The Durango '95

[Patrick Bateman]

The Durango '95 purred away real horror show. A nice, warm, vibraty feeling all through your guttiwuts. Soon it was trees and dark, my brothers, with real country dark. We fillied around with other travelers of the night, playing hogs of the road...

In this thread I'm going to document the construction of The Durango '95. It's a mono Unity horn, designed explicitly for listening in the nearfield. I'm hooking up the Durango '95 to an LCD, and I'm using it as a LOUDspeaker for videogames. It will end up looking a bit like an arcade game when I'm done...

Here's some pics of The Durango '95 coming together...

The Durango '95, an X-Arcade joystick, and the seventeen inch LCD I'm going to use.

See that tiny woofer in the corner? That's a TC Sounds *fifteen.* Yes, the Durango '95 is hyoooooooge.

The glue is still drying

Every good horn needs a phat roundover

The Durango '95 is stupid easy to build. Eigh pieces of plywood, each one measures 18" x 10.5".

[Patrick Bateman]

One of my motivations to do this project is that I wanted to have some toys outside. I've seen some people install dining rooms, cabanas, and even home theaters outside.

One problem with the plan is that I don't want to ruin the view from my living room. So I modified the foot print of the cabinet so that it uses as little space as possible.

Hopefully it will look something like this when I'm finished.


The shelf heights are from the Fibonacci sequence, and the bottom shelf is just big enough to contain the PC.


I can't make the cabinet any smaller because I have to use a full size case. The video card I am using won't fit in a small case. (Small video cards don't have enough horsepower for games.)


Here's the Unity horn in comparison to the cabinet. Yes, it's huge.


The mouth of the horn is 21" across. It has a coverage angle of ninety degrees, the same as my Summas


Because the Unity horn is conical, it has a small foot print. It will likely me mounted from the ceiling of the deck.


From the living room, the video game cabinet and Unity horn is completely invisible.

[Patrick Bateman]

Here's the guts of an SPL TD1. The Durango '95 is fairly similar, except I'm including a few changes to improve the power response.


Here's a CAD drawing of an SPL TD1. Again, *not* the speaker I'm building, but similar.


Durango '95 sitting on my tapped horn




Here's the Durango '95, along with two mids and a couple of compression drivers. If I'm not mistaken, these are the same midranges and compression driver used in the SPL-TD1 and the Lambda Unity. I intend to use a Celestion compression driver instead of the B&C used in "the real deal", as the Celestion plays higher (at the expense of power handling.)


That's a big horn



These are my reference speakers, Gedlee Summas. You can see that I've applied a massive roundover to the Durango '95, to improve the power response. I believe the roundover plays a big part in the excellent imaging that I get from my home speakers.