On Saturday, January 07, 2012 03:26:46 PM Fons Adriaensen did opine:
On Sat, Jan 07, 2012 at 01:34:15PM +0100, Ralf Madorf
wrote:
OTOH, if you've got much time and a lot of
money, you might build a
better monitor than there's on the market. Trail and error is how
people from rich families build some good pro-audio gear. The VM-1
microphone is such an example. Patience and money in the beginning is
all you need. You even don't need knowledge that much.
The last sentence made my day when reading it during lunch.
Sure, if you have plenty of money you can hire someone with the
required knowledge. And if you have plenty of time you can re-
invent and rediscover all the design theory, psycho-acoustics,
material science and measurement techniques accumulated over
the past 80 years or so, and everything else it takes to create
a good studio monitor or mic.
There are probably some good speaker designs available on the
net, and building one of those may be a rewarding exercise.
But even in that case you're just doing maybe 5% of the work,
the rest has been done by the designers of the components you
use. It's like building your own car using an existing engine,
gearbox, etc. and just putting in your own pair of seats and
adding a layer of paint. Nice if you enjoy doing that, but a
waste of time otherwise.
Ciao,
Fons, are you perchance old enough to remember the "Karlson" speaker
cabinet designs from back in the late 50's?
This was an attempt to take the Electrovoice corner horn and fold it all up
into a more normal looking box that actually took nearly 2 sheets of 3/4"
plywood to build. As a late teenager I built the 12" sized version of it,
and while I can't say it didn't "color" the sound, the thing I can
recall
was that it was extremely efficient with a University 6201 12" coax speaker
in it. 5 watts could loosen the putty in the rooms windows. The 12" sized
version also seemed to have an LF cutoff in the 45hz range but that was
probably the speakers blame as it cone wasn't exactly softly suspended.
If any of those survive today, what do the experts think of them now,
nearly 60 years later?
Cheers, Gene
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