Speaker building, a rewarding hobby
Dear Headfoot,
Welcome to the realms of the "amateur speaker builder".
I commend you to want to educate yourself before wasting money and time. A loudspeaker, seemingly so simple, is in fact extraordinarily complicated. Designing and building a good speaker is challenging and rewarding. I have been doing it over fifty years now.
These three books from Old Colony sound labs, a division of audio xpress is a good place to start. Vance Dickason's book is particularly outstanding.
http://www.audioxpress.com/bksprods/products/bkaa67.htm
It would also be a good idea to get a subscription to Audioxpress. That is the merging of three magazines by the same publisher, Speaker Builder, Audio Amateur and Glass Audio. You might want to pick up some back issues of Speaker Builder. The reason for the merger was declining sales. Believe it or not, there is much less amateur speaker building than there used to be. I say it's time to reverse that trend! There has never been a better time to start designing and building speakers. More is known, and there are numerous computer modeling programs that make things much easier. With the cost of fitting out a home theater with eight speakers including the sub, you can save huge amounts of money. However if you don't learn to design it right, and build the speakers skilfully the results will be very disappointing.
For your first project, I would recommend a two or two and a half way design. Do not start with a three way. Do not have any preconceived ideas, about whether the cabinet is ported or sealed. Both designs done well, work well. Whether the enclosure is ported or sealed is dependent on the parameters of the drivers you choose. Some work either way, others better ported or sealed. There is a strong tendency of most of the current offerings of OEM drivers to be optimally loaded ported.
You can always choose to look into transmission line loading, which I have always favored. There are very few commercial examples, because of the cost of building them. However this gives the amateur the opportunity to best even the high end manufacturers.
Those of us who consider ourselves members of the speaker building community will be glad to help and encourage you.
