Do It Yourself Speakers

Im fixing to embark on my first speaker building venture as well.

I plan to use a set of 6.5in peerless drivers with some top-mounted tweeter. I plan tot unr the box to about 50Hz to give a nice deep full range.

Here is a good book,

Designing, Building, and Testing your Own Speaker System
By David B Weems

I reccommend reading that before you try anything. There are alot of considerations, but as long as yer not a total moron it is not too hard to understand, and it will save you alot of money and materials by preventing you from making some real stupid mistakes.

Loudspeaker Cookbook by Vance Dickson is pretty good too.

You will need some baisc understanding of w2oodworking as well. Back when i was in the military i used to use the base hobby shop quite a bit. Now im out and still working on getting a good woodshop going. Just need a table-saw at this point and im ready to go.

For speaker parts check out
Madisound. They can send you a catalog of all thier wares, they have about 10 driver manufacturers listed in thier catalog with all kinds of misc stuff, even a xover service to design a cross over for you if you are not ready to tackle that yourself just yet

Good luck dude.

I plan on building my own amps, cables, speakers, and pre-amp. The only thing i dont plan cause it is just plain too hard is the CDplayer and FM tuner.

Im gonna keep pics posted with my results. You should do the same.

Try out the Linkwitz Orions (www.linkwitzlab.com). Plenty of others working on this design and they are among the finest speakers I have ever heard, price no object. You'll be hard pressed to find a more well supported DIY project or a better soudning speaker.

Diy is the way to go for high performance speakers -- unless your bank account is superlative!
I strongly second Slaufer's recommendation for the Orions. This is a VERY complicated and elaborate design; easily amongst the best sounding dynamic speakers commercially available -- if not the best (and I've listened to many -- OK, not all:)).

Also, very strongly recommend CLueless' visiting list; I would add and also recommend you visit JPO's site and look up the Point 75 project -- another good design by Troels Gravesen that has a dipole midrange.
Good luck!

Putting together someone else's design in kit form is not really "speaker Building" in the classic sense. Don't get me wrong: I think these kits are fine, and I use them myself, but it isn't the real thing.

After building a run of nice two-ways in the early 90s I decided to build a three-way of higher performance. After LOTS of work I had ONE mono prototype (8" Peerless +5+0.75" SEAS) voiced really well. After learning that subtle crossover value shifts that I found important measured only 1/3 dB over an octave and a half in the upper mids, and that I could NEVER affordably buy driver pairs that well matched I gave up! Driver manufacturers often custom-match runs or pairs for $$$ to high end speaker producers, as getting cloned response in the midrange and treble is critical. Snell helped pioneer tight driver response QA, and I imagine the Brits too, back in the LS3/5 days for the BBC. After listening to the staging ablity of stereo pairs where the manufacturer matches and catalogs all drivers to a 0.5dB window (my Parsifal Encores, for example), I'm pretty sure I'll never reenter the arena. Even Boston Acoustics uses reasonably-sophisticated QA for its own tweeter production. As driver manufacturers routinely sell off the "outliers" for the DIY market, getting a matched pair of ANYTHING becomes very tough. The 2-3dB sens envelope spec'ed by a tweeter manufacturer can be 5-10 just-noticeable-differences in crossover-tweaking in the lower treble. Too much work to make matched pairs for the little guy...or at least ME!