The Budget Conscious Designer

Johnny Richards

I. Introduction
For starters, this is not an article on how to actually design a speaker. There will be no project outlines, no introduction to electrical and acoustic theories, and no dissertation on the various crossover slopes and other passive networks. Please note I am neither an expert designer nor wood-worker, so I feel that instruction in the black science of speaker design is best left to others. I am, however, an avid and active hobbyist and this article is simply an outline of some of my thoughts in regards to the area of budget loudspeaker DIY, and some explanations of the design decisions I make. Essentially the catalyst for a new design is generally one of two events: I see a driver that I realize will work in an application I already have in mind, or I think of an application and then go shopping for drivers. This article discusses some of my crossover and cabinet design philosophy, and briefly discusses acquiring a measurement rig to facilitate the entire learning and voicing curves. There is nothing in this article to benefit an experienced builder. Neither is it a how to guide for people new to the hobby. In general it is geared towards the curious novice in that it outlines what, for me, is a proven methodology for conceiving a speaker project from scratch.

II. Choosing a project

I am often struck with inspiration for a project based on the derived value of a certain driver, whether it be subwoofer, mid-woofer, tweeter or other. For example, Parts Express usually has a broad selection of drivers they purchase from a 3rd party and market as buyouts. There can be real gems found in the selection among all the seeming junk, but in all honesty, I believe if you know the original intent for a specific driver then there is no such thing as a bad driver. There are only different drivers better suited for different applications. When looking at a driver, I try to judge it based on several criteria: cost, build quality, cosmetics, and suitability for a specific application. However, without knowing what I would possibly do with the driver, it rarely goes beyond the curiosity stage. There needs to be a pre-determined use for the driver for it to end up in my shopping cart. The inspiration for a certain design will hit me when any of the above criteria tickle my fancy more than usual. For example, in my $28 MTM project I was infatuated with the price of a certain woofer. It clocked in at $5.00, and also offered 12 ohm
The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

impedance and an attractive poly cone. This seemed promising for an easy to drive (and crossover) MTM design. From there, the glimmerings of a project began to form in my mind and the purely concept stage was already complete when my neighbor mentioned how much he hated his center channel. That is when the lights went on in my mind. From there, it grew into a full project of the ultra-budget variety. In this particular instance, I did not set out to design a center channel one day it just turned out that I had most of a concept design in mind when an application came my way. If I were to bullet point the progress it would look like this: 1. Not a bad looking driver. It might make a nice MTM. 2. Neighbor complains about his center channel. 3. Light bulb. Had my neighbor asked me to design him a center channel first, or say, a month after browsing the buyouts the project would not have happened the way it did. Another example of being led by the nose for my inspiration are the Micro Monitors I designed. I was sitting in our home office lamenting the cheap PC speakers and thinking I needed to design something based on a 3 or 4 woofer. I came across an attractive 3.5 wide range driver that looked very much like a Peerless poly driver at a nice price. It met certain criteria outlined above, and so it was a fit for a project I had bouncing around. That is how these things work for me. My much belabored point being, I believe the first thing for a successful budget design is to have a specific application in mind. The application will answer quite a few fundamental design questions for you, such as physical size (desktop micro monitor, inwall, big monkey coffin floor-stander etc), surface finish (are they going in the living room, the ten year olds room, are they a gift for your antique furniture loving Grampa?) and relative quality (are these just going to be a pair of speakers for the neighborhood party garage or a gift for the discerning audiophile to be used for critical listening?). In short, knowing the why, what, and where you are designing for is very important. Knowing these will tell you what size drivers to look at and in what price range, approximately how much raw materials you will need, and thus most of your budget. Knowing the drivers and budget will help answer your next questions on crossover points and bass alignment. It is nice and tidy how it all works like that.

III. Determining a budget and choosing drivers

With a specific application in mind, I proceed to the next important step: creating a budget and disciplining myself to adhere to it. If, for example, I want a pair of speakers in the garage just to play some 128k MP3 files while I sweep sawdust off of the floor, I will automatically sort the woofer column by price from lowest to highest and
The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

go from there. On the other hand, if I am targeting a new five channel surround sound, I might up the ante a bit. Please remember there is no absolute relationship between cost and quality there are just too many variables in the manufacturing, marketing and distribution process of drivers. Bitter experience (but grateful for the knowledge gleaned from that experience) has taught me that certain cone materials are to be voided on a seriously low budget anything with a very stiff cone will likely have a breakup that will need extra components (read: becomes more costly) in the crossover to deal with. Many of the cheaper ribbed paper cones have horrible linear distortion (deviation from a flat response) in the region that will be crossed over sometimes as awesome as a broad 10db dip right at 1.5k. Aluminum usually has a pretty severe breakup that will almost always require extra components to knock down. Softer materials like many plastics and treated paper will tend to ring less, and will be easier to work with. The downside is generally the softer cones will exhibit progressively less linear behavior at higher volumes (stiff cones will generally stay pistonic until a certain point and then go to hell in a hurry). The softer materials are sometimes less sensitive due to the heavier moving mass. On the other hand, the drivers resonant frequency is largely dependent on the moving mass the heavier the cone, the lower the resonant frequency. On the other, other hand driver Q can rise with the mass of the cone as well, countering the lowered Fs. It can be quite challenging to try and determine what drivers to use, but I have found if you set a physical size and price range and discipline yourself not to exceed it it makes sorting through the available drivers much easier. I never even bother looking at tweeters in the mid to upper tier of pricing. I tend to favor tweeters with a resonant frequency below 1.5k and a soft dome. Much like picking a woofer, I sort by price and pick a tweeter that costs somewhere around what the woofer(s) cost. This generally results in a $7 to $20 tweeter for me, and dont let anyone ever tell you that there are no good sub-twenty dollar tweeters. The market is literally flooded with them right now. As with the woofers, there is no absolute cost/quality ratio. Is there a rough correlation? Absolutely. The truth is, though, that building a high quality speaker for peanuts is becoming easier and easier every year. As technology trickles down from the high end manufacturers and the Chinese have slowly gotten their QC under control the result is a flood of high quality, affordable drivers for both the DIY and OEM markets. Top that off with high quality, free design software and inexpensive measurement tools and is truly a remarkable time to be a frugal designer. It takes some time and experience to look at a driver and get a feel for what it will do based on pictures alone. When you get to that point, it is a little easier to pick and choose the buyouts. As a very general rule, stay away from small to midsize buyout woofers with the old school front mounted cardboard gaskets and the gold finished

The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

frames. These were likely originally intended for bass only duties in HTiB, 2.1 PC audio setups or for those all-in-one boom-boxes from Sony and JVC. If you are a novice woodworker, stay away from drivers with unique mounting requirements. Some drivers were intended to be automatically installed at a fast rate on specially machined or formed baffles and creating your own baffles will lead to a lot of work. As you improve in your woodworking, or are already an experienced wood worker then the driver mounting will be less of a challenge. Dont buy a driver based on the color of the cone in the picture unless you have a color calibrated workstation, you will be disappointed. Stay away from most buyout tweeters. Many of them have oddball mounting requirements, and most have a very high Fs. In the entry level commercial world, skimping on the tweeter is a popular cost cutting measure. They tend to run woofers full range, top it with a cheap tweeter that cannot play below 4 or 5k and throw a single cap on it. Those are the types of tweeters usually found in the buyouts. However - if you are looking at doing a small 3-way using an 8 woofer, and a 4 cone mid then those little tweeters are perfect. As always, intended application determines the usefulness of any given driver. If you are planning a 4 based mini 2-way, then even the best 10 woofer in the world is not very useful!

IV.Enclosure construction, driver arrangement and bass alignment

When building the enclosure, keep in mind the application. If it is a tiny desktop speaker for near-field listening, it is doubtful if three pounds of bracing and a granite baffle is worth the cost in time, effort and money. If they are party garage speakers, spending two weeks making sure the seams from the butt-joints are not visible through seven coats of hand rubbed Italian lacquer is probably overkill. If Grampa loves Victorian furniture, he may be turned off by Art Deco styled cabinets with a paint scheme inspired by Fritz Langs Metropolis. Budget should be extended to your time as well as your wallet. If the project is an ultra budget variety, there is nothing wrong with extending that concept to the materials used in the cabinet. Particle board is an affordable option to using MDF or birch plywood. Using particle board on most projects presents no special problems, especially with some judicious bracing. On very small projects, bracing is not even necessary. On a budget, every penny should count. For budget subwoofers, I choose MDF baffles and particle board cabinets. For budget desktop speakers using 4 5.5 woofers, I use MDF baffles and 1/2 to 3/4 particle board cabinets. For the rare budget floor-stander, all material whether it is MDF, particle board or plain old ABX plywood with well-placed bracing. As a budget minded designer and builder, I experimented with different wood glues over the years and settled on regular old Titebond. This was based on cost, as I noticed no significant advantage from one to the next, at least as far as strength. They
The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

all create bonds stronger than the materials they are joining; the differences seem to lie primarily in working time, curing time and temperature tolerances. All of these are easily controlled so as not to be a variable to consider when choosing an adhesive. Stuffing is necessary for most budget projects since cheaper woofers tend to run to the high side of things when it comes to the Q factor. Stuffing helps to tame some of the peaking in the bass response. I use regular polyfil from the local Walmart. It is cheap, and does a decent job. Just because a project is budget oriented does not mean I ignore some basic principles. On larger projects, bracing should not be ignored ever. If you have the tools, rounding over the baffle edges is a must. Follow established guidelines on driver orientation offset the tweeter an unequal amount in every direction from the baffle edges for example. Driver spacing should generally be closer rather than farther apart, especially in a design where the crossover point was pushed higher than the theoretical ideal. Again, if you already possess the tools and the skills to do so flush mount the drivers designed to be flush mounted. Each of these things has a marginal impact in and of itself, but together they can really add up. If you have a tweeter spaced 18 away from the woofer, crossed over at 9k, and located smack in the center of a round baffle then flush mounting that tweeter is a complete waste of time you have other, far more serious flaws in your design. Most budget drivers are simply not capable of solid reproduction of the bottom octave or two. I learned this expensive lesson the hard way over the years. Most inexpensive drivers simply cannot do 30 Hz no matter what the models say. Very, very few drivers under 5 can, no matter what the models say. My philosophy is that it is cheaper to build a small, powered subwoofer using a modest 8 or 10 inch driver to fill out the bottom end than it is to step up to the type of 6 or 7 drivers actually capable of playing cleanly to 30 hz. There is more to consider when being a budget conscious designer than just building $28 MTM center channels. A 70 watt, powered 8 subwoofer can be built for less than $120 with all materials if you are patient and wait for the right sales. If there is an 8 buyout subwoofer, or you can find a decent used driver and amp it can be done for even less money. My current computer subwoofer uses an Infinity Interlude CMMD 10 driver with a buyout plate amp from Foster in a 1 cubic foot sealed and stuffed enclosure. With boost applied, F3 is 24 Hz. It is capable of considerable output due to the 12mm of Xmax. Smart shopping and careful design led to a subwoofer that cost me less than $90, complete down to the last drop of paint. You have to pay attention to those sales and buyouts! A similar subwoofer cannot be replicated using new items for less than 1/3 that cost. For most of my designs, I tend to choose drivers designed to work in sealed enclosures, and that will reach to the 50-70 Hz range. Most of the drivers that will do this, will do so with a system Q of around 0.9 1.1. This alignment gives a slight ripple in
The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

the bass response, which can lend the illusion of heft to the bass. The shallower roll-off of a sealed alignment is generally easier to integrate with a subwoofer. When modeling these high Q drivers using WinISD or similar programs, do not be scared away by the extremely large sizes the software recommends. Play with it a little, and see what you can come up with that meets your requirements. Remember that the installation will very often mean all bets are off on the actuall bass reproduction so obsessing over a few Hz or db here and there is probably not worth the effort, especially in a budget design. Another reason (beyond simplicity in tuning and integration with a subwoofer) to go sealed is material cost and build complexity. Sealed enclosures are more tolerant of variations from driver to driver and are easier to build. In the near-field, ports can be somewhat problematic if they are rear-mounted due to the close proximity to a wall (if that is the case). Front mounted ports are not always an option due to baffle size constraints on some builds. Going sealed eliminates a lot of design decisions allowing me to build more often

V. Crossover
When designing a crossover, again keep your application in mind (notice the trend?). Desktop near-field use will benefit from as low of a crossover point as the tweeter can handle, but off-axis is not as important as it is for speakers sitting nine feet away. On the flip side (and this is arguable) the low crossover points on the tweeter at nine feet are not as necessary. The lower the crossover point, the costlier the components will be. All the values will be larger. As a budget conscious designer, keep that in mind. Be reasonable in your expectations - crossing a seven dollar tweeter at 1.5K will probably cost twice as much or more in components than the tweeter itself (just to protect it, never mind if it will actually sound good there or not). If a 1500 hz crossover point is desired, at some point a compromise will have to be made either by scrapping the original tweeter and buying one which will play lower (sayonara budget!), or by raising your crossover point to a region where the tweeter is more comfortable (sayonara textbook ideal!). Distortion is uglier than comb filtering, so I find compromising on a theoretical ideal crossover point to take some stress off a small tweeter is a reasonable compromise. It takes some time to get a feel for when to stop adding components, but using my driver selection guidelines I have yet to build a speaker with more than 8 or 9 components in it including a recently finished 12 based 3-way. Choosing the caps, coils and resistors to use in the crossover is always a contentious issue. For the most part, I find the Mylar caps to be adequate for most designs. I dont necessarily believe they sound better than electrolytic, just that they seem more consistent and do not cost a whole lot more. For the truly ultra budget
The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

builds, I will use NPE caps. The woofer circuit I will generally use NPE caps for values over 15uF. In some of my nicer budget builds, I will use poly caps on the tweeter, and mylar on the woofer. I prefer the cost of the Erse Audio caps over Bennic/Dayton and other budget poly caps. Pay attention to the buyouts sometimes pre-assembled crossovers or surplus components show up. I have cannibalized pre-assembled crossovers for a lot of goodies over the years! Parts Express had some passive subwoofer crossovers a few years ago for something like $3. They contained a pair of 9.0mH coils. Have you priced those? I can unwind them to whatever value I wish. This is exactly what a budget conscious designer should be doing. Take every advantage you can to save several dollars without in any way impacting the design quality. For coils, I stick to 20awg air core coils on the tweeter, and for values under 1.0mh on the woofer. For values higher than that, I use iron core coils. Again, pay attention to the buyout and surplus stuff out there. You can save a lot of money by cannibalizing pre-assembled crossovers. Copper is not cheap! I use sand-cast resistors. They are less than $0.50 apiece and come in a wide variety of values. The amount of inductance on these is borderline insignificant, and they have all been close to advertised values. I try to get most designs to work with no more than a series coil and Zobel on the woofer, and a 2nd order electrical plus series padding resistor on the tweeter. I tend to look at a Zobel as much as an equalizer as an impedance compensation. Playing with the value of the parallel cap can provide some padding around the knee, and changing the resistor will alter the slope. Pay attention to your impedance though, as you can easily get carried away with crazy values to get a target FR, and then realize your impedance would smoke a cheap amp! Sometimes, a woofer will benefit more from a 2nd order electrical and no Zobel than from a single coil and Zobel. On rare occasions, I have used a 2nd order electrical with a Zobel. Sometimes though, if you just increase the Zobel capacitor you may find no need for the 2nd capacitor. In rare cases, I will go with a 3rd order electrical on the tweeter but usually only if I am building a 4th order LR system. If I feel the tweeter needs an extra protection I will rework the crossover with an L-Pad rather than the single series resistor. If further protection seems warranted, I will start inching the crossover point higher. Lately, I have been experimenting with Butterworth (BW) slopes and I think I prefer them over the popular LR slopes. 4th order LR though, is among the easiest slopes to target if you are careful in your design choices. Many drivers already exhibit a 2nd order BW roll off above and below their passband, and since a 4th order LR is nothing more than a double stacked 2nd order BW, a cap and coil inserted in just the right spot can theoretically create the 4th order LR. It is worth experimenting to see which you prefer. In DIY, we have that luxury. We can design two crossover topologies for
The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

otherwise identical speakers and compare them. We can tinker with different cap types and brands. The power of DIY is not necessarily saving money (in fact, on the ultra budget end we cannot even compete) the power of DIY is the flexibility it offers in advancing an individuals personal knowledge in the field. This is something that hands down trumps all other benefits of DIY.

VI.Measuring
To get the most out of budget drivers I believe it is essential to buy a measurement rig and learn how to use it. Measurements provide a sanity check and really expedite the learning curve and the voicing process. For around the price of a single high end Chinese driver or a mid level European driver, you can buy most of the equipment you need for basic measurements. The $150-200 you spend on measurement tools and a handful of cheap buyouts will teach you more about designing loudspeakers than you ever can holding a $200 woofer in your hands or building someone elses designs, no matter how well documented the project is. What you learn by building someone elses design is that someones design philosophy and preferences. While this is not in itself a bad thing (in fact, it is healthy to expose yourself to as many ideas and concepts as possible), IMHO it is ultimately more rewarding to develop your own path. I use the Dayton calibrated microphone, which goes on sale for less than $40 from time to time. It comes with a calibration file, and is similar in size and appearance to the Behringer microphone. For us budget minded folks, it is accurate enough. I used to use a Behringer mixer, but decided to try the Blue Icicle XLR-USB converter instead. Setup time is far easier now. It turns your microphone into a USB sound card input device. Street prices are under $40 for the device. I purchased a 25 cable and mic stand from Musicians Friend for less than $40 shipped. For software, I use the free version of ARTA. It will export .FRD files usable in popular free modeling programs. It comes bundled with LIMP, which with a simple test jig can be used to measure impedance and driver parameters. I used to use that, but purchased a Woofer Tester when they went on sale. ARTA is free if you do not want the ability to save projects. Otherwise, there is a program called Holm Impulse that is free, and another one called REW (Room EQ Wizard) that I am learning to really like. An SPL meter from Radio Shack is also a good idea, at least if you want to produce SPL accurate measurements.

The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards

In all, I have about as much in my measurement rig as a lot of guys do in one woofer! Stepping up to doing your own measurements is an exciting, and I would argue almost necessary step towards understanding the hobby.

VII.

Conclusion

Breaking into DIY audio is a fun way to learn more about the black science of speaker building. Initial investments may seem steep, but smart shopping and spreading the purchases out over time will help temper that sticker shock. Realize that DIY audio is not about saving money, not strictly. If you already own all the tools it is cheaper to enter the hobby, of course. If you have nothing and rush out and buy a table saw, router, router bits, radial arm saw, jigsaw, clamps, hole saws, Forstner bits, sawhorses, drill bits, screws, glues, foams, stuffing, terminal cups, primers, paints, veneers, dust collection, benches, vises, a shelf full of drivers, a tacklebox full of different crossover components, and a complete measurement rig your first pair of speakers will cost you many thousands of dollars! Instead, understand that DIY is about something else entirely. If all you want is a good sounding pair of speakers there are a lot of very nice commercial offerings in the price range of what you would spend tooling up for a speaker building hobby. Work some OT or grab a part time job flipping burgers and you will be purchasing a nice pair of speakers in no time. That misses the point, though.

We DIY to learn. We DIY to boost our ego. We DIY because we demand more from ourselves. We DIY for the sheer hell of it, because there is no way to put a price on the knowledge, the emotional satisfaction and the experience. DIY to save money? Thats for drywalling.

The Budget Conscious Designer Copyright 2011, Johnny Richards