B-Spoke B-Speak

[Bespoke]

Hello all. Nice place you have here. I suppose I had better introduce myself.

My name is Andy and I live on the south coast of the U.K. I used to work for Rogers (Swisstone Electronics) back in the 90s as well as doing R&D for Cerwin Vega around the same time. I was close friends with the crew of CV back then and they used to call me "The blow it up Brit". I've always been passionate about audio and used to like to combine audiophile with loud. More on that later..

In 2001 I moved to the U.S.A to marry and sadly decided to leave a week after 9/11. Due to this my Visa application was lost and I ended up in a four year fight with immigration. This caused me to be short on money so any gear I had needed to be sold off. Then when my Visa was sorted out I decided to load up my car with very expensive AV equipment (Clif design, Phoenix gold (Zeropoint and MPS) and so on. TVs, 10" screens and so forth. I got divorced in 2008 and decided to come home, ripping some of the stuff out of the car before doing so. B-spoke was a project I was due to begin when I got back but sadly a week before leaving I crashed said car and damaged two vertibrae. Thankfully my cousin donated me his old hifi (Mission and Sherwood) and I have made do. Until now.

I have began collecting power tools as finances will allow and finally have all of the parts I need for B-speak. Hopefully if anything this may give some people an idea of what they can do with their old equipment !.

The design was simple. Take an incredibly expensive set of parts that were removed from my old car and design and build a portable audiophile stereo. One that can be picked up and taken from room to room or even out onto the patio (weather permitting of course).

The parts I have are -



A set of Tannoy terminal crossovers. A friend of mine donated a set of Tannoy 6es but the woofers were split (plastic). I didn't want them any way.

An Infinity head unit that looks plain and simple but sounds divine.



A set of Fujitsu Ten (Eclipse) Point Reference 6x9 components. These are the rev 1 (far more expensive than the inferior rev 2)



The tweeters that came with.



Rev 1 uses titanium domes and Rev 2 used cheaper silk domes. The rev 1 are also far more substantial and handle bucket loads more power.

A set of Tannoy tweeters.



A 30 amp Delta Electronics computer power supply.



A set of Infinity reference grilles.



And a Tannoy stand filled with rocks and sand

So now with parts in hand I set about preparing them for use. Out came the solder iron.



Tinning some cable.



Refitting the clips for the Tannoy tweeters.



Then I modified the crossovers so that the woofers are on the bottom biwire set of terminals and the tweeters (4, running 6 ohms total per channel) on the top channel.



Then I stripped apart the grilles and began to paint them in satin black. Sadly I ran out of paint and I am still waiting for my order



Sand fill and repair the stand before coating it with red oxide primer.



And order and tin the cables that will be used from the stereo into the biwire terminals. For this I chose QED.



Then it was onto the test phase to make sure that everything behaved and worked as it should.



The unit is 4 channel. I have the tweeters running from the front channels and the woofers from the back. This will allow me more than just the bass and treble controls. Here is the unit in testing.

YouTube - ‪Children - Robert Miles‬‏

And then it was onto the plans. Now from memory stereo seperation is best done at least 7 feet apart (the speakers). Now obviously this is not possible, so I simply tilted the face of the design stage so the woofers would fire outward toward the listener. Obviously the stand is at the optimum height for sofa listening so that was good to go. Here was stage one of the plans.



Now obviously with years of designing and building under my belt I was a little concerned about the design. I have seen many people in the past make the mistake of not checking the tilts and the magnet on the subwoofer ended up hitting the inner wall. Another good thing about tilted baffles of course is that they are great for preventing standing waves !. The unit's woofer baffles are going to be double walled in 1/2" MDF (I still work in inches, old school fool !) and I was now growing concerned about it. So, I drew in the double walled baffle.



Took some measurements of the woofer.



And then created a scaled down woofer



Which was then fitted to the baffle.



Sweet ! turns out I hadn't lost my touch after a ten year break from building enclosures On the back of the plans are notes that only make sense to me.



So that was the plans finished, now it was onto matierials and tools (I had a power drill and a jigsaw). I ordered a 1200w lazer guided circular.



A good belt sander (for the angled pieces, god bless MDF !)



A staple gun for wadding and sound proofing.



A countersink.



Jigsaw blades.



And a decent hole saw capable of cutting larger holes. The reason for this is that the unit and power supply will be cooled with a 140mm Noctua Vortex fan. These things are virtually silent so won't interfere with the stereo sound.



And a pile of gloss roller heads for final finish. I think I will go with satin black for the main unit though. For the facia of the unit I had bigger plans. I was going to coat it with Kevlar (I like the yellow and the fan grille is gold) and whilst my budget did allow for it I was scared of messing it up. Due to the stage this would need to be done I would (by then) have the unit about 80% complete. One mistake, one error and the body of the unit will be ruined. Not wanting to take that chance I got some carbon fiber vinyl in yellow



(close to the center, bottom row) and have a liter of clear coat/ laquer to give it depth and shine.

For now that's about it. I have a work bench and squeeze clamps on order but still need quite a few pieces and parts (200 1" drywalls for example) so the build should hopefully be well underway in a couple of weeks. I will be using car body filler for filling and smoothing as it sands far smoother and grips a lot harder onto the surface, unlike wood filler !

Back with more progress soon