Speakers Buying VS Building VS Upgrading

Long story short, build if you like doing that and have the facilities.
Buy if all you need are the speakers and don't want to wait or work at it.
Upgrade an old pair if you like to tinker.
But the takeaway is that each of these isn't going to give radically different results. Working within a price range will make all of these options come out pretty much the same.
You can buy really good speakers ready made for very little money, just like you can build a pair that will sound great for around the same cost (minus equipment and your time). And upgrading can be worth it if you keep your expectations within reason and do it properly.
There have been hundreds of thousands of pretty good sounding speakers made in the last 50 years, so buying a used set and leaving them as is certainly isn't a bad choice.
Speakers are important, but they will always sound better in a good listening space. If you are really interested in the best sound quality, you cannot ignore the room.

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[IBuildIt]

Long story short, build if you like doing that and have the facilities.
Buy if all you need are the speakers and don't want to wait or work at it.
Upgrade an old pair if you like to tinker.
But the takeaway is that each of these isn't going to give radically different results. Working within a price range will make all of these options come out pretty much the same.
You can buy really good speakers ready made for very little money, just like you can build a pair that will sound great for around the same cost (minus equipment and your time). And upgrading can be worth it if you keep your expectations within reason and do it properly.
There have been hundreds of thousands of pretty good sounding speakers made in the last 50 years, so buying a used set and leaving them as is certainly isn't a bad choice.
Speakers are important, but they will always sound better in a good listening space. If you are really interested in the best sound quality, you cannot ignore the room.

[Aswaguespack]

I took on the upgrade path years ago with an old pair of KLH speakers I had basically in storage. I had gotten rid of an expensive set of a popular big name speakers. I replaced the capacitors with new modern quality capacitors and replaced the cheap iron core inductors with same value air core inductors (I did not go overboard on inductor selection but chose one that would represent what I thought was an upgrade but stayed with a modest value replacement part) the speakers had a cloth roll suspension on the cone so I retreated the suspension and I replaced a busted dust cap on one of the drivers. I replaced the gasket material around the woofers to reseal the box. I left the tweeters alone. I did add some reinforcement to the physical box itself. The end result was very satisfying. From where the old speakers were to the upgrade was an audible improvement and it was a fun and extremely satisfying experience. Minimal cost and a positive end result.

[edwardasmannjr.]

I appreciate your content John. I hope you are enjoying making it because I enjoy watching it, and learning from it.

[wattspeakers]

John, this was a fantastic break-down! I especially appreciated that you covered the older speakers!

[haycrossaudio]

Great video John. Touching on many speaker options. Glad to hear your opinion on listening vs measurements. You have the same views as myself on that. Measurements are important and we both use them but listening is the main goal. After all we use our ears to listen and not a PC screen. Great video

[joesimpson]

I have been watching your woodworking videos for a long time and somehow did not know you were the same great teacher when it comes to all of this cool audio stuff! I have only started looking into getting a home theater setup in my bedroom that can also play records (I do not have a record player - or records [two on the way!]) and do streaming. I am by no means an audiophile but I would very much like to find the sweet spot at the crossroads of DIY/cost(value or getting the biggest boom for my buck)/having something that will work great for a long time. Right now, I am in the learning phase. I do not mind spending time building things and spending money but I don't want to buy marketing, I want what I pay for to be great. I am so excited to be learning from you! Thank you for sharing what you know about this stuff and thank you for "keeping it real" when it comes to what matters vs. what marketers say is real or important.

[peterdoe]

I upgraded the speakers I bought in 1977 in the early 8ties: I replaced the 4 meters of 2x0, 75mm² cables with 2x4mm² (short as possible and into the box, onto the speakers) in one box, first. Compared it to the original with 3 of my friends. Worked! So I did the 2nd one, too. Next I replaced the original sheet of foam material inside with sheep wool. (The foam would have disintegrated by today, anyways.) That took a bit. Again: 4 people listening until we found the right amount of wool to please us all. Those speakers are still standing in my brother's living room in the US.
Found a pair of these speakers used, later on. I wanna copy/upgrade the crossovers by changing all capacitors to MKP/MKT.. whatever with matching them to 1% difference. Leaving the coils as are. But after all these years, that should be an improovement. And I do have spare chassis, if one @ my brother's should fail.
We did listen to my upgraded ones once in comparison with a much more expensive pair from a highly recommended manufakturer. And found high- and midrange on mine better. Just found one of the famous tweeters offered for 200€. I just bought a pair of "my" speakers (smaller sibling, but with the same chassis for high and midrange) for 30€. Bargain ;-)

[norm]

Haven't watched your channel for a long time, but enjoyed to see this video to pop up ❤

Electronics lying all around ... that's why my wife gave me and our youngest one for painting our own room in the new flat.

[cleatuslewinda]

I would love to see a video or series from you that shows the design process of a simple set of bookshelf speakers. How you select drivers, size the boxes and make aesthetic decisions.

[rompdude]

I brought some Elac speakers back in like 2000, they have been great. They weren't hugely expensive and I still have them to this day.

[BostonMike]

I have been designing my own speakers and for the money if you can take the time to learn they can't be beat and I am a carpenter so I make them look like furniture. But I did run into a pair of ADS for $75 and those were a steal. I have bought other older speakers like khl before I knew how to design crossovers and took a gamble and bought a remade crossover from Dayton audio and it improved the sound by 90% the caps do shift and most of those old crossovers just threw a cap on the tweeter and that was it and they let the woofers roll off so it was a huge difference. As far as new speakers I actually bought my first pair of new speakers the Sony bookshelves that were hyped up. That's right before I designed my first pair. My first pair I built on a budget and used free hard maple from some furniture I found on the road and they sounded so good that I sold the Sonys and decided to spend some money and build my reference pair and I spent almost $800 not included wood which was MDF with flooring adhesive and solid.75 oak over the MDF and those speakers just blow my mind how good they sound compared to anything I have heard. But if took a lot of time to learn I become obsessed when I want to learn something and I have carpentry skills and tools so it helps. But for the $800 for the ones I designed they would cost a lot more in the thousands if you could find a company to build you something with that much love put into it. That's the other thing when it's yours and you take pride you go extra and like John said the companies are on a budget they use cheap components . Definitely designing your own can be the best but I have also have seen people that have been designing speakers much longer than me and they can't get a speaker and crossover to sound right so idk. I some people have that talent and most don't

[jpz]

I built my last speakers when I lived in a small apartment. I asked the lumber yard to ruff cut the mdf. Then I made the rest. When I moved out I found a lot of mdf dust from all the routing I made even thou I had a vacuum. But the speakers sound great. And yes I was single at the time. 🤣

[mfkhometheater]

Age 57? You're still young, I've been designing and building my own speakers almost that long, I'm old. I have a fellow speaker design/building friend in Palo Alto CA that is 94 that tells me I'm still young. Your video provides good accurate advice, very good job!

Designing your own speakers is easier today than in the past. When I started we didn't have free software measurement systems or CAD software for passive crossover design. We didn't have PC's to run such software on, we didn't even have pocket calculators.

Like you mentioned REW is free and adequate calibrated microphones are available for $100 or less. I suspect there are passive crossover design software packages that are either free or reasonably priced. I've been using LspCAD for crossover design for years so I haven't really looked to see what less expensive options exist but I'm sure there are some.

Building your own speakers is a fun and rewarding hobby, I once built a pair of bookshelf speakers in a hotel room that I lived in for a year in Taiwan so not having a woodworking shop is no excuse not to build🙂

[Cakebattered]

On the bottom of the price scale, just buy. On the upper end of the price scale, build. When I include the value of my time, I can't build a pair of speakers below $500 significantly better than store bought, because my personal time is very valuable. That said, If you have a $5000 DIY parts budget, you can build some speakers that rival many of the the $20k+ models. The only way I would recommend upgrading a store bought loudspeaker is if someone else did all the measuring/testing already, and posted their modifications online for you to copy. Another aspect of the build/upgrade path is aesthetics. Audiophiles pretend looks don't matter to them, but anyone in HiFi sales will tell you it absolutely matters. If you have some woodworking skills, upgrading the aesthetics of a store bought loudspeaker is a much more worthwhile endeavor than trying to improve their sound.

[chinmeysway]

glad ya like those Elacs. been liking them too for normal non ocd listening

[JoseGarcia-oomc]

Greta video, I have a pair of Avid 103 that I bought in 1976, and I like the way they sound, maybe I will try to fixed the one tweeter, thanks

[bobb]

For the last 40 years, I have been down the DIY speaker building rabbit hole (measurement mic, WinISD, WinPCD, ARTA, SOUNDEASY, REW, etc.) and there is no way I would ever buy a pre built speaker now. But I also see that this is certainly not for everyone. If your viewers want to buy new, the best resource is Erin’s Audio Corner. If you want to upgrade an existing speaker, then GR Research is good. While I think Danny probably over rates his replacement parts, his measurements and analysis are generally spot on.

But I am getting older and I just got my first hearing aids the week. Like you, I was not thrilled with the initial results. Hearing aids are largely just equalizers, but they do add a lot of DSP to make speech more easy to understand beyond just boosting sounds around 3k to 4k hz. But I certainly don’t see how they justify the mid four figure price tags them. I am interested to see your hearing aid project if you care to share it. Thanks for all you do and keep posting.

[Derek_Lark]

As a young engineer I trained under Neville Thiele, speaker design was a passion and hobby for him. A wonderful gentleman.

[emo.]

I'm a tinkerer. I love to take things apart, figure out how they work and try to make them sound "better", even going so far as to pull drivers out of their original boxes to repurpose them in new projects. I now acknowledge that I have an issue with hoarding speaker drivers and crossover components, but I've had worse vices. Heh

[Riddhi]

I started with a 8inch speaker (that was it one-way) then added a tweeter.. then added midrange driver. Then added a subwoofer.. but never went with a super tweeter.. i can't hear that probably..


Oh yeah all of them are driven by different amp( hmm active filtering with dsp now. Previously it was analog)