DIY Audio Speakers

Designing and building a loudspeaker appears on the surface to be a very simple craft; just build a box, mount a driver, midrange and a tweeter, hook it all up to an off the shelf crossover network and your done! You could do that (I have) and with a little luck you could end up with a decent sounding loudspeaker. But with a little more effort and by understanding the "rules" better, you'll greatly improve your chances of building a set of good sounding loudspeakers.

I started way back before the Internet was invented, back in the late 70's. Back then it was very limited in the components that were available; mostly Radio Shack and whatever speaker parts you had lying around. Then the internet came along; and along with it came a much larger selection of loudspeaker parts and a new source of information. In the true nature of a enthusiast I headed back to the workshop spurred on by this new knowledge, software and some new speaker components. This site is the result of my renewed enthusiasm.

It's not very difficult to build loudspeakers less expensively and of better quality than what is available at a reasonable cost if you have some tools, some skill at woodworking, have the time for a new hobby and the time/patience to "tweek" your loudspeaker design to get it "just right".

Another option for those who are handy at woodworking and would also like to save some money but "ain' t to crazy" about trying to design your own loudspeaker should consider using professionally designed (and tested) do-it-yourself loudspeaker kits. If you do go this way build it exactly as it is designed and use only the exact specified drivers and components. Using substitute drivers will undermine all the designers hard work that went into fine tuning the loudspeakers design and it will have a negative effect on the resulting sound quality of the loudspeakers.

Successful loudspeaker designing and building starts with a good basic knowledge of the technical terms which describe how an individual speaker will perform under different conditions. These speaker performance characteristics are defined and described by the Thiele-Small Parameters.

The original site was built and put online in 1998 (Loudspeakerbuilder.ca) and removed in 2009. It was then updated and put back online in the Winter of 2024.