HiFi Subjectivist ¦ Audio Forum ¦ NVA User Group

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:17 am
If the pleasure in DIY is coming up with something that is your own design, would self-assembly to someone else's instructions really count?

Thats a good point, but many of the diy speakers at owston where someone else's design

Scott's frugal horns are common now, mostly because Stefan sells pre cut kits so they appeal to both the less adventurous diyer and the guy who will cut his own wood work.
Guys who actually design and build there own loudspeakers are a minority within a minority.

valvesRus wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:18 am

What Peter didn't know about hi-fi, and loudspeakers in particular was probably not worth knowing, and he's a nice chap as well.



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Before we had our owston meets, we where all on the World Designs forum and had meets at eggbrough power station and Witham on the A1
The 1st eggbrough meets made the magazine.
Peter attended the couple of meets at Witham, he was really interested in the open baffles a few of us where building, those inspired him to write a series of articles in hifi World about open baffles.
He was quite taken by the clarity we where achieving compared to conventional loudspeakers
Good times..

SteveS57 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:40 am

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:17 am
If the pleasure in DIY is coming up with something that is your own design, would self-assembly to someone else's instructions really count?

Thats a good point, but many of the diy speakers at owston where someone else's design

Scott's frugal horns are common now, mostly because Stefan sells pre cut kits so they appeal to both the less adventurous diyer and the guy who will cut his own wood work.
Guys who actually design and build there own loudspeakers are a minority within a minority.

A pre cut kit?

Like from IKEA?

I'm being deliberately facetious with that example, of course, but I'm exploring the difference between DIY and self-assembly.

My (uneducated) prejudice is that most kits are 'knock offs' of classic / famous speakers; that someone else did the hard yards to design. Am I wrong?

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:17 am
If the pleasure in DIY is coming up with something that is your own design, would self-assembly to someone else's instructions really count?

There's scope for a wide variety of DIY approaches.
With this including sub-contracting the cabinet building to a friend or a cabinet maker, for a design that someone else has already done.
And sub-contracting any crossover assembly to someone with skills in that area.


Doesn't most of the pleasure comes from using the damned things for many years to come? Whilst using the money you saved by not buying some overpriced dealer mediocrity for other things in your life.

When you see case studies where people buy mediocre 4000 euro speakers and then feel compelled to spend another 2000 to 4000 euros on an amplifier to "drive" them, that's an awful lot of missed opportunity cost there.

Lindsayt wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:30 pm

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:17 am
If the pleasure in DIY is coming up with something that is your own design, would self-assembly to someone else's instructions really count?

There's scope for a wide variety of DIY approaches.
With this including sub-contracting the cabinet building to a friend or a cabinet maker, for a design that someone else has already done.
And sub-contracting any crossover assembly to someone with skills in that area.


Doesn't most of the pleasure comes from using the damned things for many years to come? Whilst using the money you saved by not buying some overpriced dealer mediocrity for other things in your life.

When you see case studies where people buy mediocre 4000 euro speakers and then feel compelled to spend another 2000 to 4000 euros on an amplifier to "drive" them, that's an awful lot of missed opportunity cost there.

When you buy a speaker from a dealer it is not usually overpriced. But, it is priced to a model that includes costs that you may or may not value as a consumer.

If I make a basic Cube kit available in acrylic with drivers that you dope yourself, what value do you attach to that beyond the cost of the parts?

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:09 pm
A pre cut kit?

Like from IKEA?

I'm being deliberately facetious with that example, of course, but I'm exploring the difference between DIY and self-assembly.

My (uneducated) prejudice is that most kits are 'knock offs' of classic / famous speakers; that someone else did the hard yards to design. Am I wrong?

In the 1960's companies like Bozak sold ready made complete speakers via dealers.
They were also very happy to sell you their drivers and crossovers and they published detailed plans of their cabinets, as well as circuit diagrams of their crossovers.

A DIY project that a few - mostly rich Americans - did was to have cut outs in their internal walls to which a board containing Bozak drivers would be mounted. For a highly effective and amazingly simple infinite baffle solution.

There was a lot more of a hobbyist culture in the 1960's. Along with more of an engineering lead culture to speakers.

In the 1960's, major speaker manufacturers were entirely happy to do the hard yards for any DIY hobbyists.

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:43 pm

Lindsayt wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:30 pm

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 11:17 am
If the pleasure in DIY is coming up with something that is your own design, would self-assembly to someone else's instructions really count?

There's scope for a wide variety of DIY approaches.
With this including sub-contracting the cabinet building to a friend or a cabinet maker, for a design that someone else has already done.
And sub-contracting any crossover assembly to someone with skills in that area.


Doesn't most of the pleasure comes from using the damned things for many years to come? Whilst using the money you saved by not buying some overpriced dealer mediocrity for other things in your life.

When you see case studies where people buy mediocre 4000 euro speakers and then feel compelled to spend another 2000 to 4000 euros on an amplifier to "drive" them, that's an awful lot of missed opportunity cost there.

When you buy a speaker from a dealer it is not usually overpriced. But, it is priced to a model that includes costs that you may or may not value as a consumer.

If I make a basic Cube kit available in acrylic with drivers that you dope yourself, what value do you attach to that beyond the cost of the parts?

I think I see both sides of the argument here, the intellectual property of the pre built speaker is 'baked' into the overall cost of said speaker. To reverse engineer it you have to actually deconstruct one, and try to recreate the production process which will certainly involve specialist tools that the average DIY'er does not have lurking in his shed* .
If you supply a kit then you are exposing yourself to being cloned and absolutely ripped off because you are making your 'workings' easily visible and eminently more prone to plagiarism. So quite how you bake in the IP of the original design, build, testing tweaking into a kit? The only way I can think of for NVA to do this would be to supply the drivers already doped. To you DIY doyens the doping process may sound easy, but to the likes of me, I would find the first one daunting, even though I have some old drivers I could practice on, doing it for real would still be off putting, at least for me.

I confess that on the speaker front I'm biased in so far as the last time I looked at the then current crop of speakers with a view to replacing what I already had I left with my money in my pocket because as mentioned elsewhere the great majority of them sounded if not awful then not as good as the modest boxes I currently have. I have locked very closely at kits, but the ones I've encountered haven't really grabbed me.

*Karetestu excluded here of course

Lindsayt wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 1:06 pm

savvypaul wrote: ↑Thu Dec 09, 2021 12:09 pm
A pre cut kit?

Like from IKEA?

I'm being deliberately facetious with that example, of course, but I'm exploring the difference between DIY and self-assembly.

My (uneducated) prejudice is that most kits are 'knock offs' of classic / famous speakers; that someone else did the hard yards to design. Am I wrong?

In the 1960's companies like Bozak sold ready made complete speakers via dealers.
They were also very happy to sell you their drivers and crossovers and they published detailed plans of their cabinets, as well as circuit diagrams of their crossovers.

A DIY project that a few - mostly rich Americans - did was to have cut outs in their internal walls to which a board containing Bozak drivers would be mounted. For a highly effective and amazingly simple infinite baffle solution.

There was a lot more of a hobbyist culture in the 1960's. Along with more of an engineering lead culture to speakers.

In the 1960's, major speaker manufacturers were entirely happy to do the hard yards for any DIY hobbyists.

I understand the history. What I'm asking is what value do you attach to the intellectual property?

If the answer is none, then it cannot be surprising that those companies stopped selling drivers and crossovers, and publishing detailed plans and diagrams, can it? Unless they inflated the cost of the parts so that you didn't know you were already paying for the hard yards.

I like the idea of a hobbyist culture but the idea that commercial designers will give away their intellectual property, seems fanciful.

So, what would a Cube kit be worth, over and above the parts cost?

What intellectual property is their in a speaker?

I’ll give you a clue . How many speaker manufacturers have patents?

Construction knowledge of what drivers to use, what crossover will what values ain’t intellectual property.

Can't say I'd ever heard of Bozak, but having looked him up he seems to have been successful.

In the 60s KEF did a couple of speaker kits, and I got the KEF kit 3, which was the baffle from the KEF Concerto complete with drivers and crossovers. A 3 way design, and only needing a cabinet to be built. I built mine from chipboard, and although the drivers were sold many years ago I still have the cabinets. They hold up a work bench in the conservatory.

I also have some Frugal-horn cabinets which came ready made (in MDF) from a European Ebay supplier and were very well made, even having the sound dampening material fitted behind the driver cut out.

I like DIY, but my woodworking skills are lacking, and I hate to think how my veneering would look if I ever dared to try.

PS Do Wilmslow Audio still do speaker kits ? They used to have a good range.

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