DIY
customized loudspeakers built by yourself
Do-it-yourself construction makes it possible to be uneconomical to achieve grandiose results.
The pages on DIY are an excerpt from the experience and knowledge gained in several years of development work. Again and again I recognize that the complexity of the topic is underestimated or replaced by creative stories. In contrast, I try to follow an engineering approach, and to make it publicly available here for general use.
Self-construction does not need an advertising budget: the end in itself of the product is in the focus, otherwise nobody would bother to complete it.
In the hi-fi industry and many others, the problem is that advertising about a
product is more important than the product itself. This leads to the fact that
many manufacturers in the hi-fi industry need a factor of 10 between production
costs and sales price, so that they can realize the counter-financing for the
sale and ultimately for the seduction of the customers to buy something that
they rather don't need / don't want in the offered quality. This may sound
harsh, but it is the insight gained when comparing products under real
conditions - for example in a living room of any apartment. Under these
acoustically often not so optimal conditions, the differences between
loudspeakers, amplifiers and players become very clearly audible.
What is now presented here is not do-it-yourself construction with the aim of
being "cheap", but rather presents loudspeaker designs that go beyond the usual
generally known target values. These designs can be produced with a little
craftsmanship or by outsourcing the carpentry work to a specialist company
without any economic pressure and are completely and exclusively committed to
the objective of achieving an optimum result.
This target leads to the fact that all DIY projects presented here are
definitely not cheap. The site exists in the end, because up to now companies
that tried to establish themselves on the market with quality and highest
technical demands have failed. Therefore we have to speak of "uneconomical"
enthusiast projects. I could also write, I publish useless knowledge, because
there is no money to be made with it. But I also degrade the market participants
who market extremely expensive hi-fi objects and spread the advertising claim to
be "the best" or to be able to sell "the best" sound. But I also don't sit on
the throne of being able to offer the ultimate by myself, as this is a maxima,
i.e. only a fiction, thus an unattainable long-term goal. The projects here are
of real nature, therefore always provided with flaws, but not developed under
economic criteria and therefore always one step ahead of the "others".
Because there is not one right maxim and also not the ultimate loudspeaker, but
everything is always very real, there is also the fun
project for the 3d printer, despite the
claim to make it really good.
HiFi and High-End...
Let's put it this way: Actually it's all about listening to music, about nicely designed equipment and sometimes also about watching a movie in a thrilling way and being able to really hear the music and dialogues. For this purpose, there are an infinite number of small and bigger manufacturers of all kinds of things and of course an infinite number of accessories that are supposed to sweeten our music experience, especially really big cables. What seems to be less in focus now is that these are physical processes that are supposed to convert a code that is often available as a file into an "air movement". There are many details to consider until the entire transmission path works really well and all components work optimally. In order to get closer to this goal, strategies and projects are described on these pages, and for one or the other detail suggestions for implementation are shown.
The transmission path from
file to sound:
There are only a few disturbance variables in the signal processing in the
digital line, usually these are only slightly overstrained switching power
supplies, both as a dedicated power supply and as a power supply on a
motherboard or within a streaming client. Such devices are either to be modified
by experts or replaced by non-noisy ones. Of course there is also jitter, but
many people take it into account when programming and hardware design, so it is
a small problem for the Hi-Fi user.
BThe first barriers have to be overcome in the digital-analog conversion,
because industrial products have to be used, but they are almost always simply
cheap - very cheap. Fortunately, there are no patent restrictions for stereo, so
that the DIY enthusiast has the possibility to modify DACs
himself or to configure them in a way that the result is really good. For
film multi-channel sound tracks there is the patent problem, so that there are
only a few products of high-volume manufacturers available on the market and it
takes a lot of effort to modify such a product. There are already mini-companies
that offer such a service.
Fortunately, the quality of amplifiers is sometimes quite good, so that it is
not necessary to build them yourself. However, it is also a matter of luck
whether you find something useful in the infinitely large new and used market.
Therefore I decided to build power amplifiers with transistors of the same
characteristic curves, and so I got amplifiers that can play in the top class.
One of the power amplifiers I heard from others impressed me positively: the
power amplifiers were built with the amplifier boards from newClassD, which were
supplied by a power supply unit with extensive power filtering and active
rectification.
Finally, the power amplifiers are taken from the power amps to the loudspeakers,
often through crossover networks, sometimes even over long wiring distances, and
only then is the electrical signal converted into sound. On the subject of
loudspeakers, here is a brief technical essay
on the relevant factors.
A comment on cables based on measurements can be found
here.
Ball-Speaker
DAC
Совершенно
BeatBox
Technik
