DIY Speakers

You can make the speakers that suit your kind of music best. You may, for example, like intimate music with few (acoustic) instruments or more general pop music, like U2, or, movie soundtrack music. You may like speakers with a good stereo look, both sideways and in depth, dynamic and capable of delivering punch in the lower frequencies. You can choose to build a bass reflex enclosure as well. Or you can give your type of finish to your speakers when you build them yourself.

Since the speakers made by you are your own creation, you can also give it a name, for example, ‘Spring’ or ‘May’ to express your kind of feelings. If you have a poetic temperament, your speaker may express your idea of evolution of something new, something growing or springing out of your heart, which you cannot explain through words, but which the design and shape of your speaker can.

You can use any kind of wood whose quality you like best without having to be satisfied with whatever is offered in the market. You may, for example, like birch or oak. Birch is very hard, dense and heavy which is the same as for oak. Both types of woods have the same characteristics. Birch is much harder to work with.

There are two schools of thought in building the speaker cabinets. One is that you can build a speaker cabinet as rigid as you like. There is, however, a risk of high resonance frequency in rigid cabinets. You can also build less rigid cabinet and fill it up with some kind of resonance killing material to eliminate low resonance frequency in the cabinet. If your cabinet is of bass reflex enclosure type, you can make it as rigid as possible.

It is good to build all the boards with smaller boards put together. This type of construction prevents the wood in the cabinet from losing its shape. If you put together smaller boards in one board, the board becomes harder in places where the board is connected to another board because the pieces are held together with glue. This arrangement prevents the vibrations in the cabinet to a certain degree as the vibrations or waves cannot easily pass through a medium with varying densities.

Designing and crafting speakers can be a creative and price saving hobby. You can build a speaker set that costs around $500 for just $200. It is a good hobby for any music junkie.