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The time has finally come! The moment when a speaker design has reached the stage where you finally get to install the drivers and have a listen to your masterpiece. I have to admit, I struggled through this middle phase of building these speakers. The part where I spent hours and hours tediously cutting strips of carpet pad, spray-gluing them into the cabinets, only to repeat the process with another layer of carpet pad and glue, then two more layers of a cotton/poly (80/20) blend fabric (and glue) and finally another two layers of 100% polyester batting and once again, more spray glue. This whole job just stunk. My garage was HOT (middle of summer here in AZ) the glue was sticky, it got all over everything, including me and halfway through the process I realized the glue wasn’t holding and all the pieces were coming off! Complete nightmare. I remember the days when all I used to do was cut a big piece of fiberglass insulation and staple-gun it the box and be done, 1/2 hour job, tops. (Okay, I did that just recently, but still).

So I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to do this whole multi-layer-different-material-glue job catastrophe. It didn’t help that each panel in the speaker is so compartmentalized, what with all the bracing every 4″ to 8″. Every piece had to be measured and cut to fit a specific location and then repeated over and over again. It was so stinking time consuming and honestly I have no idea if it’s any better or any worse than just putting a big wad of fiberglass in there. For the sake of argument, I am just going to say that it is better. So much better than I am super excited to get to do it ALL OVER again when I build the upper cabinets for the midrange driver and tweeter. Yeah. The fun has just begun.

So enough bemoaning, I chose this hobby, it’s my own fault. The basic idea behind the damping method was to start off with a relatively dense material up against the MDF and progressively use lesser and lesser dense materials working my way outward (or inward?). The idea being that in order to absorb the most bandwidth, I would need multiple different types, or densities of materials. There really is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to good broadband sound absorption. I started off with 2 layers of 6-lb carpet pad which makes up about a 3/4″ layer of sound absorption that I suspect does a good job in the low-to-mid frequency range. Next up I have the 80/20 cotton/poly fabric winch is also about 3/4″ thick. This was sort of an impulse buy but I liked it because it felt denser than the 100% polyester but lighter than the carpet pad. A perfect “in-between” weight for those “middle” frequencies. I used two layers on all the sides except for the back panels which has 4 layers. And last in the stack-up is the famous and favorite, 100% polyester batting. This material probably works well over a fairly broad frequency range and its effectiveness is more or less just dependent on how much you use. I lined what was left of the inside of the boxes with with another 2 layers (which looks more like 4 layers) of the polyester fill making up another 3/4″. So in total the walls are lined with this custom-fabricated, multi-layer, sound-absorbing compound that is 2.25″ thick and should have good overall acoustic properties. When you consider the wood in the mix, that’s another 1″ for a total of 3.25″ of sound-deadening, sound-absorbing action. The only thing you will hear coming from these speakers will be from the actual drivers themselves. That’s the hope anyway. It’s a concoction all right, but it’s my concoction and I like it. One day I will recreate each layer in a sounds booth or something and measure them independently just to see what it really does.

So along the way I did very unscientific sound checks with each new layer which consisted of me sticking my head in the box and singing different tones and simply listening for how much the boxes echoed or resonated. The boxes without any damping had a very apparent resonance in the mid-to-low vocal range. The lowest note I could sing, the boxes just resonated like crazy. Once completed however, the boxes felt very “dead” and had very little echo or resonance. In hind sight, I wish I had measured the cabinets throughout the process, so I’d have something scientific to back up my damping technique, but like I mentioned earlier, I hated this part enough already, add in the complexity of trying to take frequency and impedance plots along the way, I probably would have gone crazy. It seems like most people just take the trial-and-error approach to speaker damping anyway (me included) and so I fell victim to the same ploy, I guess, just out of shear laziness on my part. Sorry folks, but I will say this, this damping technique seems to have worked out perfectly in this 4th order cabinet to satisfy the requirement of “walls lined” and matching the corresponding Absorption (Qa) factor. To the best of my measurement ability, the measured frequency response and impedance plots line up very closely with the modeled performance. My plan is to carry this method into the upper mid/tweeter cabinet but instead of merely lining the walls, the entire cabinet will be filled with the 100% polyester batting in addition to the layers of carpet padding and cotton/poly blend fabric as previously defined. But since that enclosure will be sealed, and will have a high-pass active filter at around 300 Hz, I am really only looking for maximum sound absorption over a very broad frequency range and not too worried about over-damping or loss of bass response. So I am going to fill that cabinet up.

Okay, so now it’s time to drop in the drivers and the port and take some measurements! For now the only measurements I am going to show is nearfield FR and impedance plots. I have my entire setup in my garage and so room modes were apparent in all my measurements and I wasn’t in the mood to tear it all apart and re-build it outside in the backyard. That is coming, just not yet. My main thing for now was just to do a quick check on the damping and tune the boxes so everything is as close to modeled as I can get before I stain and paint the boxes and call them done. And of course just to give them a quick listen!

My measurement setup consists of an old laptop running REW 5.16, an ECM8000 microphone and stand, a Behringer 1202EQ Mixer (for phantom power) and a Denon AVR-1801 receiver (for the amp). This was the first time I had done actual impedance plots using REW and it worked out flawlessly. I love REW, it impresses me every time I use it! Thanks again to the guys who developed it for people like me. =) Impedance plots can serve several purposes: they show you box tuning, box damping, can reveal if there are leaks and of course, they show you the overall impedance vs. frequency of your speaker system. It’s more useful in that sense when combining multiple drivers and complex crossover networks, but even a simple 2-driver set-up it’s nice to see a solid 4 ohm impedance for two 8 ohm drivers in parallel.

So what I chose to do was deliberately cut the port long and take measurements with progressively shorter and short port lengths just to show how the port length affects FR and impedance. I didn’t really do any exhaustive listening tests since the speakers were being driven full-range and I was doing the measurements in my garage, which is not the final destination for these puppies. So as I mentioned earlier, the alignment I was shooting for in this design was a BE4 (Bessel) alignment according to Vance Dickason which should result in improved transient response (for a 4th order design) and has the lowest tuning of all the various alignment options. Which in a 78 liter enclosure is 32 Hz given the T/S parameters of the RS225P-8 drivers.

So what the plots show is that for every inch I cut off the port, the enclosure Fb increased by ~1 Hz. Enclosure Fb can be measured using the Impedance measurement tool in REW in addition to a 100 ohm resistor. Fb is located at the lowest point between each of the two largest impedance peaks. A more accurate way to measure Fb is to measure each peak, label them Fl and Fh and then seal or plug the port and measure the peak again can call if Fc. Then you can calculate Fb with the following equation: Fb = sqrt(Fl^2+Fh^2-Fc^2). So I made 4 measurements with the port length starting at 10″ and ending up at 7″. The tuning corresponded by starting at 29 Hz and ended up 32 Hz in these tests. This can be seen in the impedance plots below. I am happy with the 32 Hz tune for now. It represents the lowest tune that still fits within a classical alignment type and doesn’t give up too much in way of lower midbass extension. But it does not represent a flat response either, which would have needed to be tuned way up at 38 Hz with a modeled f3 of 43 Hz. That just wasn’t low enough for my liking especially considering how big these cabinets are. I’m a little disappointed that I won’t get extension into the 20’s. But that’s okay, because I already have a matching subwoofer in the plans to compliment this whole setup that will get me into the teens. So there’s no sense wasting that low frequency stuff on these little 8 inch speakers. Besides, I did get a change just to play some extremely bass heavy music (just to break in the drivers a little bit) and even with a 32 Hz tune, they can drop some extremely deep bass. At one point my entire garage was bumpin’. Of course, not the intent of these speakers, but they really sounded quite awesome.

So I ran a whole bunch of frequency response plots with the speaker in the corner and in the middle of the garage, with the garage door open, near-field, mid-field, far-field, near the top cone, near the bottom cone, near the port, etc. There’s a huge room mode at about 25.5 Hz, which showed up in all the plots. That calculates out to be exactly 1/2 wavelength at 22 feet – the distance wall-to-wall in my garage. So I left it as good enough for now and will wait to do the measurements outside once I finish the upper cabinets. The frequency plots looks very good though. They match up nicely with the predicted responses as modeled in Unibox. See the Excel screenshot above. Even the impedance plots look very good as well. The impedance peaks are a little higher in my enclosures which suggests I do not have quite as much damping as the model, but that only means I can easily go up from here and add more as needed. Besides, if I had to error on one side or the other, I’d rather be a little less damped and pick up some extra bass then to be overdamped and bass shy.

So that’s about it for now. The plan from here forward will be to start the upper cabinets for the mid and tweeter. I have finally finalized the design and am ready to start cutting wood! I’ve got the materials all ready to go, I just need a nice long weekend to get to it. Hmmm, wonder when that will be? I’m thinking probably Christmas. That way it’s cooler outside and my garage won’t be a sweat shop. Enjoy the photos until then! And of course the cheesy Google video montage.

So it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post and I’ve made significant progress on the ‘ole speaker project. I figured it was time to do a quick write-up and post some more pictures. Last I left off I had completed 5 of six sides and left all of the internal bracing exposed. The plan for damping is still in work as well as figuring out some means of measuring the enclosures in stages with progressive amounts of damping with different materials in different quantities until I achieve what I would call “reasonable expectations” with regard to resonances. Or in other words, I want to get the structural and acoustic damping “just right” and only my ears and some measurement equipment is going to be able help me get there. Which means the speaker enclosures needed to be done so I can get to point of dropping in the speakers and taking some measurements. Besides, I still haven’t come up with the perfect combination of glue/foam/carpet pad/cotton/egg crate/wool/polyfil to dampen these puppies just right.

So I left off with the second back panel, main front panel and one side incomplete. So I glued and screwed on the second side to each speaker. I then installed the back panel which is glued to the oval-patterned frame/brace which makes the back panel 1.5″ thick but not throughout the entire panel. There are oval cutouts in the first panel while the second is solid. This stiffens the back panel without adding too much additional mass and buys me over 1 liter of extra internal volume.

The front panel went on next and was measured with a makeshift compass (nail, envelope from Ace Hardware and a pencil) and cut with a jigsaw to mount each 8″ Dayton driver and the 7″ port. The driver opening is oversized by 1/16″ of an inch to allow some wiggle room for mounting each driver. The backside of each opening was routered with a 1/2″ round-over bit to provide “breathing room” for the back/rear of the driver into the cabinet. Note that the internal panel, or the first main front panel, the opening was oversized by 1″ which leaves even more breathing room for the rear of the driver. The front panel is now 1.5″ thick with a pair of 2″x3/4″ cross braces between the drivers and between the lower driver and port. The cross braces also connect to the sides as well as the first window brace internal to the cabinet. The idea here being the more braces that are structurally tied to one another, the better damped the braces will behave, and therefore the entire enclosure. Doing a simple knuckle tap test reveals just that, this sucker it well braced and solid! But it still sings like a canary since nothing is actually damped, yet.

At this point I am basically done with the 3/4″ MDF (except for the 2nd bottom piece which will go on last) and the boxes look awesome but they also look terrible! Screws and holes and glue are everywhere! There’s no way I’m going to try and putty and polish this thing up to paint it. It just wouldn’t be worth my time. So instead I did my old trick of using sheets of 1/4″ MDF panels to “finish” the speaker cabinet. The 1/4″ front panel provides the exact depth required to flush mount each driver. Then a piece on the top and back provide a super-nice and even finish which I will ultimately be able to sand and paint to a beautiful semi-shine. All those crummy MDF edges and screws get covered up in one shot. The 1/4″ MDF plus the 3/4″ MDF means the top is now 1″ thick and the front and back panels are 1.75″ thick. The enclosure is getting stiffer and beefier by the minute and not to mention, a lot heavier!

So while I was considering installing all these 1/4″ MDF panels, I decided I didn’t want a uniform finish on all six sides of this speaker. I didn’t want just an all-black speaker and I didn’t want to to have to try and paint the entire speaker and make it look perfect, because I knew I would not succeed. So the idea crossed my mind to use a real-wood veneer for just the sides of the speakers and then do the other 3 faces in the 1/4″ MDF. This is a design scheme that I’ve grown rather fond over the years and a technique I’ve done on several speakers I’ve built in the past. The real wood stained combined with a nice semi-gloss black should look awesome together. Plus I can stain wood only slightly better than I can paint it, or at least staining seems to be more forgiving for me. So if I can get the stained sides to look great, then all I really need to get perfect is the front and the top. I think I can handle that.

I picked up two 4’x4’sheets of 0.20″ (1/4″) Birch plywood from Lowe’s. I rummaged through the only 8 pieces they had and picked two that had some nice, unique natural wood grain patterns that I thought would look cool when finished. I cut each piece to fit the sides of each enclosure and oversized each piece by 1/8″. Each piece was glued to the cabinet wall using Liquid Nails. I applied pressure via my own body weight to press the Birch into the glue as much as possible. Once it was well seated, I popped in a some 1″ (18) gauge brads into each corner to prevent the panel from drifting, flipped it over and did the other side. Then I did the other speaker and stacked them on top of each other. I added two really old speakers I use in the garage for music along with 240 pounds worth of QuickSet concrete bags (one of which got wet from the rain and is literally a solid block of concrete). This was just enough to keep some even pressure on the entire surface of the newly glued pieces of Birch plywood. I let that dry for 24 hours before tearing my mass tower down.

This is the point where I added the 1/4″ MDF to the front, top and back. The front baffle was cut using a Jasper Circle Jig from Parts Express. This tool is awesome! Since this is a visible cut, I didn’t want to use my jigsaw, I needed that cut to be a perfect circle. With 1/16″ increments, I made some practice cuts to pre-fit how much gap I wanted between the edge of the frame of the drivers and the edge of the baffle. One size was too big, so I dropped it down, then it was too small, so I picked a spot right in the middle. Perfect fit! The overall size ended up being 0.031″ larger than than driver (or ~1/32″) which leaves about a 0.015 inch gap all the way around the driver. This gives me some wiggle room to fit the driver as well as some room to grow from paint/polyurethane. You can see from the pics though, the fit is perfect, if anything I went too small and drivers won’t fit after I paint them! I am going to have to be careful and watch that inner diameter. I may even need to mask it off after a certain number of coats to keep it from being undersized when I’m done.

Anyway, I used liquid nails again on all the 1/4″ pieces mainly because the viscosity of Liquid Nails is so much thicker than wood glue that I have a much better chance of controlling the squeeze out. The reason this is so important at this stage is because both of the enclosure sides have that beautiful Birch ply finish which does not take kindly to a smattering of runny wood glue. Since it’s only Birch ply, the actual Birch is extremely thin and doesn’t give me much option to sand down/away any place that the wood glue would have touched. With the Liquid Nails I can ensure that the Birch is untouched while the other panels are being glued in place. Even then I still covered the Birch with 2″ blue painters tape, just in case. The old speakers and 240 pounds of concrete sat on top of the speakers for another 24 hours while all the 1/4″ panels dried in place. Again, the 1″ brads held the panels in place to keep them from walking while it was drying.

So now that all the panels are installed and dry (and they aren’t coming off, ever), since I had oversized all the pieces, I needed to use my router to trim each piece flush to each side. This was accomplished using a 1/4″ flush bit and a router. I took the router to each side and zipped along its edge at just the right depth so as to only trim the MDF without touching the Birch. Once complete, this left a perfectly flush edge on each side of the speaker from the MDF to the birch and the MDF to the MDF (front-to-top-to-back). Oh yeah, I had done this already to the Birch plywood before installing the 1/4″ MDF since it was also oversized when installed. That was made near-flush to the 3/4″ MDF leaving some room to account for the thickness of the Liquid Nails (about 0.015″).

I am almost done at this point but there’s one more finishing cosmetic touch to add, and that’s the 1/4″ 45° chamfer on all the 1/4″ edges. This look, I have to admit, I borrowed from the VR-5’s but it really does give the speakers just a little bit of extra class, something notable, something different, that overall fits the look and style of this speaker perfectly. I will still have to seal this edge, since it’s just MDF, but having that angle to it on each side meet at a point at each of the four corners just looks…so cool. Totally subjective sure, but for the cost of a 45° chamfer router bit and the 20 minutes it took to router it, in my mind, it was well worth it. From a baffle edge diffraction perspective, a roundover would have had less diffraction than the 45° chamfer but it’s still better than a 90° edge. And in practice to get any significant benefit or reduction in edge diffraction, the roundover needs to be quite large, which in my opinion, ruins/changes the aesthetic of the speaker. Arguably the upper frequency limit of these cabinets will neither benefit nor suffer from edge diffraction effects but I intend on carrying this design into the upper enclosures which will run all the way to 20 kHz. So it’s at least important to keep it in mind. The overall shape of the upper cabinet should help with diffraction effects also, but I’m getting off topic, and ahead of myself.

So with that, that’s about it, I’ve reached by 1000+ word limit so it’s time to just put up the rest of the pics and let them tell the rest of the story. Enjoy!