Do It Yourself Speakers

I have built a pair of North Creek Okara II's, a Vision Center channel, and am currently finishing a pair of Vision mains. The North Creek kits are outstanding and sound fantastic to me, so much smoother than anything else I've been able to compare them with. If you are of intermediate woodworking skills, I highly recommend the Visions for HT or the Rhythyms for 2 channel. The toughest part is the finish so they look pretty. North Creek takes care of making them sound great for you.

Steve

Im fixing to embark on my first speaker building venture as well.

I plan to use a set of 6.5in peerless drivers with some top-mounted tweeter. I plan tot unr the box to about 50Hz to give a nice deep full range.

Here is a good book,

Designing, Building, and Testing your Own Speaker System
By David B Weems

I reccommend reading that before you try anything. There are alot of considerations, but as long as yer not a total moron it is not too hard to understand, and it will save you alot of money and materials by preventing you from making some real stupid mistakes.

Loudspeaker Cookbook by Vance Dickson is pretty good too.

You will need some baisc understanding of w2oodworking as well. Back when i was in the military i used to use the base hobby shop quite a bit. Now im out and still working on getting a good woodshop going. Just need a table-saw at this point and im ready to go.

For speaker parts check out
Madisound. They can send you a catalog of all thier wares, they have about 10 driver manufacturers listed in thier catalog with all kinds of misc stuff, even a xover service to design a cross over for you if you are not ready to tackle that yourself just yet

Good luck dude.

I plan on building my own amps, cables, speakers, and pre-amp. The only thing i dont plan cause it is just plain too hard is the CDplayer and FM tuner.

Im gonna keep pics posted with my results. You should do the same.

Try out the Linkwitz Orions (www.linkwitzlab.com). Plenty of others working on this design and they are among the finest speakers I have ever heard, price no object. You'll be hard pressed to find a more well supported DIY project or a better soudning speaker.

Diy is the way to go for high performance speakers -- unless your bank account is superlative!
I strongly second Slaufer's recommendation for the Orions. This is a VERY complicated and elaborate design; easily amongst the best sounding dynamic speakers commercially available -- if not the best (and I've listened to many -- OK, not all:)).

Also, very strongly recommend CLueless' visiting list; I would add and also recommend you visit JPO's site and look up the Point 75 project -- another good design by Troels Gravesen that has a dipole midrange.
Good luck!

Putting together someone else's design in kit form is not really "speaker Building" in the classic sense. Don't get me wrong: I think these kits are fine, and I use them myself, but it isn't the real thing.