Building your own speaker cabinets from scratch (or from a kit)

[momatt]

I recently picked up some nice speakers cones for fairly cheap, thinking they were part of a kit to build the whole speakers.  Unfortunately they didn't come with the wooden bits and the paperwork they came with is in Japanese.  They did provide the Thiele/Small parameters which I vaguely understand.  I'm not very familiar with woodwork though.

But I still want to have a go at making them.  It's the kind of thing my Grandad used to do, and he was really cool.
I've had a Google search but could only find some very expensive cabinet kits in America for >$500.  Which spoils the point somewhat.

Has anyone built their own speakers?  Know any good kits to buy or good plans/diagrams to copy from?
Or shall I fuck it off and do something else?

[NoSleep]

Maybe you can find some old speaker cabinets to house them, replacing the old (hopefully battered/worse) speakers.

[Endicott]

https://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Speaker-Box

Come on, how hard can it be?

[momatt]

That's cheating!
But I had thought of that.  I was thinking having some thick MDF cut to size and gluing it together wouldn't be too hard?  Just wondered if anyone knew of suitable affordable kit companies?  I think they used to be fairly common, but it's not worth bothering with now.

They're a single driver, so won't need a cross-over.

[momatt]

https://www.wikihow.com/Build-a-Speaker-Box

Come on, how hard can it be?

Yeah I saw that.  Looks alright!

[Dex Sawash]

Figured someone had done an ikea speaker "hack" looked and some look ok.
I liked the look of the sslad bowl ones

[mojo filters]

The speakers above are technically dual driver, using either the Tannoy or KEF approach to coaxial design and adding a small waveguide for the HF element. The round cabinets are a neat touch to eliminate internal standing waves.

Since you have the Thiele Small parameters, WinISD would be a good tool to use to determine an appropriate cabinet design. The program helpfully allows you to see how different topologies such as sealed box, bass reflex etc can be used with the same drivers - all offering different advantages and compromises, including the difficulty of any build.

One thing I'd query is even if these drivers are capable of covering the full frequency spectrum, do they require application of a specific EQ curve to balance out the spectrum? If so, thankfully inexpensive powerful DSP units are now available - which will be far easier than having to design and build any kind of complex passive filter.

Whilst generally designed for PA systems, cheap DSP now means there are lots of amplifiers available which include powerful processing (including protection such as limiting) built in. However as these are generally fan cooled rather than using convection, such a solution may prove to be noisily intrusive at low levels.

I'd be very cautious about just putting any nice driver into some random empty cabinet not designed for the purpose, as you risk causing damage to the drivers once power is applied. However if you had some empty boxes, WinISD would give you a good idea of their potential suitability.

[momatt]

Wow, love those bowl-speakers!

Thank Mojo!
The drivers aren't really expensive, just a set I got in Japan.  So I'm not going to go to in-depth with the design.  But that program will be helpful to get the dimensions working alright.