DIY Wilson Clone Speakers?

It was fun! At times frustrating but well worth it. I was concerned with same issues, Steved is mentioning, and used extensive bracing (check North Creek Music) and a lot of lead sheet inside the "Watt" cabinet to mimik density and weight of the original cabinet materials. X-over is easy but parts can be expensive. If you have any more questions you can e-mail me.

http://home.att.net/~dragan_v/home.html

Regards!

Regards!

First off as somewhat of a parttime wood worker I can tell you that you will not and can not produce the product that Wilson does. I had met David Wilson at one of the Electronics shows in the early 90's and the man is an absoloute psycho fanatic, about making the best.

I own a pair of Watt2/Puppy1'S and I can tell you the precision on the manufacture is miles better than I am capable. I can not work with Corian and get the precise same angle cuts like Wilson Audio did. My father was a life long electrical designer and worked on high end military transmitters, and he could not produce the type of x-over as Wilson has. Lastly if making a pair of the Puppys you can not buy the Dynaudio drivers in the US any more. That said you can build a decent pair of clone watt/puppys, but if you shop around you can probably pick up a used older pair as I did for not much more than you will spend on the up-scale drivers, the corian, special mdf and the high end crossover components.

I did find a kit on the net that was for building a pair of X-1's. That is now another entire different story. Those are some big cash even on the used mart...May be worth taking a stab at making a pair. Good Luck.

Eldragon,

You thought the crossover was easy? Are you sure you did it right, doing you own T-S parameter measurements for the drivers, and measurements for all the drivers, then again as a system, taking those initail measurements and using a CAD program to optimise the 3-way crossover? I'm into the speaker building hobby and there really is no such thing as an easy 3 way crossover. And I'm not talking about a crossover like one might see in car audio. Not trying to insult or question your methods, just suggesting to somebody trying to do the same that you will not even come close to a good design without doing all the things mentioned above. I recently got back into the DIY side of the hobby and let just say that in the 10 years since I last tried to do this things have become much more sophisticated. Word of advice if you want to DIY, go for a 2-way. If you really need the bass, use a powered sub. Those actually are pretty easy to build successfully. But you could get into it with a sub too, just a matter of you patience and willingness to learn.

Sjh, here are the x-overs for the WAtt:

http://www.users.nac.net/markowitzgd/david/wattcrossover.htm

Puppy:

http://www.users.nac.net/markowitzgd/david/wapcrossover.htm

OK I thought you meant designing your own crossovers would be easy. But know this. Your interest in this particular speaker tells me your are an audiophile of taste who expects a certain level of performance. Different production runs of different drivers, different enclosure dimensions, etc; these will as change how one specific crossover design will operate. So it hard to design a crossover for a kit. The more complex a xover is the more errors will compound the audible error. I'm not trying to poo poo the whole idea, just know that these things are sometimes too complicated to knock off in this way. Lord knows I've considered it. I'm going to check out that crossover site. Good Luck.