In my experience (twentysomething years of amateur speaker building), crossover design is what primarily separates the men from the boys. Other significant factors can include custom-tailored drivers and exotic cabinet materials.
Note that in my twentysomething amateur years I've amassed perhaps as much experience as a professional does in his first year or so. And I don't have the engineering background that a professional does.
The main practical advantage of DIY is that there are no layers of price markup, and the labor is free (or nearly so). This means that DIY speakers can include a lot of painstaking detail work (especially on the cabinet) that would be prohibitively expensive for a manufacturer.
For me, the appeal of DIY is the joy of creating something that no one else has ever created before. I'm tweaking a high efficiency monster in my living room right now. Yup, it's R&D for a (hopefully) commercial product, but it's also a lot of fun. Assuming my prototypes validate the concepts I'm exploring, I'll engage a professional designer before going commercial.
So, can a DIY design be the ultimate? In 1998, a first-generation commercial effort by longtime amateur designer Siegfried Linkwitz walked away with Stereophile's "Speaker of the Year" award. The Audio Artistry Beethoven was essentially a commercial incarnation of a DIY design, and in fact you can go to Siegfried's website and learn how to build your own Beethoven equivalant, called the Phoenix. I would suggest that amateur speaker builders in the same league as Siegfried Linkwitz have a shot at designing and building a truly "ultimate" loudspeaker. The rest of us are somewhere farther back on the learning curve.
Note that in my twentysomething amateur years I've amassed perhaps as much experience as a professional does in his first year or so. And I don't have the engineering background that a professional does.
The main practical advantage of DIY is that there are no layers of price markup, and the labor is free (or nearly so). This means that DIY speakers can include a lot of painstaking detail work (especially on the cabinet) that would be prohibitively expensive for a manufacturer.
For me, the appeal of DIY is the joy of creating something that no one else has ever created before. I'm tweaking a high efficiency monster in my living room right now. Yup, it's R&D for a (hopefully) commercial product, but it's also a lot of fun. Assuming my prototypes validate the concepts I'm exploring, I'll engage a professional designer before going commercial.
So, can a DIY design be the ultimate? In 1998, a first-generation commercial effort by longtime amateur designer Siegfried Linkwitz walked away with Stereophile's "Speaker of the Year" award. The Audio Artistry Beethoven was essentially a commercial incarnation of a DIY design, and in fact you can go to Siegfried's website and learn how to build your own Beethoven equivalant, called the Phoenix. I would suggest that amateur speaker builders in the same league as Siegfried Linkwitz have a shot at designing and building a truly "ultimate" loudspeaker. The rest of us are somewhere farther back on the learning curve.