I am thinking of making my own speaker case by buying a pair of speakers taking them apart and somehow making a new case. does anyone have any ideas of what I should use to make the speakers case? it will be a making quite a complex design, so I won't be using anything like acrylic, is there anything that you can mold like playdoh but is plastic? and also once I have made the case, what paint should I use? so that the paint won't come off if it got wet. many thanks Murray
Well, I've never done anything with molded speaker cases- perhaps some kinda of hard polyeurathane? That's what JBL uses on a lot of their speakers, and it appears to work well for them. Bondo might work too, but this is just off the top of my head.
if you use some kind of moulging clay or something that has a great deal of structural integrity it wont sound half as good as a good box from 18mm mdf or similar. It needs the air area inside to be adequate and allow for the reverberations, if its totally solid like a block of stone then you will get a much more trebaly sound. Not as nice. I built my own bass amp cab and thats 18mm mdf with 2 hartke 10" bass speakers and a 12" celeston and it sounds just right. If you want to make it look wiered then make it wood and then model on the outside of it with fiberglass or something.
Indeed, MDF is the material of choice- thats medium density fiberboard. unfortunately, seeing as its really fat paper, it isnt flexible, and i think hes going for some crazy rounded shape or something. I have minimal experience in said area, so someone else is gonna have to jump in on this.
MDF, Cotton/Wool, Fiberglass. Great for doing weird shapes and whatnot, and requires less layers to cover the support underneath (read: chicken wire) No offence P2D
If you want to be specific, you have to take into account the thiele-small paramaters of the speaker and adjust the measurements of your cab accoringly. However that's an audiophile thing to do (or you have to be a pro designer etc) and the biggest suggestion I can make is that you make the cab closed-back and you add a bass port in the front
Careful... speakers are not just a random sized box.. the volume of the interior is carefully calculated to offer the correct amount of physcical and acoustic loading on the back of the speaker.. which is in effect, just a piston. Too little back pressure, and you'll have very poor power handling, poor transient response, and very boomy bass... too small, and you'll have no bass, and distorted mid-range. Odd shapes cause problems too. For a quick read on speaker design, either do a google on "theil Small Parameters" or click here . If they're just to deliver every day sound, then it's not too important, but if you are even slightly bothered about soudn quality, then you need to design enclosures carefully.
Yeah, i may be wrong but i got the impression that he doesn't care too much about sound quality- any cabinet will technically work, just some suck big balls and others sound good. Just keep the theil parameters in line (you can look up a decent guess based on the speaker size) and if you're making a complicated shape, just know they usually sound like hell.
There are actually some thiele-small calculators floating around on the web, try consulting those too before finalizing your plans for your cabs.
If it's for smaller speakers like 5 1/4" or smaller, which I imagine it is since theyre for computer speakers, then there's no big worry about being too big on box volume (assuming a sealed box). But what pookeyhead says about the reprocusions of incorrect box volume is certainly true, especially for larger higher power speakers. The ideal speaker box shape is X" tall by (2X/3)" wide by X/3" deep, i.e 12" tall by 8" wide by 4" deep. Just in case this matters to you, but I'd guess not since you're looking at a complex design. On that note though (is that a pun?), try to make the inside of your box a simple shape as irregularities will cause odd resonances. Oh and fiberglass is used to make some really high quality, custom shape boxes.
I built some speaker cases a few years back. I got a book to guide me in the theory as you have to calculate several parameters in order to make decent speaker cases. "Building Speaker Systems" by Gordon McComb The ISBN of the book is: 0-40293-13604-8 Radioshack / Master Publishing, Inc http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...104-9803347-1968717?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 I think that might be it, not sure....
You can quickly and easily ruin the sound of speakers like this. use an inwalll mounting style so the sound isn't allowed to roll around the back and cancel the sound out, an enclosed speaker, with no wholes, the same size the current one is, or if it is ported 75% of it, or make a ported one about 1.25 times larger, or same size if it is ported. Im slightly into sound, if you have issues pm me.
the box shouldnt really matter to terribly bad. try and get it around the volume of what it was inside to begin with. if you are that insane and want to model the transfer function, and see where the rolloff occurs and what frequencies it will play at, give winisd a try- http://www.linearteam.dk/default.aspx?pageid=isdonline as far as making the enclosure, you can actually use modeling clay to make your shape of the interior of the enclosure and place fiberglass and resin on the exterior to form the shell of the enclosure. but that make odd shaped boxes and ripples. i would most likely determine what shape the base of the enclosure will sit on, if flat, use some 1\4" sturdy wood, then cut a speaker ring, and mount it at the height\angle you like your speaker to be at, and then stretch somthing like fleece across the entire project and cover in epoxy resin (fiberglass resin) and it will make a shell, cut the speaker hole out of the inside of the ring you made and voila fiberglassing is fun. read up on it.
Somebody might have already said this is so im sorry. Each speaker has a perfect speaker box size, if you just make a box that looks good it might not sound that great. Find out that the perfect box space is for your speakers make a box roughly the shape you want with perfect speaker space and then use bondo/fiberglass etc to make it look better.
where would I be able to buy fiberglass and resin from? would that give it a same look as say the case for a monitor, keyboard or mouse. Lets say I wanted to make a case in the shape of mario and had the speaker coming out of of his back. what would i need to make the shape and so that the material is like the case for a monitor? many thanks muzz
At first you should write what speakers you want to use... Than if you know some TS parametres you can use JBL Speaker Shop.
