DIY Speakers, worth the hassles?

Hi Ake:
DIY speakers are NOT created equal. There is a bigger difference from speaker to speaker in all DIY stuff than even retail. That is, some of it stinks and some of it is great. That being said, I think the returns on DIY speakers are greater than your figures (Say will $1500-2K DIY speaker kit are as good as 5-10K speakers? Or will the sub 1K kit be as good as 2-3K speakers), IF*! you do a good job. You are leveraging your $$$ with your time and knowledge.

If you want to do DIY speakers the best single advice I can think of is take your time in choosing a project. Spend about a month at the Madisound.com speaker building forum following the discussion. Some of the people over there have their own web sites and offer DIY kits. (Dave Ellis, Dennis Murphy, John K,...and others). Take a look at their sites too. Don't try to do to much or design your own crossover the first time out. Beware of folks who talk as though a computer program is going to design a good speaker for you. When you have decided on a project post it over at the Madisound forum and ask for advice or comments. After about a month over there you will have figured out who to listen to. You have to make a couple good initial choices to have a good first attempt DIY speaker and/or trust someone else to make them for you.

If you like single drivers do the same thing at the Single driver forum(www.melhuish.org)

I have had very nice results doing clones of speakers from Northcreek. www.northcreekmusic.com That is another site I would read completely before doing DIY. They have some very nice kits too. I've worked with the "Rhythm" speaker over at Northcreek with very good results.

I'm going to mess around with a few single driver things. You might take a look at Twl's Lowther project (he posts here) if you are interested in that direction.

Good luck.

I remain,

The results you get are very good, if you have a good design, good drivers and crossovers, and execute it well. If you fall short in any of these areas, you have crap. I have designed, built, and lived with many DIY speakers for going on 30 years now. I have definitely had some pieces of crap. The ones I have now are glorious. I have even had ones where I salvaged the drivers and electronics, and burned the lousy boxes I made that sounded like crap. Then, I sold the rotten sounding drivers and hardware that someone had told me were good for my project. That was a 3-way B&W 801 clone. Probably lost about $300 on that one. Another fiasco was a horn loaded 3-way that didn't match up with driver sensitivities. A horrid mess. Then I got smart and started learning what I needed to know. Amazing how much better things started sounding. I made a nice pair of 2-ways for my mother's system that sounded alot like the old B&W DM601. Probably a little better on the bottom end. However, the Dalesford 1" dome tweeter was a little grainy, and I could't afford the ScanSpeak that I should have gotten. I had finally got my crossover and driver matching skills. I made a 12db/octave crossover on that one that was perfectly matched to the drivers and was pretty seamless sounding. That was 20 years ago. If I could give you some advice, I would say go with top quality drivers for the design you have in mind. If the drivers aren't up to the task, it won't matter how perfect you do everything else, you'll be stuck in mid-fi land. Also, keep it simple. A good 2-way mini-monitor is a good place to start. Make your own crossover networks. Don't buy some generic crossover and expect it to work like it should. Finally, if your effort sounds like crap, remember that TWL had his first few speakers sound like crap too. That might make you feel a little better. It's the first step on a long road. Good luck!

I should have said that I am interested in the DIY kits from various companies. Are they really that great as they claimed?

ake

Ake,

Check out this site:
http://www.lowtherspeakers.com/lowther.html
If you would like to get it pretty darn close on the first try I would look closely at these. Based on what you have posted here previously you will love these with tubes. Also, if you ever want to upgrade the cabinets, such as Twl's design, the drivers would be a drop-in into new cabinets. I'm considering this myself.

Good luck,
Patrick