Custom Speaker Boxes and the DIY Speaker Box often = Better Performance

In the process of choosing to build a speaker box?

What about building custom speaker boxes?

Speaker Cabinet construction can be taken to the extreme if the builder desires.

Building a cabinet that is vastly superior to retail cabinet offerings is very easy to do.

There are several reasons that DIY speaker boxes are the best option.

- More musical.

- More articulate bass.

- Use room correction (affordable).

- Better musical enjoyment.

- Better home theater.

- Much less expensive.

- How can this be proven?

If you can afford a $2,000.00 speaker; that money will go much, much further if you are assembling your own speaker cabinets.

Speaker Manufacturers; Why Retail is Not a good Deal;

And speaker Manufacturers don't want to spend one extra cent more than necessary to make the product.

Also, materials and high shipping rates drive up expenses for the speaker manufacturer.

It is in their best interest to keep costs as low as possible which means that you can easily do better because the materials are actually quite cheap and who cares how much they weigh.

I would rather have a 300lb speaker than a 50lb speaker any day.

Although, moving them is not much fun...

Building great custom speaker boxes for your DIY home theater speakers is an excellent way to improve the performance of your home audio system.

This step is often cut short or sacrificed by most speaker builders because custom speaker boxes are time consuming to complete correctly.

I have a hunch that most audio enthusiast will not mind spending a little extra time to get substantially higher performance.

There are many advantages of a DIY speaker cabinet so let’s start by listing a few of those first:

1. Cabinet rigidity: retail cabinets are flimsy and crude devices. The more the cabinet speaks the more it distorts the musical accuracy. Distortion is the result of poor cabinets. You would need to spend over $10,000 before you start seeing some really good cabinet designs.

2. Cabinet weight: a heavy cab is actually a good thing. The speaker drivers movements cause a tiny ‘rocking back and forth motion’.

This is really only an issue with large drivers but to some extent all speaker drivers will cause this.

Having a heavy speaker makes this rocking less an issue.

3. Baffle thickness: if you build speakers for yourself you can make your baffles as thick and dense as you like.

4. Cabinet Bracing: adding braces is easiest to do before you ever make the first cut on the table saw. Add cabinet bracing to your design or use a cabinet blueprint that addresses the problem before you build a speaker.

5. Driver spacing: This may not be so obvious, but the driver choices that you use and the crossover points will all play a role in how far apart is best to mount your drivers. Usually, the closer the driver are mounted in your custom speaker boxes the better results you will get.

6. Speaker Driver choices: You can obviously pick speaker drivers you like but even better than that is this; you can often upgrade your drivers when new and better models become available.

If you built the speaker you can plan ahead. A good way to ‘plan ahead’ may be to use a removable mounting flange or front baffle for your speaker box.

This will give you an upgrade path down the road without the need to completely rebuild your speakers. A DIY speaker box lets you build a modular design from the start. Saving you tons of money over time.

7. Not excited about DIY speaker projects and the best speakers? No big deal… Get some custom speaker box plans and have a local cabinet shop build the cabs for you. This will still save you a bunch of money. Many cabinet shops can even apply real wood veneer so you can get the finish that you want.

8. Have an auto body shop paint your custom speaker boxes. A custom paint job will give you a product that no other person on the planet owns. A one of a kind way to build speakers.

I’m sure there are other good points to make too but that is all I can think of right now. If you have any additional comments just post them on the bottom of this page.

I don’t publish a cabinet design plan until the model is built and working impeccably. This causes our design time to be a bit long and as a result we don’t have many plans.

The good news is that the plans we do have will produce an excellent DIY speaker box for you to make your own.

We are currently working on several speaker plans and factory direct speakers for the very near future. Join our mailing list or submit to the RSS feed on the left to see when finish these.

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