Rolling your own


How hard is it to build your own speakers and have them sound great. I dont want to make to simple the fact of building expensive speakers but It looks like some off the shelf drivers and crossovers and go to, is it Poland? to have a few hundred cabinets built and finished to your specs.

What about copying current hi end speaker designs, and the drivers, and the way their cabinets are built. Some of the best playing guitars I have ever played were custom built.
Can you study this craft then do it your self or can you make a 15k mistake? What do you do if you want to sell them.

Really peaking my interest currently is maybe a copy of the legacy focus with some atc drivers? With a copy of the dunlavy tower woofers, or my ultimate, a copy of the German Physiks Gaudi with 4 ddd bending wave drivers, six mid metal driver speakers and 4 super sub woofers? The parts not including cabinets (if you didnt buy the gp subs) about 15k do you need special crossovers for the ddd's I burnt mine up but the new crossover is suppose to take care of that. Could you use pro audio crossovers that are active and adjustable?

The only home built speakers I heard are usually horns which are ok but not what I want.

The type of music I listen to mostly modern alternative,classic rock, Ill keep my electrostats for the old smokey jazz thing. But some times I want a concert in the hole ( the room is undergrond) so i want the db inthe 110-120 range.

My room is 20 x 25 and have different ss amps and 4 big 250w tube monoblocks. I live in the middle of no where and no one else around the area has this vice.

Thanks

Kelton
kelton
I've built a few of my own speakers before, they never worked very well. VERY inefficient. It's pretty hard to get a good design. I never did copy someone else's design, like you mentioned. That may work to your advantage. Although, if it were so easy to build a well sounding speaker, wouldn't everyone build their own? I also built my own driver one time. It was a 10" full range speaker. I wrapped my own voice coil, found magnets that worked with what I was doing, and used a spider from an old speaker that I had kicking around. It was ALOT of fun, but a complete waste of time. It did worked. But is not clear, detailed, or dynamic. This may have been due to the fact that the cone was made of tag board! :) Happy listening!
It can be as hard as you want it to be especially the first time around. Vance Dickason says you can build a 10k set for 1k and I do not think that is far off. Buy his book at www.audioxpress.com

You are not going to design a new speaker or copy a difficult design first time around. Forget it. Go to www.Madisound.com forum and listen for awhile to the dialogue and then make a copy of a proven two way design. Mess around with it in order to learn a little and develope a little intuition about how filters work. Go to http://home.iprimus.com.au/ gradds if you want a challenge.

Try www.snippets.org and then to the LDSG (Loudspeaker Driver selection Guide)link. Read it all.

or www.murphyblaster.com for simplier projects

or www.klone-audio.com which has great info on how to clone speakers. The guy there is working on a Legacy Whisper I think.

There are tons of sites on speaker building.

www.diyaudio.com is good too. Tons of individual projects can be found and reviewed there.

www.trueaudio.com and www.adireaudio.com have some simple overviews of speakerbuilding too.

You will find that some good builders have spent a lot of time on what appear to be relatively simple two way projects. Rome was not built in a day.

At www.audua.com there is some free loudspeaker design software to download and mess with.

Have Fun and if you already know all this and these sites than sorry for wasting your time.

Cheers,
Kelton, go to the DIY forum on audioasylum.com and you will have as much information as you can absorb.

KP
Check out www.northcreekmusic.com. You may get a bunch of good ideas and plans there. They make amazing crossovers too.

-Karl