So I’m going to build a new speaker soon and have been pondering just building a single speaker and mixing stereo music down to mono.
There are many practical benefits to this.
Obviously it would be half the price (or twice the budget) and half the labour.
Using any stereo receiver you will have 2 channels at your disposable for one speaker and this has a bunch of uses.
The 2 channels can be used to provide an active or digital crossover for a 2 way and reap all the benefits , even for a 3 way the woofer to mid crossover can still be done digitally or actively, where the biggest and most expensive components would be normally be required for a passive crossover.
With 2 channels you can also bridge the channels and have double the power available to a mono speaker with passive crossover, while providing a balanced load to the amp.
Ok, you get a lot of benefits but it comes at the cost of stereo... but is this really all bad?
The real reason I’m considering a mono build is that when I was building my last stereo speakers I was testing and fine tuning the crossover using a single speaker, after some time I had it dialed in and it sounded really fantastic, I went ahead and built the same crossover for the other speaker.
Upon listening to them in stereo, the ’magic’ I was hearing when tuning the single speaker wasnt fully there in stereo, the single had much purer tone and cleaner image, but obviously did not have big, wide sound you get with stereo...
Large portion of sounds in stereo music are really just monoaural with different degrees of panning, for reproducing any of these sounds a stereo speaker is actually inferior to mono since 2 speakers will never be perfectly matched. 2 speakers will play it louder and that’s all.
I’m pretty close to moving ahead with a mono build but it is pretty much unheard of.... anyone have any thoughts on it?
