Does anybody build their own cabinets?

[Big mike 1100]

I've been having a great time building pedals, all of which have eventually worked, with tremendous help from this forum! 

I've even been successful in building a few amp chassis which I'm happy to say also work!

My next step is improving my woodworking skills-to build speaker cabinets, and combo cabinets- Probably pine finger-jointed cabs.  Can anyone suggest either posts on this forum or point me in the right direction to get educated in this process?

Thanks in advance!

[ayayay!]

No plans but check out the isolation cabs by Grendel Amplification.  Very cool ideas. 

[marcelomd]

I'm in the same situation. I'm starting to build my first tube amp and cabinet.

As almost everything, looks easy when you know what you are doing (and have the proper tools): https://youtu.be/RyoA58eaM4o
This guy does a 1x12 and a 4x12. Worth a look.

[Mark Hammer]

On my drive down to Nashville in late June, I made a short side trip to Parts Express in Springboro, Ohio.  They are best known as a large - very large - distributor of audio components/parts/systems, and carry a wide selection of musical instrument speakers.  I picked up a quartet of 6.5" Eminence speakers for a decent price.  At 4 ohms each, I built a cab for a pair as an 8-ohm cab.

I used butt-joint construction with pine, for weight, and did a passable job on the tolex.  The baffle is painted with rubberized truck-bed spray-paint.  It is a semi-closed design.  I used a crude folded port to improve the bass response and audible efficiency (i.e., ALL the sound comes out the front).  Nobody is going to mistake a pair of 6.5" drivers for a quartet of 12" Celestions in a mammoth baltic-birch-plywood cab, but the unit has a pleasing frequency range, most notably a little more top end than some speakers I have.  Compares favorably with the 8" JBL I have in my Princeton.  Makes the difference between middle, and middle+bridge pickups more noticeable.  Best of all, it's light - 17lbs with all tolex, hardware, and drivers.  I've carried kids upstairs to bed, and brought bags of groceries in from the car, that were a lot heavier.  I'll eventually make a second identical one for stereo applications.

I also made another cab that was my feeble attempt to mimic a Feiten cab.  When these were reviewed in Guitar player 20 years back, the reviewer raved about them.  Feiten has since stopped making them.  I dug around for technical info, and learned that Fuchs makes a licensed version.  Their website provides measurements.  I cut the wood to correspond with the posted measurements, but found that the resulting baffle size would not accommodate a pair of 12" speakers, even at an angle.  I had a Weber 10" hanging around, though, so I cut out a hole to front-load a 12" and another to rear-load the 10".  Look at the picture below of an actual Feiten cab, and you can see that the two speakers are loaded differently, which is apparently part of their sound.  I decided to rear-load the smaller speaker in mine to reduce the difference in the location of their respective cone apexes.  A smaller cone size means the apex is not as far back from the cone edge as it is for a 12".  So if they were both attached to the baffle in the same way, higher-frequency content from the smaller speaker would theoretically reach the listener a tiny bit later.  Picky, on my part, but like I say, it was a theoretical difference that was easily sidestepped via the different loading methods.

I haven't cranked it up yet, so I can't speak to its sound as much as I can for the smaller cab.  But so far, it sounds okay.

[Joncaster]

I'm looking at building a 2x12 based on the THD dimensions and back panel slot.

My research reading and phoning plywood suppliers brought up a product called Litewood:

https://www.universalply.com/product/litewood-lightweight-plywood/

Light as pine of the same thickness and void/knot free, and strong.

Anyone used something like this?
Albasia?

I'm gonna pop into the supplier and have a look at it.
Cheaper than Baltic Birch. But have to buy a full sheet of 18mm and 12mm, so would be plenty of uses from the boards.

[stallik]

I've recently put together a 1x12 closed back cabinet but was struggling to find the right dimensions to give me the sound I wanted so I put together some MDF L shapes about 8 inches deep which could be screwed together creating any shape I wanted. To increase the depth, of just add more L's behind and attach them to each other using a small board and some screws.

Every test I did meant making a new speaker baffle but I ended up only needing to do it 3 times.

As it happens, my final dimensions were very close to an old monitor cab I have so I popped the speaker in there to check if my tests were valid and they were. I get the impression that it's box volume rather than dimensions which is most important but I stand to be corrected

[Mark Hammer]

Volume is generally the more important characteristic, but dimensions/shape is not irrelevant.

Consider a cab for a 12" that is 18"x18"x10" deep.  Now consider a cab that is 23"x24"x6" deep.  Not much difference in total volume in cubic feet, but the shallower second cab would be expected to sound a little odd.

[marcelomd]

Barefaced cabinets are nice and expensive. They have a good technical section on their site (by good I mean "more than you have ever wanted to know") https://barefacedbass.com/technical-information.htm

[vigilante397]

Following this thread because I'm in the same boat I know my way around circuits just fine, but my woodworking skills are lacking.

[maartendh]

I think there is a cabinet plan on the Ax84 site. And R.G. Keen had something about cabinets (Vox?) on the Geofex site as well, as I recall.
Maarten

[PRR]

> impression that it’s box volume rather than dimensions which is most important

Simple volume has major impact around bass resonance, no effect an octave or two up. Of course the "balls" is a lot of a speaker system's "balance", so a mis-tuned bass may not be a happy speaker.

"Frontal area" affects mid-bass "throw". Consider a speaker in a bill-board. All the sound goes to half the world. Now put a speaker in the end of a long pipe. The mid-bass spreads out to the whole world. We normally run speakers well into the highs where the cone alone will support a directional wave, so tube mounting gives a wide-spread mid-bass and still beamy highs.

Most boxes, the bass is always omni. If your billboard is over 4 feet each way, even the bottom note of guitar is supported, you have some bass "throw", a Marshall/Who Four-12 Half- or Full-Stack. The Fender open-back Twin also gets some bass throw and room efficiency by dipole action. Most smaller boxes are just small; still Frontal Area is good within reason.

If you try to optimize frontal area per volume you get a very shallow box which tips over easy. Also if the box back is closer to the cone than the cone diameter there will be a reflection and a "boxy" sound. This is not awful. Note that this depth is similar to a large acoustic guitar, and its "boxy" IS part of "tone". And filling 1/4 the depth with fuzz will pretty much kill the boxy. (This is more a concern for High Fidelity than for music production.)

[Rob Strand]

"Frontal area" affects mid-bass "throw".

For those who haven't seen this before:

The bass end does the same but the wall behind acts like a big front panel so you don't lose it.

There's a region between the front panel region and the region where the back wall contributes where you get a dip in the lower mid / high bass region.  The reflection from the back wall is like there is another speaker behind the wall (an image) at the same distance from the wall as the real speaker.    The dip occurs because the sound from the image is delayed and the phase shift causes it to cancel out the sound from the real speaker:
http://arqen.com/acoustics-101/speaker-placement-boundary-interference/

[Rob Strand]

I've built heaps of cabinets but today you can buy finished items for not much more than the cost of the drivers (or amps).   Unless you get the drivers cheap or you want something specific it's getting less cost effective to build you own stuff.

[thermionix]

I've built cabinets in the past, but I don't have a wood shop myself, so I farm that out to a buddy that does custom cabinetry for homes.

One lesson I learned early on is that if you want to build a pine cabinet, use "yellow" pine not "white" pine.  The white is softer, lighter, and has an overbearing resonance.

[thermionix]

Another thing I'll add, make damn sure it's "square" as possible.  You'll need a very flat surface to glue up the main box (the "surround" or whatever you call the four sides).  If there's a small twist due to warped boards or whatever, it will cause your baffleboard to curve when mounted.  That in turn will bend the frames of stamped-steel frame speakers, and the uneven cone excursion that results can be something you actually hear, unpleasant overtones.  I imagine if it's really severe, you could even get voice coil rub.

My current amp started off in a different cabinet.  I always had it on carpet, or uneven floors, so I didn't know it had a slight twist.  I can't calculate the number of hours I wasted trying to fix what I thought was an instability issue in the electronics.  From moving wires, to repositioning the OT, to completely gutting and rebuilding it...more than once!  When I finally figured it out, I pulled the speakers and they rocked on a flat table top.  Spin 90 degress to confirm it's not the table top.  Yep, bent frames!  Ugh.

That's another thing about yellow pine, you're more likely to find straight boards.  When I had my buddy make my current cab, I explained to him how important it was for the front to be dead flat.  When I got it all tolexed and assembled, before I mounted the (new) speakers in it, I set them in place to make sure they didn't rock.  Spun them 90 degrees, still no rocking.  Good to go.  No more funky overtones.

[Rob Strand]

A more musical design:

[thermionix]

I think those are DVDs.  The woofer's magnet took care of all the VHS tapes.

[Rob Strand]

The woofer's magnet took care of all the VHS tapes.

 
Rev 1 was a fail but there was no need for Rev 2.

[Mark Hammer]

> impression that it's box volume rather than dimensions which is most important

Simple volume has major impact around bass resonance, no effect an octave or two up. Of course the "balls" is a lot of a speaker system's "balance", so a mis-tuned bass may not be a happy speaker.

"Frontal area" affects mid-bass "throw". Consider a speaker in a bill-board. All the sound goes to half the world. Now put a speaker in the end of a long pipe. The mid-bass spreads out to the whole world. We normally run speakers well into the highs where the cone alone will support a directional wave, so tube mounting gives a wide-spread mid-bass and still beamy highs.

Most boxes, the bass is always omni. If your billboard is over 4 feet each way, even the bottom note of guitar is supported, you have some bass "throw", a Marshall/Who Four-12 Half- or Full-Stack. The Fender open-back Twin also gets some bass throw and room efficiency by dipole action. Most smaller boxes are just small; still Frontal Area is good within reason.

If you try to optimize frontal area per volume you get a very shallow box which tips over easy. Also if the box back is closer to the cone than the cone diameter there will be a reflection and a "boxy" sound. This is not awful. Note that this depth is similar to a large acoustic guitar, and its "boxy" IS part of "tone". And filling 1/4 the depth with fuzz will pretty much kill the boxy. (This is more a concern for High Fidelity than for music production.)

I've told this story before, but in the late '70s, I went to the home of a serious audiophile to sell him a Dynaco something-or-other.  HOW serious an audiophile?  He had large holes cut through the floor of his living room to sink concrete tubes from about knee-height in the living room to the floor of the basement.  The tubes were for mounting his 18" woofers, facing upwards, with essentially no baffle, so they could have "proper" resonance.  If they had been mounted in cabs with the same volume, I imagine the cabs would have likely damaged the wooden floor of that older home anyway.  So if you're going to damage the floor, may as well get maximum sonic value for it.

Of course, he saw this arrangement as having a limited lifespan.  "Some day", he gestured with a sweep of his hand, "All of this stuff will be obsolete, and you'll get your music in digital form, on a chip".  "Yeah...right", I thought to myself.

Here we are 40 years later, and wireless-headphone dances and concerts are not all that uncommon.  Not even a P.A., just mixers and transmitters.

[bluebunny]

Here we are 40 years later, and wireless-headphone dances and concerts are not all that uncommon.  Not even a P.A., just mixers and transmitters.

Indeed.  The Shard in London does "silent discos".  And last month, there was a similar event at Stonehenge for the autumn equinox.