Indian equivalents of the following DIY items.

[s_zimble]

Hi TCP,

To answer your questions:

I am currently in New Delhi;

And I was fortunate enough to have had an opportunity to go to Tokyo for a short work related trip. While there, I ran around on a Sunday and found a shop that specializes in DIY speaker stuff. This is where I got the Fostex's. Unfortunately one of the little P700's coil is scrapping a little. You hear it breaking up a bit when playing sound through it. The other one sounds great, though. They were niffty kits that you build your self. Very instructive for me. I guess I was not careful enough on one of them. Does any one know a trick to fix this problem??

BTW, they were distributed by a DIY mag in Japan called Gallen (I think, because this was the name printed on the magnet). You might be able to find an email address and mail order them. I also saw a stack of these boxed kits in the store I bought my 103's at. I have an email/website for them too, but no one there speaks English (at least in person. Perhaps on email it will be easier to communicate).

Let me know if you're interested in this info.

Stuart

[ashok]

I have an email/website for them too

Hi Stuart,
Don't ask, just post the info.
Cheers,
Ashok.

[s_zimble]

Ok.
Here it goes:

I made a typo. The magazine, or it is more like an online shop with all kinds of strange stuff, is called Gakken. The web link for "sophisticated Science Kits for Adults"
(http://shop.gakken.co.jp/otonanokagaku/index.html)
has a link with a picture of a DIY speaker. This link
(http://shop.gakken.co.jp/otonanokaga.../sp/index.html)
shows the little P700 and the magazine contents.

The shop I went to is called Koizumi
(http://koizumi-musen.com)
you can try to email them
(tsu-han@koizumi-musen.com)

I have not try this yet, but was thinking to email Koizumi to get another P700 kit since one of my tries did not work so well. If I recall the kits were somewhere between 2500 and 3000 yen, which is between 21 and 26 USD.

Stuart.

[tcpip]

Originally posted by s_zimble
I am currently in New Delhi

Delhi is the place where my diyaudio guru, Gooroo Angshoo XOMaharaj, lives. You can see his postings here under the moniker "angshudas", and most of what I know of hands-on diyaudio has come from him. He's been building speakers and amps for 30+ years now. He stays in Gurgaon. If you want a friendly and knowledgeable diyer to chat with, you must contact him. He eats frequency curves for breakfast and draws doodles on TO3 packs when he's bored. He's currently teaching this totally unworthy disciple how to use Speaker Workshop. Send him email through diyaudio! I'm sure he'll be good to chat with --- he's one of the nicest people I've encountered through diyaudio, and I've encountered a few more equally nice people in Jamshedpur, B'lore and elsewhere.

Does any one know a trick to fix this problem??

I don't know whether such problems are fixable.

Let me know if you're interested in this info.

Thanks for all the pointers, but I think it'll be easier for me to get something from the US than from Japan. I'll try the Madisound-via-friend route.

[s_zimble]

Hi TCP.

Thanks for the tip on the Guru....I will try to make contact. I would like to learn SW as well.

As for Japan vs USA: I guess it all matters if someone is traveling and can bring stuff in. I assume that shipping would entail large customs duties.

I am also being swayed a bit by your argument to add tweeters to my FR single driver cabinets. I found a pair of JBL surface mount tweeters (2.5khz-21khz) for 2500 INR (seems a bit pricy). They look pretty good. Not sure of the sound. The biggest question is the XO (my worst fear). You made some interesting suggestions, one being that I could find some sort of stock, pre-assembled XOs that are of reasonable quality. Can you, or anyone, suggest to me where to get this type of thing? I am not sure I am knowledgable enough to build my own...yet

CHeers!

[s_zimble]

Hi.
As a reminder,
TCP wrote:
"With a 4" FR driver, you often have the luxury of xo'ing that high, in which case you can use a stock active LR4 and not bother with xo design and optimisation."

That is the stock item that I was refering to.
:-)

[ashok]

There is a speaker maker in Delhi called BOLTON . They make crossovers too. I've seen some of them.
Go to the electronics market and ask for Bolton crossovers. There is a range of them though I have no idea what all they have. If I remember right , inductors were on a iron powder or ferrite core and caps were electrolytic types.

They were not specifically made to suit any of their drivers - just general purpose types for 4 ohms and and another for 8 ohms. You could always alter the inductance values and change capacitors to suit your need.
Cheers.

[tcpip]

Originally posted by s_zimble
"With a 4" FR driver, you often have the luxury of xo'ing that high, in which case you can use a stock active LR4 and not bother with xo design and optimisation."

That is the stock item that I was refering to.

Actually, I was referring to a stock active XO. There are many companies abroad which provide kits for this, including Marchand Electronics, Rod Elliott and others. But if you get such an XO, it'll work at line level, and you will get two line-level outputs from the XO. You will then have to feed this to two separate channels of power amps, and connect the output of each power amp to one driver. Thus, for your FR driver and tweeter, you'll need one LR4 active XO, two small power amps (you could make something using LM3875 or LM3886), and connect one to the FR driver, the other to the tweeter. For a stereo setup, you'd need two active XOs and four power amps.

Stock passive XO are unusable off the shelf... they are merely toys. They assume that each driver has precisely 8 Ohm or 4 Ohm load, and moreover, that this is resistive, i.e. the impedance will remain flat across the freq range. This is fantasy... no real driver behaves this way. This impedance unevenness will result in horrible sounding speakers. Therefore, there's no such thing as a listenable off-the-shelf passive XO. The market which buys these off-the-shelf passive XO are basically the band-baajaa parties who make big boxes with 12" woofers, small tweeters, and then stick an off-the-shelf passive XO into it to ensure that some semblance of sound comes out of both woofer and tweeter without blowing up either driver. You don't want to be associated with that quality of sound, I'm sure.

[s_zimble]

4 amps!!!! My wife will kill me.

This is one of the reasons I may stick to the challenge od single drivers.

I am considering making a similar folded TQWT or TL for the JBL60 (the 6" version of the 40's). I can get a pair for RS. 1250 and the quoted range is 90hz-19khz. It would be interesting to put them through a Speaker WKSP test to see what they really are.

I also saw a blaupunkt set of surface mount tweets and a matched pair of XOs....I know, I know...passive stuff of the shelf will be crap, but I still wonder.....

Still deciding on what to do with my 103's...might stay with the pre-designed RLH that fostex recommends.

Cheers.

[Vivek]

Where do you guys buy the JBLs for home audio?