Needle or floorstander for car speakers?

[orion63]

Hello, this is my first post here and I am really new at electronics and audio DIY.

A couple months ago a friend gave me a pair of inexpensive car speakers he wasn't using. I bought a cheap Lepai Mosfet amplifier, constructed very simple boxes with plywood and tried the speakers. They sounded much better than I expected, so I thought that there should be better looking and better sounding designs. I started googling and ended up here.

I've been reading previous posts for a couple of weeks an realized that there was much more to speakers design than I thought. I also realized that car speakers doesn't seem to be the best choice for home applications. But there are fairly diverging opinions about how suitable are them.

So, I have the speakers, I have the wood and I want to build a pair of slender colums like the Needle or (better still) Fonken floorstanders. I understand that they were designed for specific speakers, but those are not available here in Peru and by now my budget is too wasted to import them.

The question is: can I expect decent performance copying one of those designs and adapting them for these speakers? which one may be better? Alternatives? I don't need very high volume and like to hear music as naturally as possible, not heavy loaded with bass.

The characteristics of the speakers are:
4" 3-way speaker
400 W Max.
4 ohm
Frequency: 100-20kHz
Sensitivity: 88dB/W/M
Magnet: 5.3oz
Voice coil: 25mm

Any advise is appreciated.

Thanks,

Gonzalo

[chrisb]

Gonzalo:

While many of the enclosures on the Planet10 website which derived from the original mini-onken/Fonken designs were optimized for our own particular favorite model of driver (i.e. the Fostex FE127E), there is a fair degree of latitude in the make / models than will deliver satisfying performance.

Indeed, the options can be overwhelming - I've only been involved in DIY speaker building for about 10yrs, but I think it's fair to say that there's an embarrassment of riches from which to choose.

Anyway, there are driver parameters other than those listed in your post (i.e. Thiele Small or TSP) that would be helpful in modeling their suitability for the type of enclosure you have in mind.

If not, as noted above, there are any number of relatively inexpensive wide-bandwidth drivers suitable to your application - and many of the DIYers here that are likely to proffer advice have their own short list of favorites.


Which of these would be available via international shipping to Peru, or the associated expense is another matter.

[roger_lew]

I think if you are going to all the trouble and expense of building cabinets then you might as well drop a few bucks and get some decent drivers to go with em. Just my 2 cents.

Roger

[Mungo Park]

Yeh you gotta build them, it would be intresting to see how it all comes out and you will have a set of spealers.
Cheers Ron.

[Psychobiker]

See if you can find the Thiele-Small parameters for these - this is the 'starting point' of designing enclosures, based on many things contained therein.

[human.bin]

often on the magnet or somewhere on the speaker you can find a model number or something, even if the brand is not signed you can try googling for that code and see if something comes out. if they are car-thing 3-way then the only important parameters to model a box will be the woofer's parameters.

[Psychobiker]

What car is often a pointer - Volvo's stuff is often Alpine (head units) and very good OEM speakers (I forget the manufacturer). Some Mercedes are Bose units...etc

[Glowbug]

Originally Posted by Psychobiker

What car is often a pointer - Volvo's stuff is often Alpine (head units) and very good OEM speakers (I forget the manufacturer). Some Mercedes are Bose units...etc

The premium speakers in the newer Volvos are OEM'ed by Dynaudio. Not sure what the base system is, though. My folks have an '01 V70, and whatever they used in that definitely isn't anything worthwhile.

[Psychobiker]

Aye - that's what I'm going on. I had a '96 850 T-5 that blew my socks off. Both audio-wise (with Premium system) and with 230hp!

[Glowbug]

I wish they had kept their 850. I've been working on the V70 the past few weekends, trying to fix transmission issues and bad vacuum seals...tons of things go wrong on the '01s.

Sucks because the 2.4 turbo will still haul *** at 220k miles...if the rest of the car doesn't break first