how many of you build you own speakers,and why?

Well, My efforts are humble after reading Sean's post. Geeez Sean, no wonder you don't spend money on Speakers!!! I'm keeping quiet around you from now on.

I've kept to basically the same recipe for some time now. A 2 1/2 way system that is easy to add a sub. I am not smart enough to design and so I engineer back from what I think is a good product. For the most part you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Its a nice compromise system for most folks (not that I move many) and the average room size and it sounds nice too. Takes a lot of tweaking to get one right. With bi-amping makes nice music - pretty nice w/o bi-amping too.

Agree totally with Sean's last paraagraph. A duffer like me can make nice stuff just by using quality parts that the industry fails to use.

I would be very interested in hearing other's thoughts as to why this is the case because usually the upgrades do not have to cost that much. Is the overhead so high that they have to use the cheap caps and coils & drivers even on some pricey stuff? Are they trying to protect the market pricepoint, That is, if they put some better parts in speakers @ 3,000 price point(wouldn't cost that much to do with volume,huh?) it would sound so good that the 10k price point would be all but ruined?

I compare it to cooking (also love to cook.) Best ingredients and it's easy to be a pretty good chef. If you cook at home you can tailor to your taste at a small (really small) fraction of the cost.

Which brings me to a last point. I had a hearing test with an audiologist friend. Got to talking. He says ears aren't to much different than eyes and lots of folks probably hear music very differently and could almost use sonic "glasses" or corrections at certain Hz (hearing aids are to crude for this). This is especially true as you get a little older. He showed me some charts how hearing "dips" at certain frequencies with his patients and one of his points was that most folks go undiagnosed. Now I know why there are so many disagreements about what sounds good. We are all hearing different things!

Think there is a market for designer custom speaker making at the high end w/ a hearing test as the first step? I think this could have gone only before the .com bubble burst. Kind of hard to resell that speaker eh?

Sincerely, I remain

Excellent posts above. A good rule of thumb is that a speaker with a good-quality box will retail for 10 times the retail cost of the raw drivers. This is just due to the economics of manufacturing and distribution. The retailer typically gets 40% of the retail price, so now you're down to a factor of 6. The box will often eat up as much as or more than the cost of the parts (MUCH more if truly done right, and there are VERY few boxes in the world that are done right. In fact, if it looks like a box at all, it really isn't right!!!) This doesn't even begin to address development costs, crossover parts costs, overhead, advertising...

Thus for a given budget, there is a lot of room to improve on commercially available stuff IF you are willing to spend the 10 or 20 years it takes to truly master the subject. And don't even begin to count your time in the process, because if you did, you might as well have bought the $85,000 DynAudio Evidence Master and simply been done with it. I'm not kidding. Amateur speakerbuilding is best approached as a hobby, not as a way to save money!

Even if you don't want to get into the full project, there is still tremendous potential in replacing the crossover parts in a lot of high-end speakers. A couple hundred dollars here can make a lot more improvement than thousands in cables, starting with the tweeter series caps and the woofer series inductors. This is a very easy place to start playing around without having to "go the distance" on a from-scratch design. Yes it voids your warranty, but that's the risk you take.

I am in process of building Watt/Puppy clones. I heard newer WP 6.0 and was impressed. I am using best possible parts i could afford. AudioCap, Ansar, Foil inductors North Creek and Allen Bradley resistors etc...! I am using bracing and damping "ala North Creek" plus some of my own. It is fun and addictive!

http://www.users.nac.net/markowitzgd/david/david.htm

I agree with Karls. Speaker building has to be both a hobby and a labour of love. If it is anything less, the results will show it and NOT be worth the time and money, no matter how much you "saved". Sean
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