BTW, don’t worry about toe-in. Consider it a tuning mechanism that’s not available with headphones. It accomplishes two things:
More toe-in generally = better center image. Less toe-in generally = wider soundstage.
You can use it to make small changes in tonality. This is due to the frequency response dispersion pattern. Each speaker is different.
As I’m waking up and thinking more clearly about generalities, here are a few more rules of thumb (but by no means laws):
A thinner speaker will image better (due to less diffraction off the front baffle muddying up the response). But, inversely, it will tend to be less efficient due to not having much baffle gain. It will also have less bass due to baffle-step loss.
A wider speaker will be the opposite.
A bookshelf will image/stage better for the same reasons as above (small baffle). It will lose out on bass though.
Planars like Magnepans need lots of current - same thing as headphones.
More general stuff that’s falling out of my brain:
Less distance between tweeter and mid/woofer is better. This has to do with the dispersion pattern of the mid/woofer at the upper frequencies of its range. The dispersion pattern becomes narrower as the frequency increases. The actual “narrowness” is inversely proportional to the cone diameter. So a larger cone will have a narrower pattern at a lower frequency than a smaller cone (so a tweeter will have a much wider dispersion than the mid/woofer at the crossover point).
Also, due to the above, you don’t want a mid/woofer bigger than say…5.25 inches handing off to a tweeter. A two way speaker with for example an 8" mid and a 1" tweeter is going to have problems in frequency response around the crossover point.
All the things I’m posting are physics and therefore non-negotiable. They have to be juggled by the designer. An individual speaker will do some things better than others and what that combo is depends on the designer’s preferences/design philosophy.
Ok, that’s like my 10th post on your question I think lol. I’ll shut up unless you ask me more questions.
Now I feel like I’m just spamming but…one more generality:
A sealed box will have better low-end extension and bass accuracy whereas a ported box will be more efficient and have more “weight/warmth//impact/bloom/boom” (whatever you want to call it).
There are lots of books on speaker design, I have a couple.
None of them will tell you how a speaker sounds as a whole in a particular environment.
Drivers matter, Crossovers matter and the box matters.
Outside the crossover having good on axis frequency response and a predictable falloff off axis. Like amp design there is a lot of debate between speaker designers as to what is important, crossovers can be designed to have minimal phase impact, or to minimise the frequency range where both drivers operate. Some designers like line arrays, some don’t, some like horns, some don’t, various tweeter and cone materials become religious debates.
Pretty much the only reliable way to know if you will like a speaker more than another is to listen to both in your room.
Nearfield listening takes a lot of the room out of the equation FWIW.
This is obviously impractical for most people if they are not spending a ton of money where you can visit dealers who’ll do in home demos.
So you’re pretty much like headphones at the entry level, buy something and compare it to reviews, and try and understand what you like and don’t like about it.
Positioning really is just trial and error for the most part, speakers want to be well into a room and then you just listen, adjust and when you find something you like mark it with tape so you can find it again.
Room treatments, start with points of first reflection, that’s the point on a wall, floor or ceiling that if you place a mirror, from the listening position you would see the speaker driver.
Ive drawn from different deciplines on youtube like home theater and music production, examples “daily hifi” podcast and a channel called “produce like a pro”. Also usual suspects zeos and steve guttenburg, entrance to the rabbithole begins there.
It was back when I was into vintage speakers and was searching about repair and modification. Then I got turned onto the full-range driver field.
It’s a truly fulfilling area of audio. If you think that cheap speakers and cabinets make up many expensive speakers, making your own can save tons of money and it’s pretty interesting.
Also, I make cabinets from $1 store foam boards and hot glue with cloth covering.
I don’t see a thread up for general speakers. Maybe I’ll make one and we can continue there. I’ll message you if I do. I don’t want to congest this thread much more.
Unless youre going for a very specific sound isnt the laminate boards preffered for cabinets? I know for guitar stuff they wanted to eliminate the cabs resonance and laminate boards were better for that. They also used a lot of stuffing in the cabs too
Marine grade birch is best for rigidity/resonance control. MDF is pretty good but not as good as Birch. MDF is usually what’s used since it’s easy to machine and it’s cheaper.
Theres a artsy fartsy home decor aspect to speaker design. Not knocking fine handcrafted wood finish or premium materials. More trying not to feed the addiction like i did with cars.
