Speaker building has become a favorite hobby of mine, designing, building and listening to custom-built speakers has been a cool way to express my love of music art and construction. It began years ago as a teenager when for one reason or another I became fascinated with the idea of designing and building subwoofer box's for home theater use. My first project was a box I built in 8th or 9th grade wood shop class. I based the design on one I had found on the internet and used the same driver for it as well. It turned out great actually for my age and experience level. But since then I have re-designed another, much smaller box for the same subwoofer which also turned out nicely ( I even put my initials in gold letters at the bottom) but what I didn't do as well was the port width and length. In effect, when a very low note or sound is played through the sub, the massive amount of air that the driver pumps out ends up being pushed out of the ports so quickly that it sounds like a windstorm. I had even used a computer design software to determine most of the specs, but at some point there was something not quite right. Anyway, Josh and I have worked on each project together, carefully planning and drawing out the designs.
We built a sealed subwoofer box for our friend Justin which housed a 15" sub that hit the midrange tones incredibly i.e. fire, explosions etc. But it lacked on the low end a bit. Note: each of these subwoofer's has been built without a plate amp or a low-pass filter, so although they have sounded great in theater systems, in my opinion haven't been up to their full potential without their own power source. Josh's sub was built to fit two 12" subwoofers in a compact sized box while still maintaining enough volume to get a good kick. Needless to say, it does just that; hits loud and hard, the only problem that we ran into was the fact that the magnets on the subs were so freakin' big that they hit each other inside the box. We did however find a fix for that problem--I think anything can be fixed with caulk, L-brackets, and duct tape. From here we set our sights on an even bigger, more complex project of designing and building full-sized home theater tower speakers.
