Making High End Clones at Home for Fun and Savings

This thread was in part inspired by an Agon friend who sent me the link for the OEM of the Red Rose speakers in China.

We were both delighted to see that these speakers, exactly as they seemed to appear in Mr Levinson's showroom, were available for about 10 cents on the dollar from the Chinese manufacturer.

On the same site, they also seemed to offer the ribbon tweeter element that the speakers used.

Now this was all well and good until I sent unanswered emails and faxes to the contact details on the website.

What was really a surprise, however, was to then find the same ribbon tweeter unit, already in the US for even less ?!?!

With this in mind, it seemed like a good idea to get out the soldering iron.

Reubent, yes I agree there is a reason some of this stuff is expensive and I am not trying to put Mr Wilson out of business.

But I continue to think that with some interest and resourcefulness, we could probably put together some very very good systems for about a 1/3 of branded comparables.

Thanks for your experiences and ideas.

Cwlondon -- rule of the thumb: the parts price of a speaker is roughly 1/5th the retail price. That's NOT counting the work involved and the development, the investment in equipm't, cost of matching components, etc.

OTOH, manufacturers get a much better price for components than us, buying off the shelf.

Gregm

Understanding that speaker manufacturers need to buy groceries too, I am not so keen on funding their research and development.

Companies that provide good products and good customer service and support should be able to sustain high quality revenues which in turn help them to invest in new equipment and techology.

So it still seems like a good idea to try and build proven, now simple, high performance designs at home.

The high frequency response (say 2000 up) will be determined by the tweeter you use. You can buy the exact same tweeter used in many high end systems. Low frequency response is where matching an existing speaker system will take some work. You can buy very fine drivers at reasonable cost, but mating them to an enclosure is both an art and science. I suggest that you first play around with cheap and easily modified plywood boxes until you come up with something good. Only then begin to worry about fine furniture grade carpentry. As for crossovers, your best bet is to biamp using an electronic crossover that is easily reconfigured for frequency and slopes. You can do tests in an hour or so which would take a week if you were playing around with passive crossover design.

Finally, a shortcut is to clone an existing design instead of reinventing the wheel.

An identical box and identical drivers doesn't make one speaker a "clone" of another. In my opinion, the heart and soul of loudspeaker design is crossover design.

Duke