11-05-2020, 04:47 PM
(11-05-2020, 01:51 PM)Diabolical Artificer Wrote: "Personally, I find amplifiers pretty boring these days" Your a lot further on Mark though, I'm only just learning about all this stuff. I'd love to do some speaker design unfortunately I don't have a grand to drop on some nice drivers, that said I found this interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKIye4RZ-5k
To be fair, you're doing stuff with valve amplifiers that I haven't. So I'd argue that you're further on than me in some respects
Regarding speakers, you don't need to spend big money on drive units. Like all aspects of hi-fi, more cash does not guarantee more performance - in fact some of the big name drive units are extremely over-priced for what you get.
I just play about with whatever cheap driver I have on hand. A while back, a friend gave me an 8" Eminence PA driver (thanks, Guy!), and I've had hours of fun with that. I chucked it in a spare cabinet along with a Vifa 1" soft dome tweeter (that was also given to me), and have spent ages playing around with the crossover design. I've learnt a lot in the process. Some iterations measured OK but sounded terrible, and vice versa. Finding out why is the major challenge, of course. I've no idea if I'll ever build "real" speakers based on these drivers - but I am tempted to buy another driver to make a compact PA for folk or acoustic stuff, or perhaps to build a pair of foldback speakers. I want to get the lathe out to experiment with waveguides for the tweeter, but woodwork is a bit tricky at home right now because I need to have a major clear-out.
The major barrier to speaker design was the measurements. Few of us have access to an anechoic chamber (although a garden and a ladder is surprisingly good, as we don't need a terribly low noise floor for most measurements). These days, free software is available, and measurement mics aren't expensive. I did invest in a Dayton Audio Omnimic system because it was reasonably priced (about the same as a mid-range Fluke DMM) and very simple - I did that to take a lot of the guesswork out of it, but I did also pick up a Behringer ECM8000 (about £30) some years previously and will experiment with getting that going with REW or similar.
Next on my to-do list is some 4" drive units that Mike gave me a few years back. As he likely has some more, I'll write up my results for the benefit of anyone who wishes to experiment with them. First impressions are really positive, and I have a few ideas for their use. Until I've measured their T-S parameters, I have no idea what sort of bass end they have, and whether they'll be best suited to a closed or sealed box, but I've been looking forward to this for ages now.
I tend to stick to small driver units because speakers take up a lot of space. And there's something quite rewarding about squeezing the best performance out of a small drive unit. I do know people who fill their cars with subwoofers (removing the rear seats in the process) and compete in competitions - now that is a seriously expensive hobby! Fortunately, we don't have the space here to think about trying anything like that.
