<font color='#000000'>After building speakers for a while, one learns that definitive absolute statements are virtually never valid. One poster says that 'time alignment' is the difference between good and great speakers, while another says that "expense' has nothing to do with good and bad sound. Factually, some of the most highly lauded speakers have drivers all on one plane, and the idea that one cannot build a better sounding speaker with more money is bound to come from someone with pitiable small experience in speaker design and building. The absolute BEST one can do with a 'sows ear', is 'suede'. Silk isn't in the cards. (how's that for dumping on my own principle in the same breath in which I stated it?)
I have been rolling my own for nearly 40 years, and to my ear, the best sounding speakers do share some specific characteristics. A first order crossover (for smoothness and phase coherency), controlled dispersion (to eliminate the early wall reflections from the sweet spot, for midrange clarity), and good drivers that have a wide frequency band, high power handling capacity, and a wide flat spot in the FR, with a smooth & gentle rolloff on each end. These are all essential for a first order filter.
Dunlavy and I have many points of agreement on what makes good sounding systems. I am very sensitive to phase coherency, as was Dunlavy, given his concentration on it in all of his designs. This was his reason for offset drivers, rather than time alignment, which was a bi-product of that design.
I prefer separate, optomized enclosures for wach driver (except low end), with the frontal area no larger than the driver frame. This enables complete placement flexibility, and a complete absence of baffle defraction, because of there being 'no baffle'. For my taste, the best bass comes from a sealed enclosure; much more controlled and taut, thereby more accurate, than ported.
I tried for many years to compensate for mediocre drivers with the design of the enclosure and Xover. It can't be done, to the extent of building a great sounding system That requires very capable drivers, and they are not found in a bargain bin.
Building ones own has some irrefutable advantages over commercial designers. It need not be concerned with size, weight, time spent, and money expended trying to please everyone, and the ability to treat the listening room as part of the speaker. These cannot be compensated for with money, sophisticated instruments, and a roomful of engineers. Treating the room, drivers, enclosure, and Xover as all parts of the system is a design element that cannot be equaled by a 'one size fits all' design. There are just too many tradeoffs to put up with in the latter.
Accurate, full range speakers are important to me because they get me more deeply into the music, and that is all that it is about. The speakers must accurately reproduce what the recording engineer has left for us on the medium being used. That is our only route to the original performance, so it should be the ultimate concern for the builder, through whatever design it leads us to. Any other approach becomes 'making' music, rather than reproducing the music already created by the artist at hand. That is a different process altogether.
Ed</font>
