Reply to [DIY] Build your own Speakers

Not wanting to turn DJTT into a speaker enthusiast board (heaven knows there's enough of those) but in the spirit of MAKEing your own gear and sharing, here's some of what I've found out about building your own PA speakers. Building speakers for in-car use is also a big subject online with it's own specializations, but I've not gone down that route at all. Strictly club business here.

I'm all about the bass and I've tried a bunch of commercial powered speaker systems in the past and never been very impressed - they're optimised for "commercial" recordings and PAs for spoken word, so they have no need to cover the bottom end, whereas electronic music covers all audible frequencies. To get to the kinds of sound I like at a price that's not stupid you need to build our own. Thankfully, there's a growing number of enthusiasts who are going down the same path and the web has some stand out resources.

Amps have reached the point where 1.5-2.5 KWatt amps are easily in reach of the average Joe ($300 - $450) so there's no reason not to drive a couple of 1K drivers. All you need do is build a cabinet, and the kings of Bass are the Folded Horn designs: Rog Mogale's 186/1850 Folded Horn cabinets and the lightweight Punisher II cabinet.

http://www.speakerplans.com/index.php?id=plans
http://www.speakerstore.nl/index.php?pg=6

If you're living in Europe, lucky you.You have easy access to some of the greatest speaker drivers available in the form of the Precision Devices PD 186 and Void Acoustics V18-1000. In the US where I am, it's super expensive to get these imported, so you have to go back to first principles to find drivers that can match the specs of these monsters (EBP >= 125 and BL >= 28). That's still a work in progress (although getting a set of Caire 12" speakers for the Punisher design is looking slightly more possible if you can swallow the huge markup).

Here's a pair of 1850s in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZB8-saDLrg

A pair of subs, a pair of mid-tops, a pair of amps and a crossover, and you're good to go.