I've tried pretty hard not to become an audiophile... but I finished
building my own floor speakers last year...
I based them off of the "Dayton D8" design found around the internet. They sound fantastic to me, especially for the money I have into them. Pretty sure I kept it under $350 for all the supplies for the pair... not counting the router and clamps of course, but those will be used to many other things. Considering I ended up plating them with brass to do something "different", the end price was pretty good (the metal alone cost over $60). I did 95% of the work myself, and its really the only wood working project of any significance that I've ever done. Most of the assembly was done indoors in my office before moving, since I didn't have a shop or garage. Most of the cutting and sanding was done either on a picnic table or on saw horses. I cut the brass sheeting with a utility knife and had to use gloves to bend it to break it in a straight(ish) line. Then I hand-nailed all of the brass nails all the way around it.... and its likely that none of that made any improvement to the sound, but it made them
mine.
The funny thing is, I'm running them off of a JVC 817VTN receiver that I picked up on the curb (set out with my neighbor's trash) a few years back. It worked perfectly for years until the volume pot broke, but I managed to fix that with quicksteel.
Once a person realizes that the location and environment in which you use your speakers can wreak havoc on all of the fancy audiophile terms that people go on about... there's no longer much of a reason to spend tons of money on better amplifiers and DACs and such until you get the environment perfect. Their current location is the only place I can put them for the time being, so I'll just have to deal with reflections and hugely variable bass response depending on my location in the room (it is an attic apartment in a 100 year old house with hard wood floors and 10 foot vaulted ceilings).
Don't get me wrong, if someone let me borrow an actual real "high end" amplifier, pre-amp, DAC and all that business, I'd totally be up for an A\B test, even in this environment on my home-built speakers... but for now these things sound as good as I imagine they can in this environment.
I originally built them to save space, if you can believe that. I wanted a massive frequency response without needing a sub woofer. Floor standers were my best bet, and this design was intended to go quite low and yet remain clear with a minimal amount of parts (and expense). Mine are shorter and deeper than the original design... since I had access to pre-cut sheets of 3/4 inch 9-ply wood for free. I don't have the equipment to test my particular setup (and again, the environment would make it meaningless) but according to the modeling I did they should have an F3 of 30Hz. To my ears they sound wonderful and they provide that "movie theater" bass feel I've always loved, which I thought was impossible without a dedicated subwoofer (I was always around cars with huge subwoofers installed, going back to the early '90s). Light years better than my old Pioneer CS99 floor speakers, and better than any other system's I've heard myself... but I don't know any audiophiles personally.
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