Hi,
My name is Ollie Marshall and this is my blog about my speaker design project that uses digital signal processing (DSP) at its core. I'm currently in my final year studying Bsc Music Tech at Leeds Metropolitan University. I've always had an appreciation for decent sound quality, my dad gave me his old stereo hi-fi set when I was a kid so I've always had a pair of speakers at my desk since I was about 12. They were nothing special but I hadn't heard anything better (or louder!) at the time. I'm now age 21 and the course I am studying has reinforced my interests in accurate sound reproduction. I now own a pair of KRK VXT6's which sound great.
I'm a musician but I also like to think I'm quite academic when it comes to understanding the world. I took A-Level Physics and Chemistry. My course is a balance between science and creativity (although I'd probably prefer a little more science). I knew I wanted to do something with loudspeakers for my final year project but I wasn't sure exactly what. I thought it would be cool to build some transducers to put in a speaker enclosure, so I bought some enamelled copper wire and wrapped a voice coil by hand. I wrapped it around a card former that I also made.
I took apart an old speaker for the magnet assembly and placed the voice coil/former in the gap. I made a cone out of some card and glued it to the former. The enclosure was from another old loudspeaker. I didn't have any rubber for a surround and I was at home so I got the masking tape out to hold the speaker cone in place (not a very elegant solution I know). After a while I decided to make a spider by stretching some fabric over the empty masking tape roll. This improved the sound quality. The speaker was powered by a solid state amplifier, I had to keep replacing the fast blow fuses in it (the speaker was probably <2ohms although I never measured it). I used the graphic EQ in Foobar 2000 to attempt to improve the speakers response which actually worked really well. Here is a video with a quick A/B comparison. With the EQ turned off there is a very large, broad peak centred around about 1.5kHz. This is only an educated guess though really as no measurements were made, only subjective listening and free hand corrections were made using my ears and the EQ.
I enjoyed tweaking the EQ to try and improve the speakers response, and this project encouraged me to take the DSP further. I decided that building the transducers was probably a bad idea as my final year project due to the tolerances involved. Instead I decided to use pre-existing drivers and focus on the design of the enclosures and use of DSP.
I'm a musician but I also like to think I'm quite academic when it comes to understanding the world. I took A-Level Physics and Chemistry. My course is a balance between science and creativity (although I'd probably prefer a little more science). I knew I wanted to do something with loudspeakers for my final year project but I wasn't sure exactly what. I thought it would be cool to build some transducers to put in a speaker enclosure, so I bought some enamelled copper wire and wrapped a voice coil by hand. I wrapped it around a card former that I also made.
I took apart an old speaker for the magnet assembly and placed the voice coil/former in the gap. I made a cone out of some card and glued it to the former. The enclosure was from another old loudspeaker. I didn't have any rubber for a surround and I was at home so I got the masking tape out to hold the speaker cone in place (not a very elegant solution I know). After a while I decided to make a spider by stretching some fabric over the empty masking tape roll. This improved the sound quality. The speaker was powered by a solid state amplifier, I had to keep replacing the fast blow fuses in it (the speaker was probably <2ohms although I never measured it). I used the graphic EQ in Foobar 2000 to attempt to improve the speakers response which actually worked really well. Here is a video with a quick A/B comparison. With the EQ turned off there is a very large, broad peak centred around about 1.5kHz. This is only an educated guess though really as no measurements were made, only subjective listening and free hand corrections were made using my ears and the EQ.
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