speaker design for a 100% novice

[kayjayw]

Hi everyone! A total novice here who, at the age of 43, feels ready to build his first pair of speakers. I have searched the web for a simple design, but ended up confused and disillusioned. I'd really like to build a 3-way (MTM?) small tower speaker (80cm-1m tall) that is relatively cheap in terms of components. Oh, and I have a NAD 3020 amp which only produces 20+W of power. Is there any remote possibility of achieving this desire??? This should raise a few titters at least... I know almost nothing about the technical side of the job, but I have been making things out of wood and other materials for about 25 years. I have the woodworking tools for the job, and I can solder!
Thanks to anyone who has the patience to read through all this.
Regards!

[chrish]

If you are a keen woodworker, have you thought about building the Ariel? http://www.nutshellhifi.com/Arieltxt1.html
The expensive part of this design is the crossover. I have built this speaker using a passive crossover, but my buddy built one using an active crossover (this requires 4 amplifiers). If you go this route, you could try building a pair of gainclone amps to augment your NADs (I have built a pair of gainclones with pcbs from BrianGT http://diyaudio.com/forums/showthrea...threadid=28743 very impressive amps for minimum cost)

May not be quite the solution you were thinking of, but these speakers were an interesting project from a woodworking perspective.

Good luck with your choice of project!

Chris

[Timn8ter]

I don't know what drivers are available to you but you may want to look at some Fostex designs. There are interesting floorstanding units that are simple from an electrical standpoint and sound great on low power.
http://www.madisound.com/fostex.html

[sreten]

The NAD is not a "low" power design, 40W a channel is more
accurate (but not sine wave continuous) and it can handle
4 ohm loads with impunity, around 60W a channel 4 ohm.

There is no such thing as a 3 way MTM, usually 3 ways are TMB.

2 ways are MT or MTM, 2.5 ways usually TMM, but can be MTM.

Build one of these :

http://home.hetnet.nl/~geenius/Auriga.html
http://home.hetnet.nl/~geenius/Tempo.html

the Auriga if you like it loud.

sreten.

[Leeuwarden]

Tony Gee's (geenius) designs are very good. I have heard the Hatt mk 3 and the DD-8 mk2. Both sound great.
He has made some really musical design's!

[kayjayw]

Wow! A heartfelt thanks to all of you... I shall investigate your various suggestions and get back to the forum.
Many regards,
Kevin

[Dave Jones]

Originally posted by chrish
If you are a keen woodworker, have you thought about building the Ariel? http://www.nutshellhifi.com/Arieltxt1.html
The expensive part of this design is the crossover. I have built this speaker using a passive crossover, but my buddy built one using an active crossover (this requires 4 amplifiers). If you go this route, you could try building a pair of gainclone amps to augment your NADs (I have built a pair of gainclones with pcbs from BrianGT http://diyaudio.com/forums/showthrea...threadid=28743 very impressive amps for minimum cost)

May not be quite the solution you were thinking of, but these speakers were an interesting project from a woodworking perspective.

Good luck with your choice of project!

Chris

I've got a set of Ariels. They are awesome speakers, but the woodworking would be a huge challenge for a beginner. I was lucky to buy a project that someone else had abandoned. (He had the crossover and stuffing all screwed up.)

Out of curiosity, what did you end up with for the crossover? My set is the older design (Mark II) with 9000 tweets rather than 9500. At the insistance of my "golden ear" stereophile boss, I have refrained from upgrading. I'm using the crossover pictured below, except the main tweeter cap is 5.2 uF rather than the 4.7-5.0 that's given on the schematic. I tested it with SpeakerWorkshop. The response is nice and flat, and with the tweets wired out of phase the notch is very deep. With 4.7 uF caps it sounded a bit too laid back IMO.

Back to the thread at hand... The fe107e's that I've recently done would be a very easy and cheap way to do a first project. Do a search for for "FE107e".

[chrish]

Hello Davy,

I built my Ariels using the "value" kit from North Creek. Here is a link:

http://www.northcreekmusic.com/ArielCrossover.html

here is the tweeter xover



Finished the speakers to "working" state last year, but are back in the workshop now being veneered. When they are complete I will post a picture...

Chris

[chrish]

Here is the woofer crossover:

[chrish]

Part completed Ariel project: