DIY Speakers

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My DIY bamboo enclosure for Tannoy HPD speakers. Sounds glorious and is rock solid. Looks great too( from the outside).

 

Looks interesting.

Which improvements have you introduced in your (re)design?

Was it just the box or also the crossover?

Have you made any measurements?

 

R

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Hi

 

Anyone here having experience of DIY speakers. My guess is that build quality is below commercial ones,, but sound quality?

 

/lg

Gravesen's designs look competent:

 

http://www.troelsgravesen.dk/Diy_Loudspeaker_Projects.htm

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Bronze is very hard and dense and yet it rings like a bell so I think we need more than just rigidity.

 

R

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You are likely thinking of brass. Bronz has much more copper and is far less likely to ring.

I may be mistaken but I think many church bells are made of bronze.

 

R

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What is DIY? There are many level of it from using a kit to designing everything yourself. I did not start from kits but from commercial drivers but then I progressed to build my drivers from scratch. I am at a point that the measured and auditory performance is better than what I could buy but it was and is expensive over the long run as most of my attempts end up as trash. If want decent speakers DIY may be not the cheapest but the most interesting solution!

P.S: no more conventional passive X-over for me- only digital!

Do you mean that you build your own drivers and they perform better than the commercially available offers?

That's surprising.

Could you describe your speaker system a little and maybe add a couple of photos?

 

Cheers,

Ricardo

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I hadn't thought of electrostatics when you mentioned you built your own drivers. Now it makes sense.

 

R

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Things are always easy when you're talking about doing them, but can be very different on the attempt. Offhand, I can only think of 2 companies in the world that are actively developing time and phase correct speakers; Vandersteen and Green Mountain Audio. If there are others, I'm just not aware of them. How many DIY's make time and phase correct speakers? I've never seen one. And if I did, I'd want to see some proof to back up the claims.

 

I wonder why phase linearity isn't pursued more in loudspeakers...

Do the shortcomings outweigh the advantages?

Are the sonic benefits negligible?

 

I haven't listened to a phase-coherent speaker in ages and I don't think that I focused on that particular aspect the last time I did audition a pair.

 

R

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Indeed

With Linkwitz doing the heavy lifting amazing results are easy and affordable

Well pleased with LXmini, Pluto, and Watson designs I've built

 

Linkwitz Lab - Loudspeaker Design

 

Here are a couple of Linkwitz's comments on phase linearity:

 

Sound reproduction is about creating an auditory illusion.

When the recorded sound is of real instruments or voices there is a familiar, live reference in our auditory memory.

The illusion of hearing a realistic reproduction is destroyed by distortion that is added anywhere in the signal chain from microphone to loudspeaker, but the speaker is by far the biggest culprit.

Every designer focuses on the on-axis frequency response as if it were the all determining distortion parameter.

Sometimes great attention is paid to the phase response in an attempt to preserve waveform fidelity, which at best can only be achieved for a single listening point in space.

Ignored usually, though of much greater importance, is resonance in drivers and cabinets and the slow release of stored energy that goes with it.

Furthermore, the uniformity and flatness of the off-axis frequency response which we hear via room reverberation and reflections is rarely a design goal.

You can check the naturalness of the timbre by listening from another room.

Does it sound like a loudspeaker is playing?

The imbalance in the speaker's power response between low and high frequencies destroys the illusion

 

(...)

 

Now, a first-order crossover can be made phase-perfect at one point in space, but I feel quite strongly that you cannot just look at a speaker's performance at one single point in space.

The off-axis response is also very important to a speaker's overall performance in a real room, because the radiation in these other directions will add, through reflected and reverberant interactions, to what you hear.

Typically, we don't listen to speakers outdoors or in anechoic chambers.

 

R