The goal IS "pretty good sound". It also has to live in our home so not be the dominant decoration as we may have had in our single days. Not always easy. That is the domain of the industrial engineer. Folks like Raymond Lowey, the Eams, and Trever Wilkerson. You never heard of him. Founder of TVR cars. Later most famous for a coffee pot used by airlines. Aesthetically pleasing but functional.
Loudspeaker design does take some time and dedication. It is real engineering. Physics. If production, then understanding what is producible out of what material. I can dampen MDF and bend it into a curve, but that is an expensive process to do in production. On the acoustics side, lucky for us, Mr. White and Bullok took all Dick Small's equations and made spreadsheets we could use to calculate Hemholtz tuning. We don't have to do the calculus any more. Olson did the work on diffraction. Then nice folks made CAD programs where we just punch in the numbers. I bet only a few of us are left who ever had to do it by hand! We used to do impedance curves with a VTVM and AF generator, step a frequency, measure, step, measure. It took several days to do what my WooferTester does in about 90 seconds. But then there is some experience and art. What works on paper may not in the real world. How panels behave, how diffraction behaves. I do wonder though, why so many really crappy speakers are made by big well financed companies. Incredible cabinet work, mostly from China or Vietnam. I look at some of the cabinets in even sub-2000 range and wonder if my quality of finish can ever meat that.
Anyway loudspeakers is what got me serious in woodworking before furniture, cabinets, picture frames and whatever family decides they want.
Loudspeaker design does take some time and dedication. It is real engineering. Physics. If production, then understanding what is producible out of what material. I can dampen MDF and bend it into a curve, but that is an expensive process to do in production. On the acoustics side, lucky for us, Mr. White and Bullok took all Dick Small's equations and made spreadsheets we could use to calculate Hemholtz tuning. We don't have to do the calculus any more. Olson did the work on diffraction. Then nice folks made CAD programs where we just punch in the numbers. I bet only a few of us are left who ever had to do it by hand! We used to do impedance curves with a VTVM and AF generator, step a frequency, measure, step, measure. It took several days to do what my WooferTester does in about 90 seconds. But then there is some experience and art. What works on paper may not in the real world. How panels behave, how diffraction behaves. I do wonder though, why so many really crappy speakers are made by big well financed companies. Incredible cabinet work, mostly from China or Vietnam. I look at some of the cabinets in even sub-2000 range and wonder if my quality of finish can ever meat that.
Anyway loudspeakers is what got me serious in woodworking before furniture, cabinets, picture frames and whatever family decides they want.
