You too can have the best loudspeakers in the world

Speakers not audiophile enough? *You* can have the best loudspeakers in the world. Watch the video and find out how...

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Disclaimer: Videos on this channel may include affiliate links and may feature software that has been received free of charge with an NFR (not for resale) licence, equipment that has been loaned or donated by a manufacturer or distributer, or equipment that has been bought for less than full retail price.

[johnpickard]

You have just unlocked a stream of memories. Back in the mid 1970's I made a matched pair of stereo speakers bought from Wilmslow Audio. I fetched them myself. They were KEF kit 3s, three drive units. With help from a mate we built them in my Dads garage, and of course they were the best speakers in the world, and I have still got them!!

[eddents]

So spot on!

I'm still chasing to relive the sound that came from the Altec Lansing 12" woofers I built cabinets for that had horn tweeters with exposed crossover components that sat on top of the enclosures. Those speakers rocked all the houses I inhabited during my college years. I eventually sold them to a rock band, since they were too large to fit in my car when I left school. Now I'm thinking it was the memories of cranking tunes outside on big grass lawns with a keg of beer, a bushel of oysters, throwing the Frisbee with friends and smiling at the coeds in cut off shorts walking by that makes me think that no other speakers have sounded as good as those Altecs. In reality, I'm not chasing an improved sound, I'm chasing the youth of my past.

[markconnell]

With a fondness that can only be born of nostalgia, your video reminded me of my years during the 1980s aspiring to construct the ultimate "high-end" speaker system. My Bible was Edward T. Dell, Jr's Speaker Builder magazine. With my favorite issues of this invaluable resource dog eared and highlighted to near oblivion, I time and again struggled through the arcane stages of cabinet and crossover design, parts purchasing, woodworking and finishing. At the zenith of my hobbiest years I once mounted an 8" polypropylene woofer into a rosewood transmission line cabinet supporting a curvilinear electrostatic element with a passive 6 dB/octave crossover. Considering my total cost was little more than $200, its successful comparisons to an early 1980s Magneplanar MG-1 owned by a close friend convinced me that I'd indeed built the best speakers in the world.

[ctbcubed]

What you say is so true!

I've never owned "store bought enclosures", but boy have I built quite a few different cabinets. I started out with single 12" "full range" speakers in a very pleasing sized box but way too small to get the bass performance I wanted. This was when I was around 16. Then I read about bass reflex cabinets and cut some ports into the too small boxes. The bass was better, but everything else sucked.

A new neighbor moved in next door and one day I heard the most magnificent loud and clean sound coming from his house. I got to know him and it turned out he used a wall in his living room as an infinite baffle. There was a large open stairway on the back side of that wall. Each channel had 2 EV SP15 speakers and an Altec 500 Hz horn. I'd never heard anything like it before. The sound levels he could achieve were unbelievable and I'm surprised nobody called the cops...but he was a cop, so maybe that's why. Sometime later, he decided to replace the SP15s with JBL LE15s and sold me 2 of the EV speakers for next to nothing. This was in 1967.

I used a guide from Electrovoice to "design" properly sized bass reflex cabinets. I was just out of high school and living with my parents at the time. My dad and I cut up the wood and built my cabinets, which were huge. I had them in the basement and when nobody was home, I cranked them up. These were the best speakers I'd ever heard, with the exception of the neighbor's infinite baffle driven with all McIntosh gear. I brought my girlfriend (now wife) over to hear them and she proclaimed them to be the best speakers she'd ever heard.

After we got married, I build a listening room in the basement of our new house. It featured an infinite baffle with 1 SP15 and 1 Altec horn on each side. Now these were the best speakers in the world. I had also built my preamp, power amp and electronic crossovers from scratch and they were the best too.

When we moved to our next house, there wasn't any wall that could be used as an infinite baffle. Someone at work showed me a catalog from a company in Seattle that offered various speaker kits as well as plans. Speakerlab was their name and they offered a set of very detailed plans to build a clone of the Klipschorn as well as a kit. This was a woodworking nightmare from hell with all the compound angled cuts and many pieces to make the folded horn. A pair required 5 sheets of 1/2" plywood and 2 sheets of 3/4" walnut veneered plywood. I bought the plans and built a pair. They were beautiful and looked just like the real thing. I used my EV SP15 in the bass bin and the Altec horn along with a new EV tweeter. These now were the best speakers in the world and even my old neighbor with the infinite baffle said so when he heard them. The only problem was that when friends heard them, they wanted a pair too. I think in total I built 5 pairs for other people. This was in 1978 and I still have them today. They're now bi-amped with home built electronic crossovers and lateral MOSFET power amps. My most recent upgrade was the addition of DSP equalization. I'm old now and I know there are better speakers than mine, but the built in low pass filters in my ears probably couldn't tell the difference.

[svtcontour]

Been doing this for years. DIY speakers have changed my world. Buidling speakers especially suited for the environment they will be listened to makes a world of difference.

[guennadiyf]

You too can have the best Youtube channel in the world - yours

[ernieschatz]

I built kit speakers when I was high school. They were from a Seattle company called Speaker Lab. I liked the company because the built their own speaker components included spinning the voice coils and magnetizing the drivers. I built the cabinets in the wood shop at school. They were nothing fancy; just 2-way speakers with 8" woofer, dome tweeter and sealed cabinet of the appropriate volume. I ran them from a vacuum-tube integrated amp with about about 25W/channel, but the setup actually performed better than what most kids my age had. I actually don't remember much else about the system. I don't even remember what I had for a turntable, but remember playing nothing but vinyl. :)

[bb_lz]

That was the most fun I've had watching a YouTube video in a long time! Thanks for sharing!

[garywells]

My first speakers had twin eight inch co-axial drivers. They weren't good. Then I built a pair of speakers using Isophonic drivers from a junked Telefunken console stereo. They sounded amazing. A while later, I acquired a pair of Altec-Lansing 515's and built a pair of A 7 bass horns. I added a subwoofer, which I built using two JBL fifteen inch drivers. I own the best speaker system in the world, or so I think.

[Sarge_]

So many comments to dig through…assuming people have already mention using it and was great to see it in the description. But I also got my start using “The Loudspeaker Design Cookbook” by Vance Dickason …. No idea what version they are on now…

I used it to design and build subwoofer boxes for cars…. Sealed, ported, band pass ….. all that jazz. MDF was hard to come by those days.. early 90s…

Thanks for the great walk down memory lane

[taijkon]

I just love this. Starting in the early 70:s with no money and big dreams. Many speakers have past and now i'm planing to build my last speakers, a pair of JBL L250 copys.

[SaschaSelke]

I just discovered your channel, and I love it. What I cherish the most is your down-to-earth, no-bullshit attitude. Thank you, and kudos for that!

[kevinsmith]

Excellent video. Thank you sir.
Ahh, the memories… my Dad had a workshop with all the tools (radial arm saw, drills, fasteners, etc.). I managed to order a book on how to build speakers (this was the 70’s - pre- internet obviously).
I perused the information and came up with a design. I reused some Radio Shack mids from a friends old speakers, bought a Phillips Dome tweeter and an 8” woofer from somewhere. I don’t recall where i got the crossover from.
Anyway, I assembled the cabinet, gave it a beautiful finish and framed and covered the speaker covers with some material I found in my mother’s sewing room.
They looked fantastic!
I installed a 1” strip of wood on the front underside of the speakers so they would sit tilted slightly back.
Excitedly I hooked up my 20 Watt Realistic (a Toshiba that sounded like 50 Watts) amp, put a record on my Dual 510 and…
They did not sound as I had hoped/ dreamed.
The bass was completely anemic. Mids and Highs were ok.
The point of my long ramble is that no matter how disappointing the results it was a very satisfying venture.
I then turned my ambitious thoughts to building a pair of 12” Karlson (open baffle) Enclosures. I even managed to get the plans. (I still have them somewhere although they can be found via a brief google search.) Alas, I never got around to building them.
My son has excellent woodworking skills so perhaps one day soon we could build a set together.
And just maybe he too will get to experience the joy of building your own speakers no matter the outcome.

[avirdee]

Very refreshing. Thanks. Built the transmission line PRO-9 monitors from Wilmslow Audio about half a century ago! Gave a very good result. Everyone was very impressed because until then no one had a concept of what Hi-fi is all about. Been listening to transistor radios! PRO-9's eventually were discarded due to moving around.

[Astronomator]

Thanks for the great video. It brings back memories of my subwoofer construction.

The only speaker I've built is a subwoofer, back in the 1990s. It has a very nice driver, and the cylindrical "cabinet" is a two-foot-diameter Sonotube--a cylindrical concrete form used to pour footings for construction foundations. Though it's made of cardboard, the Sonotube is exceedingly thick and heavy, able to provide structural integrity. And its cylindrical shape ensures that there will be no flexing of the cabinet as sound pressure rises and falls inside the cabinet (since such a response to pressure would require the walls of the cylinder to stretch rather than flex, which even heavy cardboard is not willing to do), which is something you need to worry about when building speaker cabinets with flat surfaces that may flex under pressure.

I downloaded a public-domain computer program that calculated the length of the port needed given the cabinet dimensions and a few speaker specifications. I made the end-caps for the subwoofer out of 2.5-inch solid oak, put the speaker in one, and a six-inch-diameter PVC pipe (the port) in the other. Standoffs (legs, essentially) allowed the speaker to point down, while the port pointed up.

As a final touch, I covered the cardboard tube with black cloth and stained the oak plates to match the room's decor. It stands over four feet tall and sits nicely next to the screen in my home theater.

And just as you'd expect, it is absolutely the best subwoofer in the world.

[diatonicdelirium]

When I was younger I had to have a pair of Pioneer HPM-100 to have a great bass. Loads of tinkering with the electronics of the (then) 25 year veterans to try and get the best sound out of it -- and yes, that did involve a new cross-over design!
A few tears were shed when I sold them, these beasts were simply too big for my room, but good memories all 'round.

[juliopena]

I must say that it’s refreshing to find and old fart, like me, who started this journey in the 70’s. You are much smarter of course. My first speakers where Crazy Eddy’s Acoustic Phase, which were garbage. Then I made my own which were better. After that I have got speakers like: EV, Altec Lansing, Infinity Slopes, Infinity Kappa 9, Roger Studio one and now B&W. Nothing like those I made. Thanks for the memories Sir.

[m.j.s.]

I built a pair of >6 ft. Voigt pipe speakers this year. Wonderful project. Love ‘em.

[JorgedeLumiarFerreira]

Your videos are pure joy. Can´t wait for the next one. On this particular topic, there is no way I would ever venture into building a pair of speakers (kit or no kit), but if I did, it would surely be due to your compelling arguments...

[richardcarr]

I built my own car stereo setup with my choice of drivers and tweeters Also made up my own crossovers using charts and books I found on the subject Not bad results but I always learned something new which I love to do still. Still amazing alpine demo TA with dozen 6x9s in the rear prior to subs coming to the forefront of car audio I still believe it would rock today 😁🎵🎵