Vol. I No. 19

[Refer to number 10 of this series.]

As a teenager, I was reluctant to try to build my own speaker cabinets because of the convincing advertising and promotional material by speaker manufacturers.

But at this point I feel that I can very readily design speakers that will vastly outperform anything presently on the market.

While I have certain ideas for dynamized transducers (speaker/microphones) that I will build from scratch, there is much that can be done if the reader is able to obtain microphone transducers in sufficient quantity.

Factory speakers are made with wood not because it provides optimal sound, but because it is inexpensive, easy to work with, and fits the traditional sense of what furniture should look like.

Your favorite artists are recording their instruments and voices with standard mics as you see in stage performance or condensor mics that have their own power supply.

To hear most accurately the sound they create you need speakers that use transducers as similar as possible to the ones in their microphones. And as heavy as those mics are, your speakers should mount those mic transducers in something heavier than wood.

You may want to replicate the cylindrical shape of the mics in your speaker design. Lead pipe as used for plumbing would give a rough and affordable approximation of a microphone cylinder. Or you might compromise on the shape and mount the elements in a massive flat panel of, say, granite, or steel.

By selecting parallel or series wiring, you can readily ensure that your transducer array operates in the appropriate range of 4-16 Ohms.