Is this where DIY speakers are heading?

One advantage to 3d-printig is that it enables even us aparment-dwellers to attempt DIY. And we can even have such luxuries as integrated waveguides etc that would be an impossible task (for me) to attempt to accomplish with woodworking inside an apartment.

My pair are almost done now! I hope. Still needs finishing and dsp setup etc so plenty of room to fail yet.

3d printing was a pain to get started with for me since I made many common mistakes since i couldn't find a decent guide online (didn't try that hard to be honest..) but once you get a hang of it you can comfortably attempt a multi-day print with complete confidence that it will succeed.
 

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Where SHOULD speakers be heading…..that’s the question.

The hifi industry is still in decline after 25 years of tumbling…..what remains is a niche market that appeals to the wealthy based on appearance, provenance and exclusivity.

Small and self contained…..this fits the lifestyle of most folks these days. Integration with video is essential…..eARC HDMI is here to stay…..you can stream bit perfect hi res from most smart TVs these days. Spatial audio is eating stereo for breakfast and will continue to do so.

Consumers WILL pay a premium for small, self contained quality sound devices. Look towards Devialet for direction.
 
Where SHOULD speakers be heading…..that’s the question.

The hifi industry is still in decline after 25 years of tumbling…..what remains is a niche market that appeals to the wealthy based on appearance, provenance and exclusivity.

Small and self contained…..this fits the lifestyle of most folks these days. Integration with video is essential…..eARC HDMI is here to stay…..you can stream bit perfect hi res from most smart TVs these days. Spatial audio is eating stereo for breakfast and will continue to do so.

Consumers WILL pay a premium for small, self contained quality sound devices. Look towards Devialet for direction.
Yes, if I decide to commercialize my hobby I would probably have to build something from pure business pov that would probably not be of any interest to myself.
 
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Think waveguides, faceplates, trim rings
even ports have potential for unique
custom design with printing.
Far as full enclosures...nope

That video comes up often when doing searches.
Wish it would go away.
Try not to be negative...but
So many wrongs in one build.

Few builders on YT obsessed with tiny tiny
pointless drivers. and then shoving them in
some plastic thing. poor center to center
and some absurd curly fart tube
I get it, but then again. not appealing.
might seem " magical" to viewers.
 
My next project will (hopefully) be a whopping 200 litre per sealed box pair of high-efficiency coax drivers. I just made a cardboard mockup and put it in my living room. My wife, a bit uninterested, said "okay".

Construction will be skinny ply slotted into hardwood corners, furniture cabinet panel door style. I'm even thinking about trying to get my 5 and 8 year old kids to trench the grooves in the hardwood with hand planes, much like they did on our new kitchen island bench.

For my tastes and my goals, 3D printing or 3-axis routing will never be my preferred construction style. Tiny speakers will always have a place.... in my headphones.
 
Here is interesting tidbit to all budding diyaudio builders. This box below I posted earlier was originally made entirely using one single glorified drill machine called Dremel like some 10 years ago. Nothing else. The mdf is like 3/4 inch. Would not recommend now, but shows what little motivation can do.

bafflemod2_cr.jpg
 
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The acoustic character of the room/speaker interaction doesn't go away with EQ. All you do is ride the wave of the problem and skew the averages. On the other hand if a speaker also needs legitimate EQ, you may see areas of improvement.

The two are easily confused.
I agree whole heartily. If DIY really should evolve. It would not just be because of 3D printing. But IMO, because proper measurements and simulations has become more easily available. I'm to this date, still surprised of how much of past engineering and scientific hardship, has been cast aside in many constructions, in the name of "romantic" sound and fence jumping with some automated measuring techniques, instead of going to the source of the actual choice of the drivers, cabinet shape, filtering and layout. Luckily, there is a growing understanding and honesty about what is really going on. Even though it should actually not be a surprise to begin with.

No technique has even been fully successful, unless its origin and principle is better understood - along with its challenges and shortcomings.

As an example. Look at the work from Hifijim and Augerpro. They openly simulate, design, test, theorize and present their findings and constructions - with the possibility to ask directly as well. In my view, this is what DIY really benefits from. It's within reach of normal people, and you can easily see the connection between actual practical examples and theory 👍
 
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> Is this where DIY speakers are heading?​

To a fair extent yes but with a few qualifications.

A speaker hobbyist would almost certainly have put that level of effort into a speaker with better performance.

A stage that seems to be missing that helps with maximizing the advantages of 3d printing for DIY and minimizing the disadvantages is detailed numerical simulation. We can see this already with waveguides where BEM simulations are being used to optimize the smooth shape to get better performance in a part without the disadvantages of 3d printing intruding significantly. It is easy to see this extending to optimally shaped curved and ribbed baffles though I am not aware of DIY examples yet. Anyone?

There are rarely advantages in complex shaped cabinets (but I can think of one or two so not zero), the mechanical properties of typical 3d printer materials aren't optimum, the time, cost, printer size,... for full sized cabinets is problematic. Can't see it being widely adopted beyond the baffle for full sized DIY speakers except for a few parts and help with molds.

Digital signal processing is a requirement to get the transfer function required for the highest technical performance. It might be more fun working with a few 6 dB/octave chunks, fixed time delays, etc... to see how close one can get to the required transfer function but it is inflexible, time consuming, costly to end up with a result that deviates a small amount audibly from the target. It may be the dominant approach today among speaker DIY folk but that is changing and it almost certainly won't be in a few years time. I don't think it will disappear completely but become a specialist interest like like valve amplifiers, record players, and similar where high fidelity in a technical sense is a secondary rather than primary concern.
 
Why would one need a fully sized cabinet, or a baffle for that matter? 😉 speakers should be designed acoustic performance first, with underlying target in room interaction while always taking account hearing system. After realizing this I've been talking about construct instead of a box. Simulating various baffless quickly shows that no baffle is best baffle, for example.

A speaker box is a box because that has been traditionally easy to build. Building boxes and baffless is legacy in my opinion. Although nice entry point for ease and continuation of long tradition and provides fine results, but is nothing more than shortsightedness in year of computer simulation and additive manufacturing. Today it's as easy to build any shape, as it is to build a box.

Well, as pointed out earlier perhaps the market is not there, exotic wood products and eye pleasing cubicless still have appeal. For DIY, anyone should tailor fit, only reason to DIY anyway, except for having fun time with a hobby. If main motivation is to build a speaker box, then one should build one, but if target is to get best sound, perhaps consider design space outside of the box, from perspective anything is possible.
 
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Spatial audio is eating stereo for breakfast and will continue to do so.
I'm not so sure that is true these days. A lot of people stream movies. It's an area of interest to me at the moment as considering changing AV receiver. We stream from a service that costs £X per year and probably pirated but I have used the usual services directly as well. Seeking info it seems if dolby is provided there will be a logo on the screen while it plays. I'll just say no signs of it at all on these services.

Go back some years and people went out and bought their dolby encoded dvd films. I get the impression those days have gone.

LOL I did find an AV receiver like unit purely intended for stereo. It assumes 2 small speaker plus 1 or 2 woofers. A note states turn off the auto standby on the woofers when watching films as it will turn off between outputs from the effects channels.
 
Why would one need a fully sized cabinet, or a baffle for that matter? 😉

To reproduce low frequency percussive sounds with high fidelity at standard levels in a room in the home. The laws of physics dictate that if that is what one wants this then a lot of air needs to be accurately shifted and that requires full sized speakers and not small ones. If one want small speakers then high fidelity must be surrendered. This is OK for many but less so DIY speaker folk.

speakers should be designed acoustic performance first, with underlying target in room interaction while always taking account hearing system. After realizing this I've been talking about construct instead of a box. Simulating various baffless quickly shows that no baffle is best baffle, for example.

These must be pretty strange simulations because a driver without a baffle would have to be huge to even begin to be loud enough at low frequencies and if at a single location in a room the response at the listening position will be uneven and far from high fidelity. Pretty much the only practical way to get genuine high fidelity performance at low frequencies at a listening position in a room in the home is with multiple distributed monopole subwoofers (with a bit of supporting room treatment preferably). This is shown by simulations, measurements and will almost certainly be the recommendation of professional acoustic consultants (real qualified ones not unqualified salesmen flogging room treatment).

A speaker box is a box because that has been traditionally easy to build. Building boxes and baffless is legacy in my opinion. Although nice entry point for ease and continuation of long tradition and provides fine results, but is nothing more than shortsightedness in year of computer simulation and additive manufacturing. Today it's as easy to build any shape, as it is to build a box.

Not following. You said above that baffless was the best but now it is not?

I agree that speaker DIYers will continue to grow their use of computer simulation to come up with smooth shapes that better guide and control the sound radiation. I agree the use of additive manufacturing will grow where the pros outweigh the cons (which are pretty significant) but I doubt it is going to become dominant within the DIY speaker hobby. Subtractive machining that is numerically controlled is also likely grow. For a DIY hobby I can't see making speakers by hand ever shrinking to the low levels of commercial enterprises. It is too much part of what makes the hobby satisfying for many.

Well, as pointed out earlier perhaps the market is not there, exotic wood products and eye pleasing cubicless still have appeal. For DIY, anyone should tailor fit, only reason to DIY anyway, except for having fun time with a hobby. If main motivation is to build a speaker box, then one should build one, but if target is to get best sound, perhaps consider design space outside of the box, from perspective anything is possible.

Some things are too expensive for a DIYer to consider but how to get 90% for peanuts brings a lot satisfaction to a fair few DIYers. What 3D printing is doing is expanding the complexity of the parts a DIY can tackle at home. When it comes to best sound the highest performing commercial examples are pretty much, perhaps even arguably all, rounded boxes. The ones that aren't tend to be a step down in high fidelity performance. DIYers often don't accept this (and why should they it is a hobby after all) but when put to the test conventional high performance speakers tend to come out on top. The Linkwitz challenge was a good example of this.
 
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