Any audio enthusiast in North America who has ever flirted with the idea of building their own loudspeaker will know what Parts Express is. It is the leading supplier of components and DIY audio gear in North America. Audioholics has done a lot of reviews of Dayton Audio products, a brand owned by Parts Express, but we have only ever dealt with their finished systems. Today, we are going to get some grease on our elbows and attempt to tackle one of Parts Express’s DIY kits: the Orian 3-Way High Output Bookshelf Speaker. While we mostly deal with finished products, we have long been toying with the idea of reviewing an unfinished kit speaker. Audioholics noticed the
Orian design in our coverage of the 2023 AXPONA, and we found the design so interesting that it has finally pushed us off the ledge into covering a DIY kit speaker. As its full name indicates, the Orian is a 3-way bookshelf speaker that promises lots of displacement. It’s a large standmount speaker that has a coaxial driver for the midrange and tweeter and a beefy 8” subwoofer driver for bass. The chamber for the midrange cone is open so that it has a partial dipole acoustic radiation pattern. What we find appealing about this design is that it should be a good full-range solution for near-field listening due to the coaxial driver and good as a typical stereo or home theater speaker due to the amount of air displacement it is seemingly capable of. How well does it accomplish this? That is what we intend to find out — assuming we don’t screw up the assembly process. Read our full review to learn what we found...
READ: Parts Express Orian 3-Way Bookshelf Speaker Kits Review
Shady, that is one of the most interesting reviews you have done for some time. That kit is on special now for $538.00 and so an incredible value.
It makes me wonder if the designer has been following my posts here.
I have some comments. First the negative. I have looked at the data on those drivers, at least in a preliminary fashion. It am pretty sure that box is an extended bass alignment. I would have gone for a higher F3, and a smoother bass response. In the commercial world low F3 takes preference over bass quality. That is generally the wrong trade off.
The encouraging thing is that the cone of the midrange driver is covering the speech discrimination band. In the realm of HT that is a huge plus.
The tweeter response is a bit rocky. That tends to be a characteristic of coaxial drivers, because of cone reflections of the tweeter output. However, as you pointed out, they often end up sounding a lot better than you might expect. Getting a good tweeter response is a big challenge working with coaxial drivers.
So one question I have, is how does human speech sound, especially male speech?
I have looked at the specs of those drivers, and their parameters seem well chosen.
The midrange is low Qts, at 0.28, so if you don't like that rear radiation. you should be able to stuff that rear cavity with damping and close it.
The woofer looks particularly interesting and attractive. So I am going to doodle with that in the coming days.
I hope this is successful. Audio enthusiasts need to get more hands on, especially when it comes to speakers. As, from your reviews a lot of commercial designs leave a lot of room for improvement. I hope this will kick start members getting the DIY bug, and they will build speakers with a far better performance per dollar than they could otherwise get. They will have lot of fun doing it.
Lastly there are more choices in coaxial drivers in recent times. That is important because of the center speaker. Speakers designed round coaxial drivers really are the answer to the center speaker conundrum.
Time to get your feet wet and start designing and building guys. There are many here that could do better than most of what is on offer. Yes, it takes some learning and effort, but its worth it. Kits are likely a good way to start, as it gets you introduced to the building process.
