Uplake Speaker Hut

These were my spring-break project in 2005. After the difficulty I had getting decent sound out of the big 3-way, I was ready for a simpler project. I also needed a more modestly-sized pair of speakers for the living room. I took a trip up the road to the Adire shop and came home the happy, proud owner of a couple pair of the new Extremis super-woofers. To finance this project, I sold off a pair of my Lambda TD-10Hs and the Seas Excel 8" woofers I had left over from my now-defunct dipole project. I hung on to the Seas Excel tweeter and matched it up with the Extremesis, resulting in far and away my best-sounding speaker to date. These guys are less than half the size of the LS2 towers, but produce more, cleaner, lower bass. I am very impressed with the Extremesis: they are easy to work with and sound great. Go get you some!

Box: 1.4 cu.ft. tuned to about 34hz (though I'm going to experiment with lowering the tuning down to 28hz to see if I like that better)

7 pictures, last one added on Jul 04, 2005

This project had sort of strange motivations. First, I wanted to build a large, high-value, full-range, 3-way floorstanding pair of speakers. I wanted them large because the cats kept jumping off of the Euros, knocking them off their stands. I also wanted to be able to substantially complete construction in the two weeks I had off from school over Xmas '04. Initially, I was going to use a single 12" or 15" woofer, along with a PE buyout Vifa midrange, and the venerable Audax TM025 tweeter. However, once I considered the shipping cost of a relatively inexpensive 12" or 15" woofer, PE's Deal of the Day Reference Series 8" woofers (with free shipping!) became too good of a deal to pass up. After great effort, I eventually got these to sound pretty good, although I'm treating the 4" driver as more of a filler driver than a 'real' midrange. They will play nice and loud, with the best bottom end of any speaker I had built up to that time.
Box: 3 cu.ft. tuned to ~28hz
[note: I'm not currently using these speakers and would love to find them a new home. Contact me if you're in the Seattle area and are interested.]

3 pictures, last one added on Jul 04, 2005

This was a pretty successful project from summer 2004. These speakers have a nice, clean sound with decent bass extension at moderate volume levels. They are not, however, suited to producing extremely loud, low material. The woofers require a notch filter (adding several components to the crossover), which makes the Euro woofers less of a good deal price/performance-wise than they otherwise would be.
Drivers: Dayton Euro Woofer and Tweeter.
Box: 0.6 cu.ft. / Dayton 8" Passive Radiator tuned to 40hz

10 pictures, last one added on Jul 04, 2005

The cabinet design started out as a simple rectangular box. The day I was to start cutting mdf, however, inspiration struck and I quickly sketched out the form you see in the pictures. At some point in the process, I decided to try out Ed Heath's clay-lined box scheme. So I headed out to the local art supply store and bought 5lbs of oil based modelling clay ($14), which was enough to put a 3/16" layer on the side walls. The cabinets respond pretty well to the knuckle rap test -- it's too soon to tell if there will be any sonic benefit though. The clay also inspired the name of this pair of speakers.

11 pictures, last one added on Jul 04, 2005

After over a year of fiddling, I have *finally* stopped hating the way these speakers sound. Originally an MTM, these are now 2.5 way speakers (the lower woofer is rolled off to compensate for the baffle-step, leaving the upper woofer to handle the rest of the midrange alone).

4 pictures, last one added on Jul 04, 2005

The box is designed with room gain in mind -- I tried to achieve a shallow rolloff more like a sealed box. F3 models at 60hz, but F10 is about 32. In room, it does more or less what I was hoping it would. No boom at all, but you can feel the kick drums just enough for my liking and you can hear the actual fundamentals of electric bass notes.

4 pictures, last one added on Jan 25, 2004

The Dalek has quickly become my favorite speaker for enjoying music. This simple inexpensive vented two-way has made it clear that my active Seas/Lambda dipoles need a crossover revision. But I've been busy with the DougThumper and another project (that will be making its way onto these pages soon) and haven't gotten around to it yet.

2 pictures, last one added on Feb 10, 2004

The current crossover (now in its 2d iteration) is pretty simple -- 2d order electrical, 4th order acoustic on both drivers. The woofer network provides a few db of baffle step compensation, and the tweeter has a padding resistor in series. The xo point is about 1500hz.

The current crop of frequency response "pretty pictures" were taken indoors at about half a meter using windowed MLS measurements.

6 pictures, last one added on Mar 19, 2004

The key to assembling these speakers was to use a CAD program called Qcad to do the design work. Qcad's interface took a little getting used to, but it runs in OSX, don't cost anything, and worked like a charm.

11 pictures, last one added on Dec 11, 2003

The WAF-7s are out of the shop and are being subjected to critical listening. The crossover is still evolving, but seems to have stabilized around 3d order acoustic slopes (2d order electrical) between tweeter and mid, and 4th order acoustic slopes from mid to woofer.

1 pictures, last one added on Dec 15, 2003

Doug's HT room is laid out such that the most practical place for a sub is centered along the front wall, but the projection image takes up most of that wall so the sub needed to be short. It had room to spread out to the sides and we wanted a roughly 5 cubic foot enclosure, so it ended up being 15"x15"x50". The driver is an Adire DPL12, driven by an Adire AVA250 plate amp. The target Q(tc) is .57 which puts the anechoic F3 around 30hz, with an F10 in the mid teens, and 9ms group delay at 20hz.

9 pictures, last one added on Feb 29, 2004

The Vino was my first effort at making a dipole speaker. As you can see, it owes a great deal to Linkwitz's Orion. I used more modest drivers in the Vino than those sported by Orion. The tweeter is a Vifa XT25; a Peerless 8" HDS driver does midrange duty; the woofers are MCM 55-2325 10-inchers.

After a month or so, I swapped the XT25 for a Vifa DX25 model, which seemed a bit happier crossed over at 1400hz. The peerless mid and vifa tweeters sounded pretty good. The 55-2325, however, wasn't really a good choice for a dipole woofer. It did ok above 50hz or so, but the bottom octave was just not going to happen in any meaningful way. Before I figured out what to do about the woofers, however, I got tired of looking at the Vino. I was initially quite drawn to the Orion's form, but after a few months the appearence of my Vino just stopped appealing to me. I started thinking about a new design for a dipole speaker, using drivers that would be up to the task, and so moved on the the Lambda-Seas MTM design.

Post Mortem:
Vifa XT25 -- sold to Bass Lister
Vifa DX25, Peerless HDS, MCM -- awaiting re-assignment
Vino carcass -- DUMP!

1 pictures, last one added on Dec 08, 2003

After the Vino, I decided for some reason that expensive drivers were what I needed to make my life complete. So I sprung for the Seas Excel tweeters, and a nice pair of Lambda TD10H woofers. I also was on my eternal quest to make speakers both small enough to please my wife, and big enough to be totally badass. One way or another, I came up with the idea for this dipole MTM. My favorite aspect of these speakers is the bloodwood panels on the side walls. I used textured vinyl laminate from Parts Express on the front baffle between the woofers for a contrasting matte finish against the glossy woofer mounts -- this is a nice material.

Eventually I moved on to a 3 way setup that uses a Seas Excel 8" woofer to cover the range between 150-1400hz in an arrangement that blends the forms of the Phoenix and the Orion.

Status: drivers reused, bloodwood salvaged, carcass DUMPed

3 pictures, last one added on Dec 08, 2003

This is the design that stuck. I need to think up a name though. Like the Orion, I use a single 8" driver for the midrange. Like the Phoenix, I use seperate assemblies for the woofers and the mid/tweeter. I kept the design details I liked from the Lambda-Seas MTM, including the bloodwood side panels and the use of contrasting black textures.

My wife thinks that the eye sees the relatively small main panel, and pretty much ignores the big box underneath it. So she prefers this form factor to a one-piece design like Orion.

For the bass module, I modified the Phoenix's W frame baffle so that one woofer fires straight ahead. It doesn't really take up any more space, and I don't think there is a significant sonic penalty for doing so. The advantage is that you can now see that purty Lambda woofer with its shiny phase plug. Mmmmmmm... shiny phase plug.

4 pictures, last one added on Dec 08, 2003

This is what started it all. A pair of Wayne J.'s Dayton Home Theater speakers. These are currently serving as a stereo pair in the living room. I think they sound pretty darn good.

4 pictures, last one added on Dec 08, 2003

My second speaker project ever. The woofer is a Swan 305 from Madisound. The woofer is an Audax Paper 6.5", the tweeter a Seas... I don't remember. Madisound did a LEAP crossover design for me. This design was inspired by Lukasz Fikus' Project 7 which uses an open baffle midrange. These sounded ok, though I had to redesign the midrange baffle to lower the dipole corner frequency to the point that the resulting (uncorrected) rolloff was tolerable.

Status: sold on ebay.

5 pictures, last one added on Dec 08, 2003

My first original design, with crossover work done by myself. Made to fit a bookshelf in the bedroom.

Current status: surround speakers in the home theater

5 pictures, last one added on Dec 08, 2003

A bunch of us got together over at Adire Audio HQ on April 17. I spent about half an hour taking a few snaps. If you have more information about the people or speakers in any of the pictures, please leave a comment.

Many thanks to Tim Forman for organizing the event, and to Dan, Dr. David, and the rest of the Adire guys for hosting. Al Wooley of RAW acoustics also took some snapshots and sent them to me for posting.

33 pictures, last one added on Apr 18, 2004