Making High End Clones at Home for Fun and Savings

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

Duke drove it out of the park. A clone should me exact...

Given the fairly easy availability of good drivers, can we also buy high quality, simple crossovers? Amplifier kits?

Of course.

For example; Solen in Canada, Wilmslow in the UK, Linkwitz in the US and many many many others (sorry for not mentioning al the DIY sources).

Will it be cheaper than buying new. Probably but not always obvious. Will it be as good as the original from a high quality manufacturer - unlikely. Will it be fun - almost certainly.