Design a $60,000 Speaker - Start here

I will be going to my garage to build speakers in a few minutes they will be better than anything presently available.(ho ho)

Well, it's a different thing to talk about how you get speakers into stratospheric price points than saying everyone can build a world-class speaker.

However, it helps to have an ear that is independent of Stereophile reviews, and price tags. Then you can pick out real gems for cheap.

My philosophy: I don't want to drink a good $300 bottle of wine. I want to drink a $20 bottle of wine that tastes just as good.

I wouldn't necessarily start with the drivers. First I would get rid of the MDF. 

Ralph
I think the implications of an aerodynamically designed speaker is foreign to most. A major goal of a good driver must be to deal with the back waves of sound. Having them bounce off the basket and back through the paper thin cone is just not acceptable. The designer should make every effort to allow those waves to easily pass all the driver components to reach the dampening material of the cabinet or the cabinet walls. 
I know of two companies that do this. Vivid Speakers and Wilson Benesch. Wilson Benesch Uses a wind tunnel test on their drivers and computer models to make sure they maximize the flow of air. I think this is real advancement in speaker design. 

Jim

Monitor Audio seems to have done a lot of work to make this happen more easily in cost effective fashion.

Accuton has completely transformed the definition of motor and coil in their latest mid-woofer drivers. The first driver I posted about has very limited basket at all, and this one, has essentially no basket at all:

https://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/woofers/accuton-c168-6-990-7-ceramic-cone-mid/bass/

Best,

E

Here is what Wilson Beseech is doing. 

http://wilson-benesch.com/products/endeavour-stand-mounted-loudspeaker.html

They are using two drivers in clam shell configuration. The driver that projects music/sound into the room is not facing the listener but rather the speaker. The website shows the woofer but the midrange also incorporates the same technology not the clam shell. This is what real engineering looks like, not just shiny drivers or driver coated with zircons.  

The views I represented above are really my view, and may not represent those of the masses. 

Re Wilson Benesch:

This is a 2.5 way speaker system, with an isobaric woofer.  Moderately interesting.

The woofer has 2x the motor strength, and the configuration minimizes asymmetry.  The 2.5 way helps eliminate baffle step issues, and improves sensitivity. The 0.5 way indicates the mid has no low pass filter, and the woofers add additional bass.

As for "real engineering" well, OK then. I think it's creative, and drivers sure look pretty. I have never heard a pair.

I discount ANY literature that claims small drivers are the way to get deep, low distortion bass however, but still, a 2.5 way with 7" drivers is probably pretty well balanced.

Best,

E

In smaller European rooms, the room lift will help out with the bottom end.

In bigger north American rooms, not as much, as averages go.

Most speakers need to be ’interviewed’ with room size and position as part of the analysis. Both a useless obvious statement -- and needing to be said.

All that said, a pair of 7’s (per side) will work wonders in most mid sized rooms. Extreme low bass that is as full range as it can possibly ever be tends to require perfected rooms be built or found, as well as the same applied to the speaker.. Which most can’t or won’t do. At any level of expense or income.

Few understand that bass control in a room is actually the most potent and difficult part of acoustics to fix and tame at the same time it is the least understood and most badly attended to by experts or the layman. None of our acoustical standards even have the guts to pay attention to bass, it’s all magic and mystery down there, according to those ’standards’. (weighting standards for measurement, etc). They ignore that which they can’t make sense of or understand. Bass reflex as a realized system that is in heavy use illustrates this point quite well. (Exhibit A kinda thing)

(the most informed and capable person I know of in room acoustics, by far.. is my Biz partner Taras, the approx 60 film set acoustics systems under his belt, is the least of his resume)(lots of things I’m not allowed to mention or talk about)

Giant extreme bass is like a rock hard suspended track day car. Fun for those few times it can be entertained as conjoined to the given musical source/package. Look how extreme I am! For regular life... the other +90% of the time...not entirely like tits on a boar and a hindrance, but warming up to it...

Hey Teo, that’s kind of a long and meandering post, and makes it hard to respond to. Let me see if I can address two of them:

• Yes, speakers with one or two 7" woofer’s are in the sweet spot of affordability, credible bass and above most dangerous room modes.
  
• The acoustics and improvement of bass in consumer listening rooms is very well understood, but not by most consumers, or even most Hi Fi dealers.

Best,

E

The acoustics and improvement of bass in consumer listening rooms is very well understood,......

On my life, I fundamentally disagree. (in a casual friendly way... but if pushed...) I’m talking about how the ’fix’ of the rooms is, in my direct experience, a fail. Not even close to how much better it may or could be. Meaning, they don't understand the nature of the problem well enough to create a more functional solution than they have.

From my prior post:
" (lots of things I’m not allowed to mention or talk about) "

The written word and the internet combine to make it seem like a ego contest. I’m not projecting that or meaning that. :)

We're starting to explore the question of acoustics a bit better than in the past, but..we're not all the way there, yet. Not as far as I've had the chance to witness, in various installs and locales, that is.

Yes. It is nice to eliminate as much crossover as possible. Crossovers are subtractive, they take away from the signal. Pay good money for an amplifier and the the damn speaker sucks out the signal. Not nice. 

Pay good money for a speaker and the air sucks out the signal. ;)

One can go entirely active with speakers, yes, but the speakers will still sound notably better if the drivers have passive zobel networks.

you could actually learn a great deal from Richard Vandersteen
the 7 is not built to a price point it is the best he knows how to do today and is the culmination of many many years of work and innovation
i might add that every single part and operation is subject to what I call Dutch Frugal Engineering scrutiny but at the end of the day it has to sound better - hence a somewhat conventional barrier strip binding post that can be directly connected into the soldered traces for the crossover - eliminating wire
i believe it is relevant as you yourself start the thread with driver cost

I love the magazine ads that showcase the crossover. All these parts. In some cases there is more going on in the crossover as some single ended amplifiers have circuitry. They also have notch filterers to eliminate cab resonance at certain frequencies. 

Please don't get me started on active speakers. I paid big bucks for a rack to isolate my amplifiers from the resonance and now they put the amp right in there next to the woofer. 

That is remarkable.

Zobel networks are another mythical beast.

Zobels are used to flatten the driver impedance, usually to assist high / low pass filters in behaving more ideally.

Their need/use/benefit and specific implementation is pretty speaker dependent.

https://speakermakersjourney.blogspot.com/2016/12/crossover-basics-zobel_8.html

See the section "Do I need a Zobel."

So what kind of testing is done on the driver material. Both listening tests and tests for distortion and resonance. All these different materials, surely some must be better then others. 

I know a few companies use laser technology to be able to read how the cones are responding to various things.  Some are even posted on Youtube for you to see.  

Bump...  Sonus Faber..  the drivers on some of their lesser range look pretty cheap. I dont esp like the sound from the base tweeter they use.
Back to 60k speakers, that 11" accuton is a beast! But why 8 ohm? The parameters call.for a large box, so 2 in parallel to get a decent sensitivity rating wd mean well over 100 litres..
Another option is isobaric, using the excellent SB 9.5" satori woofer. Best ’rear end’ of any driver imo.

Greed makes the world go round, desire feeds it. We control our desire and greed fails. Whatever we buy, its price is determined by what the market will bear and that has nothing to do with value.

I have an Audiokinesis speaker system (2 front and 2 effect speakers) where most of the cost has gone into the design, cabinets and crossovers - the drivers are quite standard (but selected) pro-sound drivers. Thereby,. the cost of these speakers are kept reasonable.

Formerly I had the Dynaudio flagship speaker, the Consequence, with more costly drivers. In my case (with a quite large room), the Audiokinesis system sounds better, it plays better "with" the room, but this may also be due to not giving my Consequence enough power. Even with a huge Krell FPB600 amp! So yes, I could get good sound, but only at full power, and even then, two Krells would have been better. Good drivers, in an over-controlled speaker, may not be the best bet. On high decibel levels, I got what I wanted, the Krell going into pure class A operation (auto-adjusting) and the speakers STARTING to dance and sing. But then the neighbours came complaining. The Audiokinesis system doesn’t have quite the refinement. But it plays better with the room, and in my context. So I don’t look back.
A plus with speakers with moderate cost or standard drivers is the DIY factor - it is possible to experiment, without spending large amounts of money. I changed to PRV compression drivers in my Audiokinesis system. Not as good as beryllium drivers, probably - but a step up, for low cost.

60k speakers is veblen goods territory. Anything for home use priced like that is - IMNSHO.
PS. 60k worth of home equipment carries the annual secondary carbon footprint of 20 tons of CO2 ( connected to the manufacture). Add the electricity used for the operation and its carbon footprint.

Not to take away from Eric's thread, but completely related, imo. A question for Eric, and the rest of you. One of the best and significant speakers of all time, especially for the money, were the Dahlquist DQ10s. None of those drivers were costly. Same woofer as in the Advent. Brilliant design, engineering, and thinking outside the box ( no pun intended ). And, a 5 way design. Carl Marchisotto, Jon Dahlquist, and a few others, all involved. How was it they sounded as good as they did ? I could imagine a re-do of that speaker, using the best drivers, best crossover components, a heavier mass box and frame, etc. I had a few pair in my life, and enjoyed them, with larger ss amplifiers. Opinions please. Or, should I start a separate thread ?

I have been told the diamond tweeter in the Tidal Contriva is $10.000.00 at thats not even there top of the line speaker. Im not sure I agree with speakers are the most over priced component' perhaps at certain price levels your correct but have you seriously looked at or heard Tidal speakers, the workmanship, Duelund xover parts, drivers. I cant even imagine how much those xovers cost alone.There are a few other manufacturers that belong at this level.

I personally feel that the Tidal and Vandersteen's are my favorites.  Totally different speakers.  Once I learned what Vandersteen has inside from drivers to a box in a box to custom made drivers made out of a special carbon fiber, I realize why they cost what they do.  He gives us some of the top values in all of audio.  

Then there it Tidal who uses even more costly components and has a much larger mark up.  I'd die to hear the Vandy 7's with Sub 9 woofers, Tidal (any of them) and the Rockport Lyra in the same system, room etc...  That would be a fun chili cookout.