Is it time in your hobby to build a speaker kit?

Yeah, I have built an amp, transmission line, ESL, turntable, interconnects, equipment rack, and distributed bass array subwoofer system. Each time it was to fill a specific need. Same with mods- speakers, crossovers. I never just built or modded anything for the fun of it or just to be tinkering.

My experience has been so good I would highly recommend DIY. About the only thing I would add is to carefully consider and understand your reasons for DIY. There’s a million reasons, all pretty much equally valid. But there’s great wisdom in the phrase, Know thyself. If your reason is to save money you can do that. Totally. Guaranteed. No problem. If your reason is to make something to fit your particular requirements- whether size, color, shape, or whatever- perfect, go for it. Just be clear and honest and don’t go kidding yourself. Be realistic.

About the only DIY yellow flag I would throw is if you think you’re gonna make something like an interconnect, power cord or speaker cable. For some reason people think this is easy. Well, its easy in terms of assembling and soldering. Getting the signal from A to B is just not that hard. Winding up with something that sounds better than what you could have bought for your parts money, that I’m here to tell you just ain’t happening.

Everything else, go for it. Time well spent. Even if you ignore me and try and build some cables, you will learn something. About how hard it is to beat the pro’s. But still, something.

DIY is great stuff! I've built a few tube amps, and enjoyed doing that quite a bit

I have enjoyed building several speakers over the years.  Most of these were kits that I was able to tweak a bit with improved crossover parts, cabinet mods, etc.  

It was nice when Parts Express offered cabinets.  They looked quite nice and cut out the most time consuming part of the build.

I would suggest that first timers go with a nice predesigned kit from a reputable designer.  Tweak things if you will.  It's too hard and total guess work for most of us to design a speaker from the ground up without a lot of resources for measurements, etc.  

Of my builds,the speaker that least impressed me used top shelf drivers.  I was impressed by the design and specs.  But it just did not involve me emotionally. Go figure.  My two favorites included a full range driver in a 0.5 cf enclosure, the other used a pair of inexpensive Vifa drivers with a series crossover.  Both of these were models of simplicity that truly were satisfying builds and very involving speakers.  And I would suggest these did outperform commercial products at there price points.

If you add up all the time you'll spend, don't fool yourself into thinking you'll save a bundle.  This is something you do as a labor of love, a learning experience.  My time is valuable and I have no regrets.

I have to agree the DIY is a lot of fun and very rewarding sound wise. I just got into this maybe a year ago. I owned a pair of LSA standard monitors in a second system long ago and always thought they were very nice for there $1000 price, I replaced them with the LSA tower version in a trade. Less than a year ago I ran across an online $1000 monitor speaker shootout and noticed the GR Research Sking Ninja modded (alpha inductors, mills resistors and sonicaps) speaker won against the LSA. While reading about the shoot out i noticed a eBay listing for a the modded GR Research monitor than won the shootout for $120 in pieces. My curiosity got the best of me so I bought it. Had no idea what I was doing called Danny at GR and he walked me through putting it back together. He always answers the phone and is a hell of a nice guy. To my amazement the $120 GR monitor was better in every way to the $2500 LSA tower except tower went lower but not better quality bass. Now my focus went to improving the LSA tower. Since LSA's are not my main speakers I took a chance and started replacing parts. I combined Clarity CMR and Jantzen Alumen in tweeter section, removed soft dome tweeter and replaced it with Peerless ring radiator( had to decrease resistor to match new tweeter) put in Path resistor in tweeter section and mills everywhere else. The rest of the parts are still stock. Made crossover outboard and soldered speaker wire directly to crossover( no binding post). Now the Modded LSA is in totally different league than the GR monitor. For $300 bucks in parts you can't beat it. Anyone on the fence, buy a good $100 solder station and learn to solder, I couldn't solder worth a damn when I started this, now it's second nature.