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Step 5Choose a cabinet design
Once you've selected your drivers it's time to begin planning out the cabinet. Work with your component provider to choose a box design that best matches your specific components. If you're building a kit, a box design should have come along with your drivers and crossover plans.
Box design can make a $5 driver sound like a speaker that costs $500 retail, but if it's not designed and built correctly, it can also make a $500 driver sound like it was ripped out of an old transistor radio. DIY speaker builders can't make their own drivers very easily, but we do build our own speaker cabinets, so that's where we tinker, innovate, build with care, and shine. As a result, it's the cabinet design and execution that we spend the most time on.
Cabinet design decisions start at the basics, like the volume of the cabinet, whether it will be sealed or ported, how much bracing the cabinet needs, what thickness material it should be made out of and what height the tweeter should be mounted at so that it's in line with the listeners ears.
From there, it progresses to more complex and acoustic decisions like rounding over the corners to reduce interference, building elaborate horn structures to amplify the sound, using exotic materials to further dampen resonant frequencies, line arrays to gain efficiency, mounting drivers at different distances from the listener to accommodate for the fact that high frequencies travel slightly faster than low frequencies, and eliminating parallel faces - the surfaces that create resonant frequencies, by building poly-faceted cabinets, or better, spheres, rather than the standard rectangular cabinet.
That being said, the vast majority of DIY speaker builders start with a straightforward, rectangular cabinet design that even though lacks the bells and whistles, and highly engineered elements listed above, still sounds fantastic.
An example of a MTM bookshelf speaker speaker design appears below from Zalytron.
Box design can make a $5 driver sound like a speaker that costs $500 retail, but if it's not designed and built correctly, it can also make a $500 driver sound like it was ripped out of an old transistor radio. DIY speaker builders can't make their own drivers very easily, but we do build our own speaker cabinets, so that's where we tinker, innovate, build with care, and shine. As a result, it's the cabinet design and execution that we spend the most time on.
Cabinet design decisions start at the basics, like the volume of the cabinet, whether it will be sealed or ported, how much bracing the cabinet needs, what thickness material it should be made out of and what height the tweeter should be mounted at so that it's in line with the listeners ears.
From there, it progresses to more complex and acoustic decisions like rounding over the corners to reduce interference, building elaborate horn structures to amplify the sound, using exotic materials to further dampen resonant frequencies, line arrays to gain efficiency, mounting drivers at different distances from the listener to accommodate for the fact that high frequencies travel slightly faster than low frequencies, and eliminating parallel faces - the surfaces that create resonant frequencies, by building poly-faceted cabinets, or better, spheres, rather than the standard rectangular cabinet.
That being said, the vast majority of DIY speaker builders start with a straightforward, rectangular cabinet design that even though lacks the bells and whistles, and highly engineered elements listed above, still sounds fantastic.
An example of a MTM bookshelf speaker speaker design appears below from Zalytron.
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Theres a ratio for horn speaker to developing the curve and length to make the flare. one of the most common methods for modern horns is to use a circle of r radius suspended in air at n distance with a set of ropes or chains. R and N affect the horns distortion sensitivity and frequency range. there are quite a few different types of horn enclosures. there are folded horns that are built inside of a square box with a large opening. then you have your traditional cone horns and of those you can have front loaded (the front of the speaker fires into the horn) back loaded (the horn is attached to the back of the speaker) and then you have your special cases such as the unity horn and off axis push pull systems.
anyway back to how to make them once you have the dimensions of a straight conical horn that you need you suspend the circle and then tie the chains or whatever from a center point to the outer ring of the circle. gravity will create the natural curve for the horns flare. from there you can shape wire frames to the shape of the chains ect put a spacing brace between wires to retain the ratio of expansion and then fold it up so to speak to make the overall dimensions and footprint smaller. at this point you have your mold then make the actual horn from anything you want, paper and resin, fiberglass,aluminum ect ect