Audiophiles help

“It's seem like this board has wide cast of characters and is loaded with knowledgable people...I'm hoping that some of you might give me some recommendations..I'm looking to put together a pair of DIY speakers..Curious if anyone here has built their own setup..and what they reccommend...Seems like a fun project..and as a budding neophite audiophile I'm always looking for better sound...”

“Audiophiles should be locked up and kept far away from society so kids won't ever never never never be harmed by them.”

“lmfao bud, i was wondering why you locked me in the outhouse....”

“wsdavies...I looked at doing this once and a friend gave me his class notes on it. Suffice to say, if they had an entire class on speaker design at Georgia Tech, then it ain't simple. Basically, you have to build a crossover network to route the correct wavelength signal to the correct speaker (No sending 40hz signal to the tweeter, for example), then you have to tune the box the speaker's in for the size woofer you have. Believe it or not, though, the best material to make the speaker box out of it is that compressed crap they make cheap bookshelves out of, because of its density.

Anyway, I never ended up doing it, although I thought about it for a long time. If you have a little electronics experience, and if you can find the right reference materials, you should be able to do it.”

“I did it. Helps to have a table saw. I got all my components from Radio Shack. They were two-way and were a fun project for a teen with access to a workshop. They put up with alot of abuse (volumn.) I still have them in the basement and break them out @ halloween for creepy music on the porch.
Radio shack ought to have plans.”

“I've pieced together a 5.1 dts system if that's what you mean. Started out with a good reciever a 12" sub and 5 of those little speakers. Later I got a good two channel center and some 3 channel front towers. Just keep building up, getting better stuff as you go, but make sure you buy the best reciever you can afford in the beginning.”

“wsdavies - don't do it
Well, don't stick any major amounts of money into them - because they probably won't sound very good anyway.
I'm an engineer - not an audio engineer, but I know what goes into development of a product. For a typical speaker that will sell for, say $500, an engineering team would spend months doing calculations, prototyping, testing, then rebuilding and refining. They may spend anywhere from a few tens of thousands to several hundred thousand dollars to fully develop the optimum design. There is absolutly zero chance for you to build one pair of speakers in your basement that could possibly rival those purchased for a similar amount of money.
The other thing is that speaker sound is very subjective - different poeple prefer different speakers - there is no formula that will help you there. You need to audition many, many different speakers to see which actually sound best to you - with the type of music you normally listen to.
However - if you just like to experiment - you can build speakers just to see how good of a job you can do - but don't waste alot of money. I built several speakers when I was in collage - it was fun - but after all of my hard work - they didn't even sound as good as Bose

try www.speakerlab.com for some ideas”

“I took “physics of hi-fi” in college and have built my own. I copied the design from a manufactured product. It was a fun project and they actually sounded pretty good but I don’t think I really saved much money. I have since bought an incredible pair and the ones I made are gathering dust.

The professor who taught that course built his own system. The speakers were set in huge sand filled concrete frames. He had over $100,000 (in 1980 dollars) into his system including the listening room.”

“There is an excellent site for buying everything you need to build speakers. They have an extensive list of speakers and crossovers for sale. It's www.partsexpress.com
But as thehangman said, speaker manufacturers do many calculations to size the speaker cabinet based on the speakers that are being used. And building your own is not as cheap as you might think.
My advice is to go to eBay and look for a nice set of used B&Ws. Ubid has speaker sales/auctions all the time. If you need to go cheaper there are plenty of older SP series Sansui speakers for in the $150-$300 range.”