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Is it time in your hobby to build a speaker kit?

Not to save money, but to learn what you are talking about. Get your hands dirty. Touch all the parts. Can you screw? Can you solder? Want to experience something most of your audiophile friends never will?


Try out these sites:
www.madisound.com
https://meniscusaudio.com/
www.solen.ca

http://www.taylorspeakers.com/

https://greatplainsaudio.com/

Do this to have fun. Do this to roll your own crossover out of exotic Teflon and copper foil.

Best,

Erik
erik_squires
bdp24's avatar
bdp24
10,097 posts
 

@n80, GR Research sounds perfect for you. Danny Richie supplies the drivers, x/o parts, enclosure damping material, connectors, hardware, etc. He leaves the enclosure to the customer, providing he or she (yeah sure ;-) the internal cu.ft. volume required for the speaker design you order.

As you are content with your speakers (for now ;-), take a look at his subwoofer designs. He developed them in partnership with Brian Ding of Rythmik Audio, and they are something special. Sealed and OB/Dipole, both with Rythmik’s Servo-Feedback circuitry, and Danny’s paper-cone version of the Rythmik 12" aluminum cone-woofer. He provides the plans for his 2 cu.ft. enclosure design for the woofer, both a normal sealed version, and one with double walls, the space between them intended to be filled with sand, for damping of the enclosure walls. Advanced subwoofers designed not for home-theater use, but for music.

zavato's avatar
zavato
1,410 posts
 
DIY is great stuff! I've built a few tube amps, and enjoyed doing that quite a bit
corelli
1,038 posts
 
I have enjoyed building several speakers over the years.  Most of these were kits that I was able to tweak a bit with improved crossover parts, cabinet mods, etc.  

It was nice when Parts Express offered cabinets.  They looked quite nice and cut out the most time consuming part of the build.

I would suggest that first timers go with a nice predesigned kit from a reputable designer.  Tweak things if you will.  It's too hard and total guess work for most of us to design a speaker from the ground up without a lot of resources for measurements, etc.  

Of my builds,the speaker that least impressed me used top shelf drivers.  I was impressed by the design and specs.  But it just did not involve me emotionally. Go figure.  My two favorites included a full range driver in a 0.5 cf enclosure, the other used a pair of inexpensive Vifa drivers with a series crossover.  Both of these were models of simplicity that truly were satisfying builds and very involving speakers.  And I would suggest these did outperform commercial products at there price points.

If you add up all the time you'll spend, don't fool yourself into thinking you'll save a bundle.  This is something you do as a labor of love, a learning experience.  My time is valuable and I have no regrets.



paulcreed
566 posts
 
I have to agree the DIY is a lot of fun and very rewarding sound wise. I just got into this maybe a year ago. I owned a pair of LSA standard monitors in a second system long ago and always thought they were very nice for there $1000 price, I replaced them with the LSA tower version in a trade. Less than a year ago I ran across an online $1000 monitor speaker shootout and noticed the GR Research Sking Ninja modded (alpha inductors, mills resistors and sonicaps) speaker won against the LSA. While reading about the shoot out i noticed a eBay listing for a the modded GR Research monitor than won the shootout for $120 in pieces. My curiosity got the best of me so I bought it. Had no idea what I was doing called Danny at GR and he walked me through putting it back together. He always answers the phone and is a hell of a nice guy. To my amazement the $120 GR monitor was better in every way to the $2500 LSA tower except tower went lower but not better quality bass. Now my focus went to improving the LSA tower. Since LSA's are not my main speakers I took a chance and started replacing parts. I combined Clarity CMR and Jantzen Alumen in tweeter section, removed soft dome tweeter and replaced it with Peerless ring radiator( had to decrease resistor to match new tweeter) put in Path resistor in tweeter section and mills everywhere else. The rest of the parts are still stock. Made crossover outboard and soldered speaker wire directly to crossover( no binding post). Now the Modded LSA is in totally different league than the GR monitor. For $300 bucks in parts you can't beat it. Anyone on the fence, buy a good $100 solder station and learn to solder, I couldn't solder worth a damn when I started this, now it's second nature.

paulcreed
566 posts
 
I would like to say I am thinking about building a open baffle speaker from GR Research.

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