DCAudioDIY.com

Judging from Roscoe's 18" woofer unpainted ply OBs, he's totally with ya!

The real audio system is in the mind. Hardware is an ancillary tool. Many of us have heard 100s of speakers and know where in the matrix of the possible we want to explore.

DIY lets me go there, where often no man has gone before...at least not ho-bag pro manufacturers chained to the wheel of financial necessity. A DIYer can make the thing that nobody else wants--or perhaps they just don't know it it yet

If you are happy with the topologies you find in a store, there are many tested designs along those paths that you can build at a large savings over store bought and which will provide benefits that overlap with and exceed the storebought path.

At your stage of DIY-velopment, I think the learning experience will be the most valuable reward, followed by cost savings and good sound/dollar.

Really though, the cheapest and most sensible way out is used gear. Build to learn and develop, not save cash. Last year a bought a couple pairs of older Snells which cost much less than I could build them for. A pair of Snell Ks is $175 and they would cost at least $300 for a one off DIY build. For $300, I got a pair of Snell Es which would cost at least $500 to build.

But I didn't learn much new from the investment. I only got a few pairs of good cheap speakers out of it.

I get to hear a lot of very rare and expensive large scale vintage horns thanks to my business affiliation. At this stage of the game, I don't even want to own these things for myself in my own home, and good thing because I can't. The important thing for me is to have those sounds and experiences in my mental rolodex.

If you find a bookshelf speaker satisfying and you have the urge to build, spend a couple hundred, build a pair and see what you get. Personally, this is not my main thing so when I needed a pr of bookshelfs, I just punked out and bought Snell Ks. I'll sell you mine if they will get you where you need to go.

Not a criticism of you or even the speakers you cite, but I'm pretty sure that those store designs wouldn't do it for me because I have developed my tastes in a different part of the matrix. And I can assure you from long experience that most store speakers are cheap drivers in expensive cabinets and the really top models are more expensive drivers in really expensive cabinets.

I exhibited next to Totem somewhere, Munich or CES, I forget. CES, I think. They have a finely honed manufacturing and export marketing/distribution scheme. They had canned demos repeated word for word precisely every time by some dude with a Canadian accent wearing a lab coat and playing 60 second snippets of music to illustrate his points. The speakers are decent, if mundane, and skillfully engineered to squeeze good performance out of merely adequate parts and provide acceptable factory finishes at moderate price points. There is a tradition of Canadian manufacturers of this ilk. While they are good at what they do, which is running a market-responsive audio business, I'm fairly confident that a DIYer could knock out something like a Totem at a higher level of aspiration for lower cash outlay.

For decades, I have been plagued with the DIY disease that everything I really want does not yet exist in commercial form and I have to build it, but for me the planning, research, and execution and especially the exploration are as valuable and important as having the ugly-ass gear I build to listen to.

For many, though, it would be cheaper and more appropriate to just buy the Totems or B&Ws or whatever if that would make one happy. For hardcore DIYers, this is not even an option. A DIY lunatic like Roscoe would never go into a store and buy a pair of Totems. I wouldn't either...even though sometimes I should.

I'm not just trying to get good sound. I'm trying to learn and advance my skills and experience set and building is the only way I'm gonna get that.

Guy,

I was not asking which was better, as they are different genres completely. Was merely comparing capabilities, size and functionality in correlation to price. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

(Jeff

I started going to IASCA events in 1993. For the next few years I spent a lot of time and money in the car audio realm. I've probably done complete installs on about 20 cars over the years. I eventually moved on to home audio. I have a 30a 13V smps that I can use to listen to car amps in any home system, and of the 20 old school amps I have tried only 1 had better sound quality than the $30 dayton DTA-1 digital amp. As for sub amps, there are some great car audio choices, but you'd have to spend about $100 on a really nice computer power supply to run it and add that to the price of the amp and you can get something else on the 120V side that will sound as good or better. Once I heard how good a home system can get I lost most of my interest in car audio, it starts to feel like just a waste of my time and money. I also spend 3 hours a day commuting to and from work, and I still have my stock stereo in my civic. I may add something later, but I'm not motivated to really do so.

I don't know if I answered your question?

Another thing to consider, there's only 1 or 2 car audio amps that are class A, most of the tube amps we use are class A, since most of us don't need 75W to drive our home systems to "loud" levels. So for example my speakers are about 95db at 1 watt. So a 10w amp is all I should ever need in my system, especially since I bi-amp my system.
The majority of car audio amps are biased well into AB or are Digital designs that make efficient use of the power supplies they have.)



Thanks for the reply You did answer my questions even with my bad way of wording it lol- I went to CAF and was pleasantly surprised how much I liked the low watt tube amps vs the high powered amps. This probably is also derived from the higher efficiency of the speaker itself, but all in all, there were certainly more speakers I liked driven by small tube amps that large SS . The direct comparison enabled by the side by side quad rooms was pretty enlightening.

I keep getting bi amped, and bi wired mixed up. Which is which again? Most articles I find tell me how to do it, not why. What are the benefits?

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(I exhibited next to Totem somewhere, Munich or CES, I forget. CES, I think. They have a finely honed manufacturing and export marketing/distribution scheme. They had canned demos repeated word for word precisely every time by some dude with a Canadian accent wearing a lab coat and playing 60 second snippets of music to illustrate his points. The speakers are decent, if mundane, and skillfully engineered to squeeze good performance out of merely adequate parts and provide acceptable factory finishes at moderate price points. There is a tradition of Canadian manufacturers of this ilk. While they are good at what they do, which is running a market-responsive audio business, I'm fairly confident that a DIYer could knock out something like a Totem at a higher level of aspiration for lower cash outlay)

I think the part that I am having the most difficulty with is how to actually assess the gear. For example - I wanted to hear some speakers so I went to a local store. Out of the speakers they had, I liked the Totems the most. I ignored the crazy expensive stuff as I don't have anywhere near the money to buy them. The problems, as I see it, are

A - My listening room is not a perfectly acoustically treated room with a chair in the perfect sweet spot.

B. My amplifier is not a top of the line, Mcintosh that costs more than my truck.

C. I don't have 5000 speaker cables that are bigger than the cord used on the back of an commercial electric dryer

D. I don't have a 5000.00 Music server that only has DVD-A tracks on it.

So knowing this- how accurate was my audtion of the Totem speakers? It sometimes feels unless i cannot do an amp, speakers, cables, etc all at once, you never really have any idea what something will sound like. Not having the money to do it all at once, makes me very hesitant to go ahead with any component
purchases.

This is why I went to CAF- I decided I was going to listen to all the speakers I could, and determine out of the ones I liked the sound of- what components or features were prevalent among them. Other than 1 set of speakers I still don't know what they were - most speakers I liked were powered by lower watt amps - not all but most. The speakers I heard that have waveguides - seemed to have a really wide soundstage. I liked that. I found I liked tower speakers more than I liked bookshelf speakers for the most part. Just had a different lower end sound to them is really all I can say.


There were 3 - more uncommon I guess - designs that I really enjoyed listening to. One was a Hawthorne Speaker that sounded amazing, really tall and wide soundstage, was very impressed with them. The second was Gingko Claravu 7. They sounded amazing as well. The last one, still have no idea what they were, hopefully someone who went will be able to tell me. They were similar in style to the Pluto I guess you could say.

I was, and am still hoping, that hearing so many different speakers, will help whittle down the ideas for the speaker I am going to build. My thought process was to evaluate that speakers that I liked the sound of, and find a design that is similar to build. Sure it won't be the same as a 20K set of speakers, but I feel like it will at least give me a good starting point. We will see!

Biamp means using 2 amps to cover the spectrum of sound instead of one. So a lowpass amp and high pass is one example.

Conversely, biwire means running separate wires from a single amp channel to the HF & LF inputs on a speaker.



I'm not convinced there's any benefit to bi-wiring, except to the cable manufacturer... Bi-amping (or multi-amping) does have some benfit, especially to the DIY speaker builder. General benefits are that you can size the amps for HF & LF (or more) power requirements. When multi-amping (bi-amping is just the two-way specific case of multi-amping) if you drive one amp to overload, the other amps may not be in overload, and you don't screw up the entire spectrum with distortion because of the overload. Another benefit is that you can use drivers of widely mismatched sensitivity and match the levels in the amp gain. Of course, with the added complexity, you've got more places you can screw things up, so, like everything else in life, there's always tradeoffs to deal with.

Roscoe

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I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.

You might ask what is it that headphone manufacturers are able to do on your ears with even less power being supplied and even less overall weight?

We know that car stereos, headphones, home theater systems and home stereo systems can all be very enjoyable but they provide different capabilities with different environment and system/user demands. The best car stereo is not expected to sound good in your home any more than the world's best headphones cannot be used to pressurize the room in your home for adequate sound. We also know that great car audio systems have front and rear speakers and a subwoofer to play stereo but even that has less demands than the typical 5.1 home theater system, which also is capable of multichannel audio. You would never expect your car audio system to sound as good in your home as your home theater system. And finally we step up to the demands of audiophile quality stereo or multichannel systems where critical attention is used to discern what sounds best. As I said in the beginning your car stereo, headphone system, home theater system and home stereo system can all be very enjoyable but the quality, capabilities, performances and purposes are very different.

[i] I'm not convinced there's any benefit to bi-wiring, except to the cable manufacturer... Bi-amping (or multi-amping) does have some benfit, especially to the DIY speaker builder. General benefits are that you can size the amps for HF & LF (or more) power requirements. When multi-amping (bi-amping is just the two-way specific case of multi-amping) if you drive one amp to overload, the other amps may not be in overload, and you don't screw up the entire spectrum with distortion because of the overload. Another benefit is that you can use drivers of widely mismatched sensitivity and match the levels in the amp gain. Of course, with the added complexity, you've got more places you can screw things up, so, like everything else in life, there's always tradeoffs to deal with.

Roscoe


Biamp means using 2 amps to cover the spectrum of sound instead of one. So a lowpass amp and high pass is one example.[/i]


Ok, I can understand the benefit of that based on some speakers I saw this weekend, as well as some designs I have looked at.

My receiver for example- has preouts that are to be used in conjunction with a separate power amplifier. But how does one hook up say 3 separate amplifiers to one preamp section ? Also- is there any issues with mixing things? As in digital or SS preamp, with tube power amps? At the show for instance-I noticed most of the tube amp guys used tube preamps, but in researching have read alot about tubes not lasting very long in preamps.


Jeff

Easy!
The preamp output of your receiver connects to an electronic crossover, either passive or active. A good one will have a buffered input so the active circuitry and the preamp are isolated from each other, else the output impedance of the preamp alter the characteristics of the crossover network.

The crossover will have multiple outputs, one to each power amp as needed.

A far worse way to accomplish the same thing is to feed each amplifier the same signal and do the required filtering AFTER the amp (like we do with speakers). This forces each amp to produce the full spectrum and wastes power.

Electronic crossovers can compensate for phase and level (efficiency) issues. they can be analog or digital, with the digital ones being way more versatile. I bought one to do some experimenting with. It's my intention to replace it with a hard wired tube analog one, once I figure out what works (using a laptop and from the listening position !

Have a look at this http://www.behringer.com/assets/dcx2496_p0036_m_en.pdf

Stuart

Oh yeah, VINYL and TUBES RULE!

Stuart is on the mark about using the DCX2496. It is very versatile and is what I am currently using for my two systems. The only caveat I have is that the A to D conversion in the Beringer stuff has some sonic limitations. The D to A is much better. I get around that by using a USB to SPDIF converter off my laptop to go into the SPDIF input of the Behringer. The difference is not small. If you would like to try one, I can loan it to you because I have an extra that is not currently in use. Even if you were to go directly into it with an analog source, it would certainly allow you to experiment. You could then decide what to do for a permanent solution later.

Tom

Thank you Stuart and Tom for the advice and offers to help. I think before I get too far down the rabbit hole I would like to hear a few more setups that could require multiple amps. Really need to hone in on the "sound" I am looking for. Pretty hopeful about some possibilities so I'll be sure to report back !

One thing though. Would the minidsp also be an alternative ?