Thread: Building a centre speaker

There seems to be a few of you interested in building speakers, so I though I'd share my latest project with you.

The original plan started a couple of years ago.... to buy a cheap 5.1 surround package and use my knowledge of speaker design to build speakers one by one to replace the cheap nasty ones that came with it. I also decided from the outset I was going to use inexpensive components using to test the theory that cheap speakers in a correctly designed enclosure will sound better than expensive speakers in an incorrect enclosure. Forget Vifa or Peerless for this project - I've been using Dai-1-chi, and with surprisingly good results. I guess my theory was correct and it makes you wonder just how much of what you pay is in the brand name!

Having previously built the sub and the front left and right satellites, I'm now up to the building a centre speaker. For consistency of sound, I used two of the same 4" magnetically shielded speakers I used in the satellites and the same 1" shielded tweeter. I played with the T/S parameters and decided that a 10 litre enclosure tuned to 60Hz was the way to go.

I’m very happy with the result, especially when you consider how little the thing cost.

Here are a few pics of the various stages of production, together with some explanatory notes.