DIY Speaker Kits, a good idea?

Perhaps this should be the official T-shirt of the forum

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Smile, it’s all in fun.

Usually it's the box that is hard to make. A strong, non resonating speaker cabinet takes a lot of bracing and wood working skills. Perhaps consider an open baffle type.

Like anything, there are pros and cons.  You can definitely get better quality parts for the money with a kit, and the designs themselves are excellent.  You completely skip the retail markup, which is a big chunk of the total money you spend on brand name speakers through a dealer. There’s also a huge opportunity to learn the skills involved with building a speaker, plus you can customize them.  Many of the kits are available with flat pack enclosures that you just have to assemble.

The downsides are that kits are more difficult to hear in person, and resale is likely more difficult with a kit.

Only two kinds of people in this world, those who assert that choices are binary, and those who assert they're non-binary.

"However, the typical audiophile mantra is to demo for yourself to find what subjectively “resonates” with you.  Can’t do this with a kit."

Not true in all cases.  The GR Research forum on audiocircle has a sticky up on top where people offer auditions of the speakers they've built. There's lots of people willing to help, if you're interested enough to pursue an audition.

I haven't chased it down, but I'd be surprised if CSS didn't offer some way of hearing their speakers before ordering.  

"Usually it's the box that is hard to make. A strong, non resonating speaker cabinet takes a lot of bracing and wood working skills."

..well, we definitely don't want to try anything outside our little bubbles.  CNC-cut flat packs are offered from the two kit vendors mentioned above. It only takes modest skills, and a minor amount of common tools, to assemble them.  People (that have never done it before) do it all time. You just have to want to do it.  There are a ton of build threads on the GR Research forum.  CSS builds are discussed on other forums(parts express, what's the best..). 

Resale..yep, there is a market(usually within audio forums as they are familiar with the models and vendor), but it'll be harder than selling a name-brand speaker.  But, say you buy a name-brand speaker for..$10K.  That speaker has..I don't know..$2500 worth of parts in it??  Then one day you need to move on from that $10K speaker and sell them for...$6K?  Well, that $4K hit you just took more than covers the cost of a very good kit.  So, the moral of the story is we all need to pay to play. You can buy a speaker kit for $2-$3K (that'll sound like a $7-$10K set of speakers) and sell it eventually, after enjoying them for years, for.. $1500? Seems like a similar story compared to the buying and selling of a name-brand speaker. 

Disclosure..I'm currently building an older model (offered & popular 12+ years ago) GR Research speaker (Super V) from scratch, no flat pack.  I'm a somewhat seasoned woodworker.  I've seen a number of sets of these built up Super V kits sell over the years for around $2K+.  The parts for this speaker kit didn't cost much more than that. 

All of the info I've offered here is on the web if you do some searching.