Making your own Speakers – USB or Hi-Fi

How do.
Has anyone ever made their own speakers out of kits or individual components?

I’m interested in having a go but am not particularly up on electrickery and suchlike.

I fancy making some small but rockin’ USB type speakers, maybe using unusual items as the ‘case’, and also some big powerful ones for my old separates system.

Anyone know of a good link that explains how to go about the electronics required in simple terms to a lowly cabinetmaker type?
The woodwork or butchering of donor components I’m fine with, it’s just the electronics I’m all new to.

Are there any good kits out there that include all you need bar the wooden cabinet?

My first thought was to buy some USB speakers and just take them apart but a lot of stuff these days is pretty well built to be very difficult to take apart without knackering it.

Cheers.

http://www.wilmslowaudio.co.uk

Nice easy place to start would be some full range drivers from Fostex in a simple cabinet driven by a little T amp of some sort.

It’s the cabinets that are the hardest part crossovers and so on are easy (ish) to do..

Simple starter

guts[/url]

Its pretty straightforward – I was messing around with it in my teens.

If you want to go usb I would probably gut some bought ones, will get expensive buying amp and drivers otherwise.

For proper hi fi go ahead and buy decent seperate drivers, will be pricey and equivalent to bought speakers 5 or 6 times the price if you get them to sound right.

I have heard some awful kits though – notably from Wilmslow – so I woukdnt spend a lot of money on it.

Cheers.
I was thinking maybe I could use some car speakers, but obviously would need something to drive them. I’m not some kind of hifi conass connur connerse snob so am just interested in building something with some solid bass and punch. More your sort of Jamaican sound system than penthouse hifi sorta thing.

I’ve read that car speakers are really designed to work differently somehow but would they not give you a fairly decent sound?

Would that involve some sort of power inverter shizzle?

Car speakers are lower impedance (typically) than home speakers – 4 ohms usually.
The best way car to use car speakers would be to build your own boom box, using a T class amplifier and a 12 volt power supply. All the bits can be had for peanuts – a pair of 6×9 speakers from eBay, T class amps go for between £8 if you want to take risk on quality to £25 for a well reviewed Lepai one, £10 for a power supply. Then all you need is a funky enclosure. I was thinking about making one from a Jerry can or an ammo box, but a wooden box of some description would give much better sound. Have a look on instructables for some ideas.

I converted some old car audio speakers to a pair of bookshelf speakers pluss bass bin. I can recommend the lepai amp, it isn’t very loud, but that is fine for the office – sounds great for the price. I used an old car amp plus 240v psu to power the sub.

Thought I’d update.
I bought a little MP3 speaker kit from Kitronik as a little test project.
Really cool little kit with a pcb which you just solder everything to following the instructions, and it cost under £6!

I had this old Ammunition box and so decided to mount it in there. Little Birch-Ply speaker surrounds and a bullet for the external volume knob.

It runs off a 9v batter, or can be plugged into a DC adaptor.
Pretty sweet.

Kitronik[/url]

Looking good.

Liking the ammunition box boom box. 😀

I think I might have just found a new hobby…. I used to work on the acoustics of mobile phones for a large Finnish company and have a masters in Acoustics. Still in acoustics but not audio any more, maybe building my own loudspeakers is what I should do!

I’ve been meaning to get round to doing this for ages.

I’ve been meaning to get round to doing this for ages.

Erm….it’s SFW, just odd!

On a well known auction site there is a seller called willys hifi or similar – who sells driver/crossover kits for very reasonable sums.
Then just ensure the enclosure you use – whatever it is has roughly the same volume.
Components can be very expensive – so also consider deconstructing second hand speakers and using all the parts – this works well for experiments – especially if you remember what the originals sound like.

If you de-construct a second hand speaker, make a note of the original cabinet volume and make the new enclosure the same. Alternatively, learn how to measure the Thiele-Small parameters of the drivers

Anyone know of a good link that explains how to go about the electronics required in simple terms to a lowly cabinetmaker type?
The woodwork or butchering of donor components I’m fine with, it’s just the electronics I’m all new to.

Are there any good kits out there that include all you need bar the wooden cabinet?

recommend:

1) go with a kit of crossover/speaker parts
2) avoid car stuff if you want hifi
3) stick to the cab design that (1) recommends
4) see (3)
5) if you must design your own cab, you got some background reading to catch up on (although ultimately it comes down to a few formulas you plug the appropriate numbers into, and you get enclosure details out)

Have a look on the DIY section of

For example, these stunning DIY Tannoys

Or these beasties (also Tannoys):

I find those Tannoy speaker projects quite amusing. To take the time on getting each internal dimension of the cabinets acoustically perfect and the to stick the finished product in their un-acoustically treated front room is like building a custom SC Bronson and only taking it on the green trails!

Blimey, them bottom ones….
Beauty is in the eye and all that… 😯

Nice work kayak! If you haven’t already done so, stick some wooden crossbraces between the walls of the ammo box – just cut bits of wood that are a few mm longer than the space and hammer them in so they’re under compression. And add some damping material (polyester batting / wool / fibreglass). The former will clean up the lows, the latter the mids and highs.

Thanks Chiefgrooveguru. I was literally just pondering the sound quality and trying it with some bubble wrap in there. It sounds ok but it’s not quite giving me the lows needed for the Abyssinians! (Nor will it ever…)

Bubble wrap won’t work because it’ll reflect mids and reduce the internal volume which is usually bad for lows. Needs to be something fibrous! When listening to reggae stick it in the corner of the room, that’ll make the most of its meagre lows… 😉

Sealing the box is also important for the low end

This is one of the projects I have in mind, If I ever get the house finished. My plan was to use one of these amps.

amp

along with an ipod dock

to hopefully end up with something like this.

as I found I could not bring myself to buy one of these.

BTW, on the ammo box ^^^^ Lovin the “Bullet” volume knob! 😉

Erm….it’s SFW, just odd!

How embarrassing, I obviously meant to post this[/url].

Are there any kits out there for making your own active speakers, ideally with some DSP built in?

this is cool. Has anyone made a battery powered one? I’m wanting one I can take with me out on site..