My Vifa/Scan Speak Project - Solen Premium kit

[conscious]

I recently bought a DIY kit from www.solen.ca, called the Solen Premium:

It's a two way bass reflex.
Frequency response 39Hz to 30KHz
Efficiency: 87db 1w/1m.
The tweeter is a Scan-Speak D2905/9300 silk dome.
The Woofer is the new Vifa Premuim Line 7" woofer the PL18WO09-08.
The crossover is a second-order Linkwitz-Riley at 2.5kHz with EQ on the woofer
http://solen.ca/premium.htm


My plan is to swap these drivers in and out of some different enclosures to see the effects. I plan to follow the kit's plan which suggests a 23L box, first do some listening and measurements and then make some adjustment to the vented enclosure. It looks like they've made it quite big to lower f3 at the expense of good transient behaviour. Later I might try a time aligned t-line floorstander or some other fun possiblities. I hope my patience and woodworking skills are up to the challenge!

Yesterday I cut my wood and soldered the crossover.

Went to my buddies with the table saw, and knocked off the wood pieces fairly quickly. The kit plan suggested butt joining the cabinet pieces using screws to line them up and glue them in place. When we did a dry put together of the box most of the seams did not line up, however. Instead, of sanding every seam until my arms fall off, I think I'll cut the tops and bottoms again - I have half a sheet of mdf left - and leave some overhang since all four sides are inset). I'll then use a router with flush bit to line the seams up better.



Soldering the crossover was relatively painless (famous last words, right) even as I've never soldered before. My buddy's dad was an electronics guy, so he had all the gear and did it quickly. I seemed to get the hang of it and working with the printed circuit board made things A LOT easier according to my buddy.



If you look at the picture of the soldered joints on the underside you'll see that the larger inductor joint has a lot of red in and around it. We scraped as much of the varnish insulation as we could, but because the wire was braided it was difficult to scrape it all off. I hope it is sufficient!



We also had to modify the washers on the terminals. The supplied bolts almost connected the two terminals and since we were concerned about shorting the circuit, we decided to use nylon washers as you can see in the close up of one of the terminal connections.



I gotta say with a few Sleeman's Fine Porter and a bag of Miss Vickie's Black Pepper and Lime chips, I had a great afternoon.

Any comments/advice for a DIY newbie?

[Bill Fitzpatrick]

Originally posted by conscious


Any comments/advice for a DIY newbie?

Yeah, quite posting 500K pictures. No way was I going to wait for 2 Megs+ of pics to load.

[joensd]

Hi,
You might wanna try THAT enclosure at one point.
I haven´t built it but it´d be a nice "experiment" for some extra bass.

[conscious]

My apologies Bill - I had intended to post thumbnails, but since I am newbie, I'm not able to see my threads immediately. Furthermore, I'm not able to edit my posts. I've emailed the webmaster to see if they can rectify the situation to prevent any further inconvenience.

Thanks for the tip Joensd, unfortunately it seems all my luck is bad today When I clicked on the link in that thread it was no longer at that address and I couldn't open the attachment.

But google to the rescue and I found it That box seems to be closer to the BB4 calculations of 14.62 litres that I came up with using the tables in Loudspeaker Design Cookbook and WinISD. I bookmarked it and I'm sure I'll give it a try, later.

Thanks and again my apologies - hope it is fixed soon.

[pinkmouse]

conscious

You have linked to the images on your own server, so you need to scale them down yourself. If you save them with the same name once you have reduced the resolution, the links in your post will not need to be changed. If you have any problems, drop me an email.

[joensd]

Thanks for the tip Joensd, unfortunately it seems all my luck is bad today When I clicked on the link in that thread it was no longer at that address and I couldn't open the attachment.

Should have mentioned that I mean the enclosure in post4 in the link I posted.

L:is the inner lenght; zd:the position of the driver measured from the top; zp: position of port from top; S0/SL: area of the line (inner); rp : radius port; Lp: lenght port; density means the stuffing of the cabinet.
(again :all inner measurements)

[jpvt68]

How does the premium kit sound?

[sdclc126]

Bill just needs to get high speed. And have some Sleeman's Fine Porter.