Homemade Speakers

http://www.chrisfenton.com/homemade-speakers/

by luu • 12 years ago

154 70 12 years ago

beat8• 12 years ago

Complex crossover networks are The Devil. As you observed, the human ear is largely insensitive to moderate variations in volume/frequency... but it's incredibly sensitive to phase. Phase is how we discern directionality (stereo), among other things. So introducing complex phase shifts in the crossover in order to achieve flatness is a bad tradeoff, imho.

To my ears, the best and most musical sounding speakers I've heard have time-aligned drivers and very simple crossovers. Tannoy, Spica, Vandersteen, and other such designs are clearer and less fatiguing. I'm a musician and have recorded numerous albums, and those speakers are the ones that match what I'm used to hearing the best.

The fundamental problem is that we work on what we can measure. It's very easy to measure frequency response. It's very hard to measure phase alignment. So we fix what we can measure. If you want to see serious map-over-territory thinking, look at THD specs for amplifiers. It's super-easy to measure THD - just isolate harmonics of a sine wave a 1khz. Unfortunately, this has approximately zero to do with music, unless your idea of "music" is static sine waves. Recorded music has a 20-30db dynamic range (less in the case of modern pop) and covers ten octaves. Dynamic recovery behavior, intermodulation distortion, stuff like this is what gives amps their distinctive sounds - but it's nearly impossible to measure! So they sell what looks good on paper... THD. Sigh.

chillingeffect2• 12 years ago

incredibly sensitive to phase

Under contrived situations such as square waves and headphones. However, in general, the ear is not particularly sensitive to phase. [0] [1] which both discuss, in particular, [2] and [3] as well as many others listed in their bibliographies.

The stated conclusions are, emphasis mine, "Given the data provided by the above cited references we can conclude that phase distortion is indeed audible, though generally speaking, only very subtly so and only under certain specific test conditions and perception circumstances." [1]

Reads may also be interested in an additional conclusion which reads thusly: "Room acoustics further masks whatever cues that the hearing process may depend upon to detect the presence of phase distortion." [1]

[0] http://www.silcom.com/~aludwig/Phase_audibility.htm

[1] http://www.audioholics.com/room-acoustics/human-hearing-phas...

[2] Lipshitz, Stanly P., Pocock, Mark, and Vanderkooy, John, "On the Audibility of Midrange Phase Distortion in Audio Systems,' J. Audio Eng. Soc., Vol. 30, No, 9, Sept. 1982, pp 580-595.

[3] Toole, Floyd E., "The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms - The Stereo Past and the Multichannel Future," 109th AES Conv., Los Angeles, Sept 2000.

mbell2• 12 years ago

This comment covers much of what is wrong with common interpretations of acoustics.

the human ear is largely insensitive to moderate variations in volume/frequency... but it's incredibly sensitive to phase.

No, it's not. The human auditory system is sensitive to time variation. Phase shift may contribute a time shift but only at frequencies low enough that their wavelength has reasonably relation to the spacing of the ears. For example at 10Khz the wavelength is far too short for 'phase' to impact arrival time. Ultimately what actually matters in this regard with the human auditory response is group delay, not phase.

Phase is how we discern directionality (stereo), among other things.

As mentioned above, what matters in the context of what your saying is group delay, but that is far from the only thing that matters for directionality. The human psycoscoutic system is very complex, part of directionality is group delay, part of it is frequency attenuation caused by sound wrapping around the ear from the ear, part of it is a half dozen other things. 'Phase' doesn't come even close to being a catch all cause.

To my ears, the best and most musical sounding speakers

And thus we've devolved from science, as this usually goes. What on earth does 'musical sounding speakers' even mean?

It's very easy to measure frequency response. It's very hard to measure phase alignment.

I have no idea where you came up with this statement but it is very easy to measure the response of a loudspeaker, both in amplitude and phase.

If you want to see serious map-over-territory thinking, look at THD specs for amplifiers. It's super-easy to measure THD - just isolate harmonics of a sine wave a 1khz.

THD can be measured at only 1Khz, but it isn't something intrinsic to what 'THD' means. Measuring at only 1Khz is generally indicative of a crappy amplifier manufacturer looking to inflate their power numbers. Proper specs will provide a 20-20kHz THD rating.

Dynamic recovery behavior, intermodulation distortion, stuff like this is what gives amps their distinctive sounds - but it's nearly impossible to measure!

If an amp has a distinctive sound, it has failed to achieve it's core design goal. I'm not sure what you think is impossible to measure, but I assure you it is not.

tlarkworthy• 12 years ago

I think you are wrong to dismiss domain experts opinions as leaving science. Machine learning 101 is eye ball your data, as the human brain is the most powerful pattern matcher known. A musicians ear is therefore the best tool for detecting anomolies in sound and should not be dismissed for not having a nice mathematical construction. Acoustics are perceptual and are heavily filtering the real world sound waves so I don't think its possible to reduce the laudatory cortex to simple filters like its ignoring phase or whatnot.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

For example at 10Khz the wavelength is far too short for 'phase' to impact arrival time.

It's the time-of-flight difference between when the one ear receives the wave front and the other from a change in the sound that gives us the directional information.

Absent any change all we have to go on is volume so we rotate our heads to the point where both ears receive the signal equally strong, then the source is somewhere in the plane that bisects the head of the listener.

Rotating one ear forward gives us the clue about whether the sound source is in front of us or behind us. (Fails to work when it is directly overhead.)

ricardobeat3• 12 years ago

If an amp has a distinctive sound, it has failed to achieve it's core design goal.

What makes you think the design goal of an amp is always to have perfect sound reproduction? That may be true for a home-theater system or if you're playing wind/string instruments, not so for a guitar amp. We have the (digital) tools to get pure, 100% uncolored sound, and musicians hate it.

digitailor• 12 years ago

Both your comments are heavyweight so I'm not trying to pick sides. (Sum your two perspectives and I think you're close to Ultimate Expert Comment.) I just want to mention that beat is talking about phase alignment between identical signals, which our perceptual network is incredibly sensitive to. Anyone who has ever done multi-mic recording can attest to the very real effect you can hear from lack of phase alignment, even if they have bronze ears. Even worse is if you duplicate two musical recordings and offset one, even by a tiny amount.

This is a critical aspect of crossovers- since they contain the same signal, any phase differences between the intersecting components are easy to pick up by the ear and very difficult to measure since it won't show up as a significant frequency or amplitude differential. In the highly acoustically sensitive area where the crossover occurs, the phase distortion between the two signals is hard to pin down but it's definitely there, it's easy to hear by A/Bing.

I mix on a multiple-monitor setup and the one that is most critical to me sounds like absolute garbage. However, it has a wonderfully "flat" response and allows you to get an idea of what proven aesthetically-unpleasing issues are present. It has no crossover. The goal is not to have perceived rumble, tinniness, or mud on any of the incredibly wide range of listening systems out there. I think this is what beat means by "musical"- flat speakers are actually not pleasant to the ears, but the most empirically useful.

The most famous secret of many respected mix engineers is the Auratone. Michael Jackson's "Bad" was mostly mixed on this little thing. It sounds like absolute garbage aesthetically but reveals more issues in a mix than anything else. It's like when you first saw things under a "blacklight" as a kid and got to see all the particulate matter covering everything, that you can't see with the naked eye.

Here's more about the Auratone. I hope my comment has helped to bridge this critical area of "musicality" vs. empiricism. http://www.trustmeimascientist.com/2012/02/06/auratone-avant...

Postscript- the listening environment is the most important aspect! Always! You can have the best mastering grade monitors on earth in an improperly treated room, and it's all for naught!

beat8• 12 years ago

I'm not devolving from science. I'm pointing out that science is insufficiently evolved to truly understand the domain.

I'm a musician and a recording engineer. I've made records, I listen to real-world instruments every day, I've built speakers, and I've built amplifiers. And I've learned along the way that "accurate" is a big stinking pile of BS, and "scientific" is usually just a euphemism for magical thinking - "If we can't measure it, it doesn't exist". If you can't measure it, maybe you don't understand the problem as well as you thought.

You don't get to ignore the evidence of the senses of domain experts just because it makes you uncomfortable.

VLM3• 12 years ago

"So they sell what looks good on paper... THD"

From an EE perspective most of the "obvious" ways to screw up THD sound truly horrible. Crossover distortion, clipping, bias problems, truly excessive hum or noise...

Also note that just because your final PA is a modern class D doesn't mean there's not some opamp input stage in the box that is perfectly liable to classical transistor bias problems. So you can't get crossover distortion out of a modern class D amp final device as an inherent part of how those switch the transistors, but that doesn't mean you can't screw up the input stage of the opamp that is inside the box of an amp that none the less has a D-type output final stage. In terms of circuit design, A guy who can design a nice class D stage is not necessarily (but often is) the same guy who can design a class A or AB stage.

"Necessary but not sufficient" is a good way to describe good THD numbers.

I would have to think for awhile how to get a good THD number with foul intermod numbers... Maybe if you fed in two noise signals outside the freq bandwidth that when nonlinear mixed gave a difference freq of 2 KHz that would sound horrible even if a pure sinewave input at 1K sounds awesome. It would take some work to screw up an amp this way but it could happen.

Anyway nothing says "tradeoff" like engineering and I wouldn't trade off a pretty basic core characteristic like THD for improved ... anything, except maybe power level. I'd rather hear something good than something a couple dB louder. Reporting good THD is valid in marketing as a way to tell that you did at least the very first homework problem... I agree totally with you that there are multiple steps beyond it, but there's no point in working on any of them if you can't pass the first simple THD test. (Edited to add, I missed the PERFECT analogy: Its like passing the UL Labs certification that it probably won't burn your house down. That's kinda required, and its also possible to aim a little higher)

beat8• 12 years ago

Back in the day, I used to build Class A directly heated triode tube amps for hi-fi. These are poo-poo'd by the self-styled "scientific" hi-fi community for their high THD specs. But it's important to think about not only how much distortion is happening, but where the distortion is happening. In super-simple triode tube circuits with no negative feedback loops, THD is pretty much linear to the volume. For small signals - the detail in the mids and highs - distortion is effectively unmeasurable.

The mainstream A/B transistors + heavy negative feedback architecture has the benefit of low manufacturing cost (no need to match devices when you just feedback the differences out) and good specs. But where does the distortion happen? At the Class A/B crossover point, somewhere in the first watt. Until the amp hits maximum power and clips, the WORST distortion is in the first watt, where all the small signals live.

To my common sense and my ears, this explains how good-spec amps can sound very harsh and cold, while bad-spec amps can sound sweet and warm. It's not "euphonic distortion", as the pseudo-scientists claim. Rather, it's that the warm amp is actually distorting less where it actually matters.

beat8• 12 years ago

Thinking about this a bit more, I suspect the reason for the superb sonic reputation of a lot of inexpensive "Class T" digital amps is that they push the frequency-domain distortion problems into a different frequency. Digitally switching at far higher frequencies than audio and then modulating audio onto that signal is a pretty brilliant approach. You get the cost benefits of digital switching amps, without audio frequency domain artifacts from all the many kinds of low-level signal crud. The artifacts are there - they're just several octaves out of band for audio.

matthew-wegner4• 12 years ago

Ah, DIY speakers! The general rule here is that DIY speakers will sound as good as commercial speakers that cost 4-5x as much. You can buy kits with pre-cut parts, so all you need to do is glue/clamp and build the crossovers.

Easy-to-build bookshelf speakers, the Overnight Sensations--$136 with free shipping: http://www.parts-express.com/overnight-sensations-mt-speaker...

And the Amiga towers are great for a living room, more towards $300 for the pair: http://www.diysoundgroup.com/speaker-kits/amiga-kit.html

More Amiga info: https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/diy/amiga

I have built both, they're both really great at what they do. If I ever have the free time and money, I'd love to build some Statements: http://speakerdesignworks.com/Statements.html

kingnight2• 12 years ago

Is that general rule pretty accurate? I've been contemplating buying an home speaker upgrade and pretty price adverse because I don't _need_ to upgrade. I am currently using Harman Kardon Soundsticks II w/ sub for my home audio and have no complaints -- kept this for 8 years really, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing. Are those 300 really ~ to $1200. If so, that sounds like a solid project!

matthew-wegner4• 12 years ago

I'd say so! Most of my information comes from a super-long 3000-post speaker thread on a private music site. I have auditioned a few high-end speakers in stores and would say that DIY holds its own very well.

Personally, I replaced an ~$800 pair of speakers with the Amigas, and they're vastly better in terms of clarity/resolution. I have a decent tube amplifier already.

Past that point I'm pretty sure room setup/room treatment starts to matter much more than hardware...

ddrmaxgt37• 12 years ago

I made some Overnight Sensations 6 months ago and they are great. The build process was really fun and the finished product is much better that what I could have bought (though if you factor in time, they are actually pretty expensive).

matthew-wegner4• 12 years ago

Agreed on time! I think I spent ~5 hours on the Overnight Sensations and maybe 10 hours on the Amigas. Personally, I really enjoyed having a not-at-the-computer hobby I could put time into every night.

But yeah, if you're just looking for a cheap set of speakers, and don't care about the actual DIY angle, making your own might be feel like a frustrating time sink...

icantthinkofone• 12 years ago

Years ago, a boss of mine used to build speakers from scratch. He played for me a recording of a symphony where there was a sound of rolling thunder along with the tinkle of glass. It was flawless and amazing to hear.

keehun• 12 years ago

Does anyone know if this is a graduate level course? Seems like working with JBL engineers and getting mentored by TH is something that would draw a big crowd.

msandford• 12 years ago

If you want to go really nuts, take a look at the Elsinore by Joe Rasmussen: http://www.customanalogue.com/elsinore/elsinore_index.htm

He does a great job of designing a crossover and phase-inverting the tweeter to get an excellent step response. beat mentions that this is something most speaker manufacturers fail to account for.

It's about as good as you're going to get for a DIY design and a whole associated design guide.

gcb0• 12 years ago

anyone who pays more than 200 on Chinese speakers at bestbuy are the bane of my existence. they drive everything up. and then publish tons of unscientific reviews and technobabble to justify their silly spending.

beloch• 12 years ago

I once had a prof who designed his own speakers and built them out of concrete. They were massive, full-range beasts that were flat down to 20 Hz. (in the right room). As it turns out, concrete is surprisingly good speaker material, aside from the near total lack or portability. Some crazy (and crazy rich) audiophile bought them for $50K. Selling slabs of concrete for $50K a pop sounds like a great business model, but there is a severely limited number of people willing to pay that much for speakers, and the speakers apparently took hundreds of hours of tweaking to work "properly" anyways.

thrownaway2424• 12 years ago

"In the right room" is important. Anyone who spent $50k on loudspeakers ought already to have spent an equal amount on room geometry and materials. In fact above a fairly modest amount (a few thousand bucks, maybe) most people will get superior results from changing the room, rather than spending more on the equipment.

stcredzero• 12 years ago

Yay! Audio knowledge! I've met so-called "geeks" who will look at you funny if you start talking about "frequency response" -- but they'll talk your ear off if you remind them about the frequency domain and Fourier Transforms. Back in the late 20th century, just about everyone who was tech savvy seemed to know some basics about sound. Nowadays, I wonder if the whole Monster Cable/coathanger thing has made some people filter out everything sounding like audio knowledge as "woo." Not all of it is. A lot of it is physics.

Back in the 80's, designing and building your own speakers was a suitable project for high school students. Still is.

minimax• 12 years ago

Maybe for CS "geeks" but for those of us who came up through the EE ranks linear systems is our bread and butter.

snowwindwaves• 12 years ago

here is another interesting tale of home-made speakers, this fellow made some very large boxes and had very specific drivers he wanted but they were still inexpensive. He used active (powered as opposed to passive RLC network) crossovers. Also he built his own off-grid house with mini-hydro plant. the OP will probably find it interesting. I ended up reading every page on this fellows 90's style website.

http://ludens.cl/Electron/Speakers/speakers.html

ljf2• 12 years ago

That guy is a hero of mine, when I first found his site I lost about 4 days to exporting it and taking it all the interesting personal projects he has worked on.

ljf2• 12 years ago

Exploring, not exporting!

Theodores• 12 years ago

"While commercial musical equipment is usually of quite usable quality, commercial speakers unfortunately are not, unless you go to exotic and extremely expensive brands. The reason is simple: Good speakers, by law of physics, need to be large. There is no way around this basic fact."

Is this as true as it was in the 1990's?

A lot of people have high-end small speaker systems with branding such as 'Bose' on the front. Maybe they have got old and their ears have changed, but even if they once had big-box speakers due to the physics reasons, they have moved to the small speaker 5.1 things and it is now okay to do that. The sub-woofer doesn't have to be stereo either.

I don't know, but has new thinking fundamentally changed how hi-fi is done from the twin speaker stacks of old with lots of tweeters/woofers/crossovers to these new-fangled mini-5.1 things?

VLM3• 12 years ago

Low frequency response needs size. If you're willing to cutoff at 200 Hz then little stuff will work. In my high school years I built a stereotypical mono subwoofer of the 2x4 sheet of plywood for front and back variety. Sounded pretty good, but could have been better.

A mantra thats repeated continuously, mostly by people selling mono subwoofers or uninterested in audio reproduction, is low freqs are non-directional.

Yet I go outside and listen to thunderstorms and passing unmuffled motorcycles and firearms and much bigger .mil weaponry and it sounds highly directional. I can point at the rumble of distant artillery as well as any other sound.

Surely if you build a directional subwoofer system and can only perceive a field, that'll work OK even if its an economic financial fail. But the other way around is an epic fail. So save money at the risk of sounding bad. Well, if the point is spending money to sound good, having an extra 3 dB of signal is never a loss...

Another puzzle is I know from experience that L-R and L+R sound different from FM subcarrier detection. Supposedly mono subwoofer people claim that magically only applies to higher freqs. I would think a single mono channel subwoofer would sound "better" fed off only L or R channel than some peculiar mix of unknown phase. The problem is which channel to connect to?

Phase relationships are a pretty big puzzle in audio once you get past simple response problems and simple distortion problems.

dankoss2• 12 years ago

I'd suggest that the reason mini speakers are popular has to do with aesthetics since they are often paired with a television in a multipurpose room. And with the advent of 5.1, having five full range speakers, wiring, and a subwoofer in a small living room doesn't pass the aesthetic test.

Bose and other manufacturers have done a good job of developing tricks that fool undiscerning listeners into thinking their system matches the performance of a full range system. But there's no tricking out the physics of low frequencies. Baffles and complex tube resonators can have limited positive effects but they often cause problems in other areas.

That said, unless all you care about is sound quality, the aesthetics and performance of a Bose system can in many cases be very attractive.

chrissnell• 12 years ago

So how did he design them? What tools does one use to do this? I have a form factor in mind for some speakers that I'd like to build for my off-road truck [1]. I have a certain look and mounting style in mind and I haven't seen anything like it. I just don't know where to start with the design, though.

[1] https://flic.kr/p/o1xmJ8

jzwinck• 12 years ago

I made some speakers when I was in high school. The tools I used were a table saw, a whole bunch of long clamps, a screwdriver, and a hand drill. But most important, this book: http://www.amazon.com/Building-Speaker-Systems-2nd-Edition/d... . If you buy it used now you will find it hilarious how they describe using computer software to analyze speaker systems, but no matter: you can stand on the shoulders of giants and design your own boxes without any software at all.

The "D'Appolito array" is covered in that book--a design employed in many store-bought speakers where two mid-woofers flank a tweeter at a specific distance to avoid some of the time alignment concerns raised here. This is a good candidate if you want to build smallish, narrow speakers for home. In the car it usually comes down to "where is there enough room for the drivers I want?"

I think the book also discusses various dual-driver arrangements for subwoofers, which is another interesting area where you can use twin drivers to eliminate undesirable effects. If you put that together with the D'Appolito design in a single cabinet, you will have something like what Infinity used to sell for $1000 each...but doing it well won't save you much money because good drivers are expensive.

Anechoic2• 12 years ago

In addition to what jzwinck recommended, I'd also recommend the Loudspeaker Design Cookbook [0] and the Master Handbook of Acoustics [1]

If you're an engineer that's comfortable with differential calculus, I'd recommend the grandaddy of them all: Acoustics by Beranek [2] (I'm actually linking to Acoustics: Sound Fields and Transducers which is an updated version of Beranek's original Acoustics cowritten with Tim Mellow)

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Loudspeaker-Design-Cookbook-Vance-Dick...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Master-Handbook-Acoustics-Alton-Everes...

[2] http://www.amazon.com/Acoustics-Transducers-Leo-L-Beranek/dp...

ljlukkar• 12 years ago

I have degree in computer science but I owe a large part of what I understand about physics and electronics to my speaker building hobby. I highly recommend getting into the physics of sound. It’s actually pretty simple and will teach you how waves behave in general.

http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/ljlukkar/labsub/

I’m currently working on a Arduino based pre amp that hosts a rest api for remote controlling: http://tinypic.com/r/15yvj2g/8 http://tinypic.com/r/11vmhld/8 http://tinypic.com/r/jrzfk5/8

mikevm• 12 years ago

So how do you get into the physics of sound?

I don't think I'll be building speakers anytime soon though, but I'm still very much interested in the details of psychoacoustics and sound reproduction.

jacquesm2• 12 years ago

Start by reading this:

http://www.amazon.com/Acoustical-Foundations-Music-Second-Ed...

remmelt• 12 years ago

I'm very interested in the Arduino based pre amp. Do you have a page with your design that I can study? I was thinking about maybe integrating a Lightspeed Attenuator.

Most of all, I'd like the pre amp to automatically turn on the power amp (currently a Gainclone) when a signal starts coming in from the connected Airport Express.

http://diyaudioprojects.com/Solid/DIY-Lightspeed-Passive-Att...

swimfar• 12 years ago

http://www.amb.org/audio/alpha10/

Here's another arduino-based pre-amp. This one includes relay-based stepped attenuators and input selectors. The pcbs are all available as well as the schematics in case you just want to use it as a base for your own project.

justatdotin• 12 years ago

consider digital crossover from minidsp. I've made a pair of powered 2-ways with a minidsp/miniamp combo in each.

scoot• 12 years ago

Those aren't homemade speakers, they're homemade enclosures. Disappointed as I was expecting something more substantial than "I made a box".

mbenjaminsmith• 12 years ago

DIY speakers as a hobby is mostly about enclosures and crossover networks. It's quite rare that people would build their own speakers drivers (some planar speakers being an exception).

Where it's rewarding is taking available drivers and building a full speaker around them -- usually optimizing for performance vs cost. It's difficult and expensive to build really high quality loudspeakers. Add markup to that and the retail price of a well engineered speaker will quickly go into 5 digits.

The speakers in my living room are DIY (though they don't really look "DIY" as far as that might carry negative connotations) and they're an excellent value. They were also fun to build. In no way was I disappointed afterwards because I had not, say, wound the voice coils myself.

userbinator• 12 years ago

The box is a huge factor in making them sound good.

For a brief time, I had a pair of speakers on my desk made from old PC case speakers that I salvaged and just put on stands made from blocks of wood with a hole in them. I liked the look, and the sound was alright, but rather weak and tinny. Then one day I decided to build a box around them, and the difference was night and day - much louder sound with significantly more bass.

VLM3• 12 years ago

This might sound harsher than intended, but given how the performance of a speaker is driven by the interaction of the enclosure with the driver parameters its kind of like saying a saxophone is just an enclosure for a reed. Or a car engine carburetor is just an enclosure for the air that connects to an engine. The acoustics of the enclosure dominate the performance of the overall speaker, especially at the low end freqs.

There is a big difference between just making a box, making a box that looks nice, and making a box that cooperates with the specs of the driver to make a good speaker.

You might be surprised how awful the specs are for a bare driver hanging by its wires in the air without an enclosure. It is very much like the analogy of a musical instrument reed.

unholiness• 12 years ago

Agreed. I think there's a lot to be learned from building a driver, if only for the powerful experience of realizing that there's nothing magical about it. Just a magnet and a coil of wire. It's the equivalent a CS guy designing a rudimentary processor: it won't be necessary be good enough to beat out commercial stuff, but it sure does convince you that the thing you take for granted really can be done with just transistors/magnets and wire.

I for one would have loved to do this kind of activity as a kid: it's a pretty simple concept that puts a whole lot of power in your hands and exposes interesting questions. It looks like Bose is doing something in this space at kids science camps [0]. If you can acquire/make an amp and a strobe light to replace their "blue box", there's a whole host of kid-friendly activities on the site to do with kids centered around making hand-made, origami paper drivers.

[0] http://build.bose.com/

timclark• 12 years ago

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/02/feature_the_future_l... - has an interesting perspective on speaker design and the human auditory system.

jensC• 12 years ago

A friend of mine created an online app that helps calculating Loudspeaker Enclosures. The app is completely free, no registration necessary.

http://micka.de/org/en/index.php

Hope that someone finds this useful.

givan• 12 years ago

This is only a box for speakers, I was expecting something more.

analog312• 12 years ago

Ah, but the box is a big deal. I'm a DIY speaker builder, but for musical instrument rather than hi-fi use. The box is an integral part of the electromechanical system that determines the response (and to some extent power handling) of the speaker at low frequencies. The box may be a plain box whose volume is its main parameter, or may contain other structures such as resonant ports.

Most woofers are designed so they have to be in an appropriate box in order to be useful. Without access to the process for designing custom woofers, the DIY'er has at our disposal two main variables for tailoring low frequency response: Woofer choice from off the shelf models, and box design. And there are some tradeoffs to manage, such as low frequency response and box size, so that there's no ideal box design for all uses.

chillingeffect2• 12 years ago

musical instrument rather than hi-fi use

Me, too. Just when speaker design seemed to be a solved problem, with a small set of uniform solutions, up springs the concept of co-designing speakers and musical instruments.

What frequency range/instrument are you working with? And what architecture/horns/boxes/tubes/drivers?

laurentoget• 12 years ago

i read several claims that you can buy components and blueprints and build yourself speakers which would be much better than what you could buy for the price. this sounds like a business opportunity to me. anybody knows why nobody is selling good speakers for less?

vl• 12 years ago

Generally speaking, if you thought of something obvious, search the internet, somebody is already doing it. For example - http://www.htd.com/ - and godzillion other.

beat8• 12 years ago

Because hours of effort, marketing, etc aren't accounted for in the price of your DIY.

The hi-fi speaker business is a highly competitive market. The invisible hand already drives prices to about where they can go.

kiram9• 12 years ago

If anyone is thinking to build their own cabinets - I would suggest checking out https://www.parts-express.com/cat/speaker-components/4 I have built a few speakers from scratch, including line arrays using them as my source. They are kind of like the mono price of speaker parts.

Homemade Speakers

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