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


Not to save money, but to learn what you are talking about. Get your hands dirty. Touch all the parts. Can you screw? Can you solder? Want to experience something most of your audiophile friends never will?


Try out these sites:
www.madisound.com
https://meniscusaudio.com/
www.solen.ca

http://www.taylorspeakers.com/

https://greatplainsaudio.com/

Do this to have fun. Do this to roll your own crossover out of exotic Teflon and copper foil.

Best,

Erik
erik_squires
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.

I would like to say I am thinking about building a open baffle speaker from GR Research.

@bdp24 The N3 kit from GR Research is very appealing to me. Web site bookmarked.

Good choice @N80! The stand mounted version, or the floor stander? Both are made with the same parts, just a different enclosure (plans for both monitor and transmission-line enclosures are provided with the kit). Great Neo 3 pdr tweeter, Danny Richie-designed and custom-made woofer/midrange driver, and audiophile quality x/o parts (caps, resistors, etc).

Danny is well known in the loudspeaker industry, doing x/o consulting work for other companies. He also offers mods for mass-market speakers built to a price point (and therefore compromised), such as the Elac's. His mods "correct" some engineering choices with which he disagrees.

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