I got my start in speaker building here a few years ago. I started w/ the Tritrix, and since then I also built the ER18 MTM and the Statements. I came from what I thought at the time was a fairly thorough knowledge of audio, but at this point I completely wrong! I had a good amount of experience in car audio, knew about setting gains, dialing in xovers, cubic airspace, etc. I also played quite a bit w/ home audio.
What I learned from building the designs I've done so far is a LOT about cabinet construction and xover function. Through the builds I asked a hundred million questions, and if it weren't for being in the middle of the build the answers to the questions would have probably not made sense, and even would've been a bit overwhelming.
At this point I'm currently working on a pro-audio system for our church sanctuary. If I can keep my head from exploding, this will be a MAJOR learn for me as well. I currently have one speaker built and I'm waiting for test results from Meniscus Audio (
http://meniscusaudio.com/), where I dropped the speaker off. That'll tell me ideal mounting positions, correct mounting angles, etc for optimum performance to the audience.
I'm also working on my own design, it's a 2 way MT bookshelf speaker. I'm going to build 5 for my HT system. I've designed the cabinets, and I'm working w/ Meniscus on these as well for the crossover design, which is helping me a TON! I also just got a OmniMic measuring system, hopefully w/ this I can learn to help my son build a cheaper set of bookshelves.
A lot of seemingly worthless info there, but the bottom line is that I would've never had the courage to finish (much less take on) what I'm doing now w/out both the knowledge I gained from the proven design builds, and the knowledge that it DOES work IF ITS DONE RIGHT. I now know not to give up, and if it sounds terrible I must be doing something wrong
.
Sorry for the long post, just trying to give you some food for thought. Loudspeaker design is pretty overwhelming to try to get all at once!