guys who are getting older ( and we all are ) should consider DIY audio as a hobby. If you love music you're half way there. To build something with your own hands that sounds shockingly good is just amazing. You can't experience this feeling behind a desk pushing papers in corporate America.