Speaker building all by yourself

@fraggler , offer is still open for veneering but yeah, in a dark theater spray painted black speakers are fine. My sidewalls are made from painted pine 2x4s, no one has ever noticed !

 

Lol. I was wondering if someone was going to say something about that. This is happening on a floor that is still being finished as an apartment (but will be used as hobby and office space for me and my wife for the next couple years). So an "allowable" mess in the kitchen.

 

My active 3-ways are duratex coated. The coat is very hard to permanently damage and can be fixed by just adding some duratex on top. My lovely lady keeps flower pots on my speakers which is how I have Almost 500l of speakers in the living room.

 

Want to see pics!

 

Finished! Here are a couple more shots of the process:
Priming in my poorly designed spray booth:

I learned I really need 4 full walls, not 3.5. I ended up with a fine mist of spray paint everywhere in the room. Luckily it was a recently emptied storage room that is on the list to get renovated anyways. Dodged a bullet...

Painted and getting stuffed:

They really didn't leave much room for the upgraded crossovers to be mounted given the bracing. The smaller inductor is awfully close to the woofer, but nothing I could do short of not using their board and doing some sort of split breadboard thing.

Egg crate foam everywhere with some recycled jeans stuff from another build to cover the crossover:

Some buttoned up pictures showing off the thoroughly meh paint job.


It isn't bad, but it isn't good. Honestly, though I don't really care now that I have heard them. I might glow them up a little with a proper veneer job some day, but not any time soon.

Decided to order their screen kit which was reasonably priced and will hopefully add a touch of pro finish to some very boring speakers:

Absolute nightmare stretching the corners and securing with the press fit gasket thing without folds. My thumbs will likely hurt for the next couple days... Need to drill some holes still in the speaker front to add some screws that the magnets in the screens will attach to.

All in all, I enjoyed the build - mainly because I really like how they sound so far. Spray paint was definitely a nightmare and I wished I had veneered or rolled on some truck bed liner. My impatience got the best of me for sure. The kit was good, with the boxes going together pretty well - I definitely appreciated the rabbeted joints. I think the bracing, while robust, may not have been ideally shaped for the larger upgraded crossover boards. And for the MTM, I feel like there should have been a pass through for one of them to better spread out the dual board crossover, but I don't know what I am talking about when it comes to speaker design. Hard to say if the cost was worth it since the nicest speakers I own are the Energy RC-10s and some DIY's Carmody S2000s, but so far I am super impressed - they are giving me everything I was hoping for when I decided to upgrade from the system I've had for the last decade plus.

And a final shout out to the CSS Audio team. They answered all my questions very quickly, and even though it had been over two years since I bought the kits, they immediately shipped me a tweeter when I found that they had forgotten one in my original package.

 

I found an EU based supplier for speaker kits from Parts Express and CSS audio

https://www.soundimports.eu/en/css-criton-1td.html

The price seems a bit steep even considering international shipping and VAT. You might want to try to ship directly first

 

Hey @The old guy , thought I would respond here.

For those that don’t know, Amiga is a Paul Carmody speaker that punches above its value. Carmody himself said that if he could do it again this would probably be his first speaker. Here’s his article

https://sites.google.com/site/undefinition/floorstanding-speakers/amiga

It’s nice to have some confirmation on how good these are

 

I'm new to this forum. There are a lot of great projects on this thread.

I didn't build my speakers totally from scratch. I had the cabinets made for me using CNC. The main towers are actually made from composite, while the woofer towers are 1.5" MDF.

These are dipole planar magnetic line arrays designed by Danny Ritchie of GR-Research. These were originally designed as a commercial product for Serenity Acoustics. They were never put into production because Bohlender-Graebener, the company that produced the drivers, was acquired by Christie Digital, and the new company decided to stop offering their drivers to the OEM and DIY market. I bought enough drivers in their last shipment to Parts Express (with a few spares).

I built the crossovers from scratch (using Danny's recommended component values), installed all the drivers and wired them up using Neotech UPOCC solid-core copper wire.

Each line array utilizes 6 BG NEO10 drivers and 16 NEO3s. They cross over at about 1800Hz and play down to about 180Hz, where they cross over to the woofer towers. They are a fairly easy load on the amplifier with a nominal impedance of about 7 ohms, dipping down to about 4 ohms, and have a sensitivity of around 98db/w. I'm driving them with DIY 300B PSET monoblock amplifiers.

The woofer towers use four Rythmik 12" paper-cone servo woofers in each tower powered by a Rythmik HX800 amplifier.

 

Composite made of what?

 

It's a polyurethane composite designed for machining. Slightly denser than high-quality MDF.

 

@Jay Torborg good to see you on SBAF. I know I told you on audiocircle that your first diy preamp build inspired me to do the same.