Speakers

Here is my post about the pair of speakers mentioned below that I built for my in-laws for Christmas this year. I had wanted to post numerous progress reports, but for fear that they may have wandered into this blog, I didn't want to spill the beans until after they got them.

Kristin and I started talking late last year about the idea of me building some speakers for her parents. At the time, a few ideas were discussed but nothing came of it. Fast-forward to late September or early October of this year, and the discussion resurfaced. Kristin seemed to think that her parents would like something, and I'll take any excuse that I can get to build speakers without having her nag me constantly, so we decided that we'd do it. The stipulations were that we had to keep it affordable, and they had to fit in with their lifestyle, which meant small and unobtrusive. After going back and forth between a tiny subwoofer/statellite system, on-wall speakers, and conventional 2-ways, I picked the 2-ways. The on-wall speakers would have worked well except that I don't think they ever would have allowed speaker wires running up the walls to the speakers. The subwoofer/satellite option tanked because by the time I built the passive network or bought a plate amp, it would have gone over budget, and I still would have been stuck with the issue of what to do with the satellite speakers. So, stand mounted 2-ways were chosen. I could have built floor standers that actually had a smaller footprint, but these look less intrusive, plus it gave me a lot more options in terms of pre-existing designs to choose from. I'm still way too stupid with my Soundeasy measurement software to design my own system that can compete with some of the better sounding designs that are already out there. I knew I'd never get it done in time. John Krutke "Zaph" has a very good reputation for designing good sounding speakers, so I chose his budget design that uses a 5.5" Silverflute woofer and a 1" Vifa D27 tweeter. I've wanted an excuse to build this speaker for a long time, and here it was!

The first part of construction was nothing special. I rough-cut all of the pieces in my workshop with my circular saw and a straight edge. I brought all the rough-cut pieces to Dad's and cut them to size on the table saw. Every time I use the table saw I get better with it, and this situation was no different. All of my cuts were precise enough that when I assembled the box, everything went together with nice tight seams, and no overhang or underhang. Sanding was minimal on the enclosures, which is always good. The front panel was cut 1/4" oversized so that I had 1/8" overhang on all sides. This way I could trim it down with the router to ensure a 100% perfect fit. From that point on, speaker "1" and speaker "2" was labeled and the baffle stayed with the proper speaker even though the fitment was good enough that they could have interchanged if needed. Any differences from one to the next were so small that they would be dwarfed by the thickness of the veneer, poly and paint.

While working on the front baffles, I discovered that my current home-made circle jig didn't allow for small diameter cuts necessary for the tweeter, so I had to make a new improved model. Now I can cut holes all the way down to approximately 2 3/4" diameter. If I was a little smarter when I made it, I could have allowed for even smaller cuts, but I guess I'll build version 3 when I need to.

Thanksgiving came and went, and at that point I had the boxes built, the baffles were built and had the driver cutouts, but that was about it. Nothing had anything resembling a finish yet, and things weren't close to assembly. Kristin's parents came over for Thanksgiving, but I made sure I kept them out of the workshop.

After Thanksgiving I started piling up the sanding sealer on the pieces that would be painted, paying particular attention to the end grain on the roundovers. In hind-sight, it still took a ton of primer, and I think the sanding sealer wasn't really worth the effort, though it did seem to harden the wood a great deal, so in that sense I suppose it still had merit.

As I worked into the first week of December, it started to become obvious that I was going to be under a time crunch. We celebrated Christmas with her family on December 16th (The weekend before Christmas weekend), which left me a full week less time than I'd anticipated. At this point, I became a slave to the garage. Kristin prepared all the meals and cleaned up while I got back out to work, where I usually stayed until 10:00 or later every night. To make things worse, during the last week, I was battling a cold with a sore throat. The baffles & stand pieces that were to be painted black were given their final preperations and brought to Dad's shop where I sprayed them with a black Urethane basecoat/clearcoat finish. The clear flowed beautifully out of the gun and required only minimal sanding before polishing. The main areas that had to be sanded was the buildup around the driver cutouts, and a run or two here and there on some of the stand pieces. While the paint was still drying on those, I began to veneer the enclosure, 2 sides at a time to get them done as rapidly as possible. While that continued, I wetsanded and polished the black painted parts, began to assemble the stands, and covered the grills with cloth. Once veneering was completed, I put a couple coats of polyurethane on the veneered surfaces. The problem with this is that the only surface that builds up a suitably thick coat is the horizontal surface. On all of the vertical surfaces, you can't build it thick enough, and you wind up sanding through it before you're able to sand it flat. I of course learned this the hard way, and had to touch up some spots with stain, then re-varnish. This time I had to do one side at a time so that I could allow it to build up to a proper thickness, but I was running out of time. I decided that I was only going to be able to do the top and sides. The back was already thick enough, and nobody sees the bottom anyway, so it was also good enough. On Wednesday night I put poly down on the top, then a few hours later I laid them over and put poly on one side. Inbetween I built the crossovers. Before work on Thursday I had hoped to lay the poly down on the last side, but the poly on the side I did the night before was still tacky. Since I had to lay the speaker on that side to poly the other side, it had to wait. Thursday night I sanded and polished the two sides that I had already put the new coat of poly on, then I began assembly. I couldn't find my padding that I line the inner walls with, so I had to put them together without it. I got them all assembled, and brought them up for an audition.

Though they were nice overall, they certainly wasn't what I'd hoped for. bass sounded good on some things, but on Hotel California it was thick, resonant, and lacked any distinction between notes. Vocals had a harshness and an echo that drove me nuts. As far as I'm concerned, if speakers sound bad on Hotel California, I might as well throw them away because I'll never like them.

Knowing that adding the padding inside would fix a lot of what these speakers did wrong, I took them back apart and put the poly on the remaining side of each speaker, and off to bed I went at 1:00 Am.

At 8:00 in the morning I woke up with a pounding headache. I took 4 advil and 2 sudafed and thankfully, by 9:00 the headache was mostly gone. I sanded and polished the last side that I put the poly on the night before, then went back around to all pieces and re-polished with a finer compound. I wrapped everything up, but left the speakers apart since I now had no choice but to stop at Home Depot to get the padding, and finish them up on-site. I built a care package that consisted of all the tools I figured I'd need, plus a few that I hoped I wouldn't need.

On Saturday morning, I took over the downstairs bathroom and went to work. I cut the padding and began installing it. One big piece wrapped around the back and side walls, followed by 2 pieces on the top and 2 pieces on the bottom above the crossover. During the process Kristin's parents began to think I was ill, and at one time asked Kristin if they were going to need a new toliet downstairs! 2 hours later, I had them all together and was glad to finally be done... or so I thought.

To go with the speakers we bought them an Onkyo TX-SR504 receiver, and Kristin's sister gave them a Sony DVD player that I picked out. The dvd player is unimportant since I'm using it only as a cd transport. The receiver handles the D/A conversion, which eliminates the cd player from the "sound quality" chain. Thus, I chose the cheapest DVD player that still had at least a reasonable build quality and tasteful appearance. Unfortunately, since their TV downstairs is so old that it has only a coax input (no RCA input even!!), it wasn't possible to hook up their VCR and the DVD player, so the new DVD player went upstairs, and their DVD/VCR combo went back in downstairs. But, at least it was a Philips and not some insanely cheap Christmas brand. Through the coax output, the audio sounds just as good.

So anyway, on Saturday night, with a crowd of 5 people watching everything I did, along with Kristin providing a non-stop intoxicated commentary of my every move, I hooked everything up. I popped in a cd, and to my extreme dissatisfaction, there was a heavy rightside bias to the midrange. After some experimentation I realized that the mid was not hooked up on the left speaker. In my haste to assemble everything, I forgot to re-attach the leads. I popped the speaker open (Thank God I built a removable front baffle!!!), hooked it back up, and tried again. Plenty of midrange, but now something else is wrong. Now the tweeter doesn't work. Apparently I dislodged the tweeter wire when I opened it back up to hook up the woofer. Take it all apart again, hook the tweeter back up, and try again. This time everything sounded great! For the next half hour or 40 minutes, a bunch of cds were put in and out of the player, but by then I didn't give a shit and just wanted to go to bed, which we finally did shortly after 11:00.

Finally on Sunday I had an hour to myself where I was able to do some real listening to my new creation. What I heard really impressed me. The highs, while nothing spectacular, were extremely natural sounding. The midrange really impressed. It offered up a ton of detail, but not at the expense of a balanced response. Usually people mistake "detail" for too much high frequency output. It's amazing that these woofers are under $20 each. The bass response, while seeming very taught and precise, did seem to blur some bass frequencies together on certain tracks. On the Hell Freezes Over version of Hotel California, the bongo beats have two distinct tones that are only a few hz apart. On many speakers, including these, you can't tell the difference. Hopefully once these break in that will come around. With everything else, the bass sounded very natural and realistic, especially considering that these are only 5.5" woofers. The integration between woofer and tweeter was absolutely seamless, and off-axis listening made it obvious that these have a very good power response. Overall, I'm amazed at how "big" these speakers sound. My main criticism with almost all small speakers that I've heard, is that they all sound their size. These speakers don't. While they certainly don't have the dynamics of much larger speakers, they do have the full, rich, lively sound that I do not expect to hear in small speakers. John Krutke designed an amazing speaker here. In terms of improvements, I do think that a better tweeter could certainly provide a noteworthy improvement, and I think supplimenting these with a good quality subwoofer would also provide an improvement, but for what these cost, I am simply amazed. I am most amazed at how good that Silverflute woofer is.

I can't really compare these to any commercial speakers that I've heard, because I haven't really heard anything that quite has this balance of sound. I've certainly heard some better sounding speakers than these, but most of those were $5,000 or more. I remember listening to some $3,000 floorstanding Dynaudio Audience 72se speakers that I was very fond of, but still didn't have the same type of detail in the midrange that these do. I really think that if a company sold this design, that they could price them at $1,200-$1,500 and have a very sucessful speaker. Of course, for the amount of time that I spent building these, if somebody offered me that much to build them a pair, I'd probably tell them to piss up a rope.

Overall, Kristin's parents seemed to be very happy with their Christmas present. They both spent some time listening to it, and although they both have a tin ear, I think that if they take the time to sit down and actually spend some quality time with their classic rock collection, that they will find it to be an enjoyable experience, and they just may find that after a while, without knowing it, that they become good enough listeners that they'll start to really be able to appreciate not only the music, but the sound.