I'm slowly knocking them off the list:
1) last week I finished and delivered a pair of DIY Sound Group Zephyr speakers -
http://www.diysoundgroup.com/waveguide-speaker-kits/alpha-series-kits/alpha12-kit.html to a buddy of mine. I didn't order the kit, though. I already had a lot of the parts here to build stock, and knew I'd likely not use stock anyways. Had to pay to get crossover schematic. But was still cheaper for me to do that and buy parts myself than buy kit. This was supposed to satisfy my curiosity about the SEOS12 waveguide. No offense intended to the other designers on AVS Forum that I don't really know, but I figured if anyone could make it sound decent, it would be Bagby. I built a few other SEOS12 designs published in public domain and played with them on my own last year for a while. Couldn't get anything to sound good enough where I'd keep the speaker long term. Along the way of the months of trying to get the crossover schematic, got buddy curious about the speaker and how it might help his awful room situation be a bit more tolerable. Got the win-win scenario. He would pay for all parts and get a finished speaker when we were done. I would get to play with the speaker, hear what it was capable of, lose nothing more than my labor and a few incidental bucks, and possibly sell some of my stockpile of parts in the end. The final crossover was somewhere in between stock and my expensive stockpile parts... so I only got rid of a few parts and ended up ordering more stuff for him to meet his budget since the stuff that was better than stock in my stockpile that was in his budget didn't mesh well with the speaker...the expensive stuff sure did, but he didn't want to spend that much... oh well, he's very excited about the result and happy with the sound in his room...
2) this morning at 1:45AM, current got applied to the next speaker project to be completed, a pair of Wayne Parham 3Pi speakers with the upgraded drivers (B&C DE250, AE TD12S woofer). They don't measure as well as Zephyr (comparing my 1M measurements with ones Wayne has provided, I may have the issue with AE woofers that has caused Wayne to drop AE TD12S as upgrade option.. but I don't know for sure because I had to take measurements at such ridiculously low volumes to not disturb the lightest sleeping 20 month old on the planet and mommy), but I like the sound with no break in time better with 3Pi waveguide so far compared to Zephyr SEOS12... there is a difference in crossover parts for 3Pi versus Zephyr...one cap's brand was changed. The small cap in tweeter on Zephyr is Dynamicap. On 3Pi it is Mundorf Silver/Oil, which should be an advantage to 3Pi. Both Zephyr and 3Pi have the same size big cap in tweeter and I used Dynamicaps in both those places... Goertz foil inductors everywhere in both. Mills resistors everywhere. I sacrificed a set of speaker cables and they are wired with JPS. I'm using Dayton "premium" binding posts on 3Pi since my WBT Nextgen binding posts still haven't bee drop shipped from WBT yet. Hopefully soon... But that matches the Zephyrs I built for Greg as well since he opted for those posts rather than the insane price differential for WBT... I'll point htem at one another, run one out of phase, and start the break in on the 3Pis tonight and do critical listening in a couple weeks after they've run 24/7 long enough to put a few hundred hours on them... the Zephyr came alive after break in...
3) Next up is using the woofer cabinet from my big horn experiment to be the base for a baffle box I'm going to sit on top that has BMS 4550 compression driver and SEOS12 waveguide. mtg90 posted a schematic in public domain and I'm going to give it a whirl:
http://www.diysoundgroup.com/forum/index.php?topic=230.msg2838#msg2838I've got one crossover board soldered up and ready to go. The second one will hopefully get done in the next week... trying to get these published designs finished before Christmas. This one again uses Goertz foil inductors everywhere, mills resistors, Sonicap for all shunts and in the woofer circuit. Tweeter circuit will use Jupiter flat stacked beeswax cryoed caps.... been curious to hear them.... all reports make them out to be just exactly my kind of cap.... we'll see soon enough... not cheap to buy them though... if I like them, it's going to make the crossovers for my big horn projects stupid expensive.... which brings us to the last item:
4) finish my darn big horn experiments....
http://www.audionervosa.com/index.php?topic=4739.0 my problem is finding time to take proper measurements at appropriate volume levels so that I can actually do a crossover design for each combo of horn/compression driver and AE TD15M woofer... and therein lies the problem.... I use up all my goodwill with the boss to allow customer demos of Harbeth and other stuff I have here for commercial purposes. Trying to get her to take the little guy out so I can get proper measurements for the big speakers doesn't gain a lot of traction.... I've been building the published designs late at night after both the little guy and mommy have gone to bed.... I can wire crossovers at 1AM... I can't play test tones for measurements at 90dB at that time... my goal is now to set aside a Saturday or two in January to get some free time to do measurements.... Its hard though when the little guy doesn't want to leave my side and comes looking for me if I sneak away for 2 minutes... he likes dancing to the music... he doesn't like being quiet while I play test tones for measurement.... it's not the worst problem in the world to have, though
