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DIY Speakers


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I think there is a lot to be said for DIY speakers, assuming you have the skill sets.

 

1) Designed specifically for the room and the position within the room

2) Lots of very good ideas and designs out there for inspiration

3) Probably cheaper if you are building in the mid to higher range - very difficult to compete with some good cheap speakers from volume manufacturers sourcing in bulk and assembling in China.

4) Tweakable (again to suit the room)

5) You know wants in them and exactly where the money has been sent

6) Some very good modelling software free on the internet (and some not so good as well!)

 

I built these about 2 years ago, they have active bass drivers with Linkwitz Transform Circuits from ESP and a series XO on the bass/mids and treble units.

 

main speakers.jpg

 

They weren't that cheap or easy but they (IMO) have delivered excellent audio value, were designed for a very specific placement brief and response profile for the specific room. I learnt alot and may, time allowing build a V2 version but not quite yet.

Trying to make sense of all the bits...MacMini/Amarra -> WavIO USB to I2S -> DDDAC 1794 NOS DAC -> Active XO ->Bass Amp Avondale NCC200s, Mid/Treble Amp Sugden Masterclass -> My Own Speakers

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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

"Science draws the wave, poetry fills it with water" Teixeira de Pascoaes

 

HQPlayer Desktop / Mac mini → Intona 7054 → RME ADI-2 DAC FS (DSD256)

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