Good choices for first time DIY speaker?

The NHT 1259 is a can't miss for the subwoofer. You need a very stiff 3 to 3.5 box to put it in. Madisound will sell you a great box made for it. I recommend the Marchand cross-over, or DBX or Audio Source Richter scale. (I have all 3 in various systems) For top end the MDY-4 kit they offer looks good and were I to do it over, I'd pick that one. Speaker City has some excellent kits. Madisound will design a cross-over using LEAP software and the one I have came out OK but I recommend all electronic cross-overs for the best sound. Read Speaker Builder magazine for lots of good advice. Join the Bass list for great specific advice and check out many different Web sites. It has never been better for the amateur speaker builder. Two caveats: 1) don't expect to sell your creations for any return--you can't, and 2) when every room in your house has speakers in it, start throwing some of them out!

Any of the Dynaudio kits would be great.

I built the North Creek Rhythm kit and love it. See http://www.northcreekmusic.com/ and check out the stuff

Yes, North Creek is very good too.

Is it really worth it to build a kit? I'm just about to start my first DIY project and making the speakers from a kit seems to take all of the fun out of it. Maybe I'm being a little too adventurous for a first timer, but I was planing on designing a pair of my own.

Has anyone tried Audio Concepts Inc.? Their Titan Subwoofer looks interesting. www.audioc.com

I feel that if you want to build speakers for your system from scratch and you never did it before you should do a kit. I bought a mess of Dynaudio driver and proceeded to build one speaker (I wanted to perfect one before building the other). The driver selection, and the crossover points and order as well as the box size and shape, make it almost an endless combination. I am a mechanical engineer and designed a few machines but speaker design took way more time than I thought. I played around with designs for years and never realy enjoyed listening to the music. I looked at several speaker kit companies and felt the North Creek had the best designed crossover. I have been very happy with the speakers and for the money you can't beat them. You will need to make or have the boxes made. The design process is very hard with speaker design. You will need to do alot of playing until you are satisfied. I was never satisfied so I went for the kit.

If you want to design and build your own, the best route is to have a terrific designer computer-model/test the crossover for you. It's not cheap, but I'm hoping it will be worth it.

Parts Express (www.partsexpress.com) offers a selection of books on loudspeaker design and constuction. Here are some catalog order numbers to check out when you access their web site. 500-036, 500-021, 500-018, 500-040, 500-037, 500-042. If you are handy at all, you can assemble a kit, enjoy the feeling of accomplishment, save enough bucks to go out on the town and hear some real music - complete with electronic hums, crowd noise, noise from the ventilation system - supporting the musicians that seem to be at the bottom of hierarchy. Several years ago I built a pair of corner horns from plans - better speakers than 99% of people get to enjoy - and the preference/reference question is settled at this house. There is no pefection in this world ...