Newbie needs some help to get started.

[restoguy]

Here's the skinny. I drive truck for a production company. They put on rock concerts and the like. I want to build my home entertainment center to look like a rock show. I want to build speakers that look like the JBL Vertec rig that we use every weekend, but I don't know anything about speakers. Some of you seasoned guys can help me here. I have all the ability needed to do this, but none of the knowledge. What kind of speaker am I talking about? What considerations are there in building one like it but smaller? What things pop into your heads as you read this that I might need to know? Thanks for all your help. I will continue to post as this project comes along.

Fraz

 

[jaxvon]

Alright, let me get this straight. You want to make a mini version of the flying arrays in your living room? How big is this going to be? And how accurate will it be for looks, cables and everything?

I'm personally thinking that it's do-able, and you're going to end up making either a horn-loaded or ribbon tweet two-way in a D'Appolito array. For reference, a D'Appolito array is one where a tweeter is sandwiched in the middle of two midbass drivers.

 

[restoguy]

Yes, you are correct. A mini version in my living room. I plan to put together some minirature aluminium trussing too. Probably of my own manufature. I've got 12' a ceiling so I guess it will be about that high in all. the two legs of truss will be out from the wall just a little with the speakers hanging from the ceiling and a few miniture lights mounted to the trussing too. The projection screen will take the place of the 'stage'. Beng 'to scale' is not such a big deal so much as being recognizable as a concert set up when you see it.

 

[Pyrrho]

Does JBL make something similar to the Vertec rig only smaller? If so, you might want to go with that rather than making your own, unless you want to read up on speaker design for a while. There is nothing wrong with using speakers made for professionals in your living room, if that is what you want. Perhaps the JBL VT 4887 is what you want:

http://www.jblpro.com/vertec1/new_vertec/vt4887.html

What I recommend doing is buying a setup that is made for small venues. This will look absolutely authentic, because it will be absolutely authentic.

If you want to build something yourself, then I suggest buying a couple of books on speaker design, and learn what you need to know to have good sound. Unless, of course, you don't care about the sound very much, in which case you can just build something that looks like what you want, and put in drivers that look like what you want, and use a premade crossover that uses an appropriate frequency for the drivers you select. Since you are basing your design on something someone else is actually doing, you know that the design can work.

 

[restoguy]

JBL does make a small vertec, but it's still too big to put in my living room(31in long). Unless I just hung one on each side! It's actually where I got the idea, though. We rented some mini's one week for back stage and !pow! I decided that was what I needed for my house. As far as sound goes, I'm just going to be watching movies and stuff with it so it doesn't have to be awesome but I want it to be good. Obviously if I had a great ear for sound I'd be the audio engineer instead of a truck driver! Good point that the design is proven to work so I'm not exactly in uncharted water here. As far as the books go, does anyone have any suggestions as to what book or two would be the best? I know that sometimes people write books and have no idea what they are talking about, they just know how to write. Thanks for all your time and help.