Just one more pair...

Speakers occupy a disproportionate amount of my daily bandwidth for curiosity and inspiration. It's really the perfect personal project for me. They're simultaneously furniture, art, and technology. Interior design, product design, industrial design, and engineering. Every major design language movement can be seen across the archive of commercial speaker designs as their history extends to the very beginning of product design itself.

But most of all, they're accessible. They can scale to any budget you have. Drivers that were designed in the mid-20th century are still available today. With a handful of free weekends and a few hundred dollars in tools and materials, anyone can recreate the sound and physical design of any speaker that was made in the last 80 years. The same can't be said of most other products with such a long history. Plus I really, really love music.

The first thing I ever designed, built, and finished from scratch was a pair of speakers when I was 14. Throughout the rest of high school and university I built another three pairs, each time focusing on a specific visual style or functional design principle (ported, sealed, passive radiators, waveguides, ribbons, active, passive, two way, three way.)

Two-way active with digital crossover via DSP

• Ribbon tweeter with modified faceplate cut to reduce center-to-center driver spacing for crossover response optimization
• Active amplification provided by two TPA3250 eval boards internally mounted
• Digital phase-linear crossover implemented via MiniDSP 2x4 balanced DSP

Two-way with 3D printed waveguide and passive radiator

• 3D printed waveguide designed for the selected tweeter with the best practices of speaker forums and manufacturer whitepapers
• Racetrack passive radiator for adjustable bass response

Three-way with sealed mid and slot-ported bass

• Passive three-way crossover optimized for placement against a wall
• Sealed midrange and slot-ported bass drivers