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(Chu Gai) wrote:

(Nousaine) wrote in message
snip...

Thanks for your insights Arny & Tom. Along the lines of what you
posted, are you aware of any scenarios where DIY'ers have had their
speakers measured more critically and compared to some other
competently performing commercial speaker, say PSB? It's not unusual
at DIY gatherings for awards to be given to 'best speaker' that have
more to do with appearance and uniqueness as opposed to sound quality.

That has been my observation as well. No I haven't seen anybody do that. There
was supposed to be a DIY Shootout in Iowa a couple years ago where I suggested
that the 'scoring' be done relative to a commerical model on a one-at-a-time
basis but I don't know if this was ever pulled off.

For the scope of what I consider an example of a high-drive DIY project you
might consider looking up Tom Parazella's system as described in The Audio
Amateur (or Audio Express or whatever it was called at the time). There are two
parts subwoofer and then large ribbon systems.

But as long as you mention it one of the real good reasons for DIY is to make
speakers that are unusually styled and finely finished. Like Randy Parker's
which have appeared in Speaker Builder in the past.

But I'm not downgrading DIY speakers. I love the "format"; god knows that I
spent years wallowing in it, and I don't mean to discourage it, but frankly
engineers at Paradigm, PSB and more lately JBL and Infinity have
discovered
all the "secrets" of making good sounding speaker systems for cheap.