DIY. Whose speakers would you use?

Using a "simulated" crossover may get you close, but will not be perfect, as measurements should be taken on the finished speaker baffle.

Check out Clearwave Audio Design and Selah Audio. Both offer quality kits that sound exceptional. Madisound's ScanSpeak kits are also worth checking out.

Think of a loudspeaker as a total design. If you have skills DIY is a possibility if not so gifted and most are not. A kit might be a good idea. If 1st build K.I.S.S.

when I got into the high end, there were many high end emporiums, it was possible to audition the equipment they wrote about in stereophile. The first thing I discovered was the world of difference between "mid fi" and "high end": Koetsu, ARC, CJ, Thiel, Sota and many other brands, are not just names bandied about by audiphiles; but are products that deliver very high quality audio.

Unfortunately, those places no longer exist; consequently, many have never heard sound that you can see. When I could see the points in space where the sound emanated from invisible instruments, I knew this was the "high end".

"Good"...is that "Mid fi" good, or is that "High end" good? Good as compared to what? When I made the assumption that everyone posting was either an audiophile or an aspiring audiophile, I was wrong; there is a third category. I believe it defines it self.

The original premise stated DIY, summing up everything I said; DIY state of the art is impossible, unless you happen to be a "crossover design engineer".

How about the Audio Note Speaker Kit 04 (AlNiCo). The cost is $7K but you can purchase the cabinet (unfinished) for $950 so for about $8K you can have a close proximity of their AN-E/SEC Silver except the kit has silver voice coils and AlNiCo magnets on both HF and LF drivers, and hemp cones on the woofers, but not the silver wire unless you add it. So the kit actually has the better drivers but lacks about a foot of silver hook up wire (just buy it yourself) and also lacks some of the better crossover components used on the higher end line. You could upgrade caps but you still wouldn't have the silver inductors, which they do not offer with the kits.

Although they say the kit has "precisely matched and calibrated crossovers" they also compare their kits with their regular line (and justify the higher price of the regular line) by saying;

It is important to appreciate that a finished AN-E is always likely to be better that any equivalent kit version, no matter which one, as the drivers we use in the kits have a slightly wider "spread" in performance than the ones used in the finished products, basically the kits get the drivers which cannot be matched within the very tight criteria used in our finished products.
Also we do not spend anywhere near the amount of time setting up the Kit speaker's driver/crossover matching, we allow a tolerance on the finished products of 0.2dB plus or minus, in the kits this is increased to 0.6dB plus or minus, mind you this is still several dB better than anything done by other manufacturers, but it is audible in the overall performance of the speakers, if you do a direct comparison on very good equipment. This and the fact that it is necessary to rematch the driver/crossovers to the actual cabinets when assembled to maintain the tightest possible match, this is not possible for any hobbyist building a kit and means that a kit can never get close to the consistency of a finished product.

Seems if someone wanted the sound and efficiency of an Audio Note speaker, you could do quite well for about $8K with the all-out kit and their own cabinet, plus add about a foot of silver wire per cabinet and maybe upgrade some of the x-over parts like changing the caps to their AN Copper or Silver foil paper in oil caps. Your end result should (in theory) sound simlar (or better than) to their $20K plus speakers for less than half the cost.

Unless it's horn loaded, the transition between a 1" dome tweeter and 8" woofer is not a smooth one, off axis response will suffer in the crossover region.