so over the weekend, I may have succumbed to an impulse buy, and came home with 2 dozen speakers. Well, technically 25.

Most of these are cheap MTX AAL 10" "3 way" speakers that are, well, terrible. Most of them I'm going to resell, but I've got a few with bad woofers. My son took an interest to this whole fiasco and we discussed replacing the woofers, but since these sound so bad, I started thinking out loud and we ended up discussing a total upgrade. I don't really have the ambition to do a scratch build, especially considering what MDF costs now, so I want to reuse the cabinets, and would like to make my life even more difficult by trying to avoid enlarging any of the driver cutouts, but I'm flexible on that.
This is what I'm starting with:

Drivers consist of a 10" woofer with a 9.25" cutout, a 5" sealed back midrange with a 4.125" opening, and a horn tweeter with an opening of 2.75".
On a side note, the "crossover" on these is a joke. The woofers play full range, the mids have a single inline cap, as do the tweeters. The output on the mids is so low that you could disconnect them entirely and probably not notice.
My design goals are to have a speaker with a considerably improved sound quality (this won't be difficult - the bar is set very, very low), driver costs under $100 total, and a more pleasing aesthetic. I'm really after a Cerwin Vega party speaker type of sound that sounds good loud and isn't fatiguing. I'm not going to be playing Brahms on these, I'll be playing Metallica.
I'm having a bit of difficulty in selecting drivers. For the woofer I think I've settled on the Dayton Classic 10" (DC250-8). It models reasonably well in this enclosure with an F3 of 38hz and only a very mild bump in output around 50hz, which honestly, is fine with me for this type of speaker.
For the midrange, I'm a bit conflicted. The idea of some of these sealed back mids appeals to me because they're a simple drop-in replacement for the existing hole, but this will either require a notch to get rid of the high Q spike on the low end, or a higher crossover frequency than I'd like. Either way, these won't extend low enough for me to cross the woofer to the mid at the baffle step transition, which would have been ideal. Another option is to suck it up and build a sub enclosure behind the midrange, which opens up the option of using something that can cross down near the 300 baffle step transition range. It also lets me use the 4" paper woofer buyout that PE has for $5.80. Even though this driver is 16 ohm, it looks like the sensitivity is high enough to work with the Dayton Classic woofer. If I build a 5" cube behind the mid opening, I model about a 3dB bump at around 250hz before it rolls off sharply. This should lend itself well to a somewhat simple high pass filter for the mid.
So, if I go with the Dayton woofer and the $6 mid, that leaves me just under $12/each for tweeters, which obviously isn't much. I could go with some variety of the Peerless BC25s, or maybe try out the Apex Jr tweeters that sell for $15/pair. Those have a pretty hot top end, which I think would be a nice book end for the bump that the woofer has at the low end.
For aesthetics, I don't really plan on doing much, but these enclosures are pretty beat and most of them have a bunch of screw holes from various mounting brackets that were installed from their years in bar rooms and other public places. I'm figuring on filling the screw holes and either painting them black or maybe laying a new fresh layer of vinyl wrap.
At this point I'd love to get some general feedback from the collective about the plan. I realize 100% that these aren't going to win any awards for sound quality, but my goal is just to have a fun project with my son, and re-acquaint myself with the overall process of using Soundeasy, designing and implementing some filters before I get back into trying to use up some of the higher quality drivers that I've been sitting on for over a decade.

Most of these are cheap MTX AAL 10" "3 way" speakers that are, well, terrible. Most of them I'm going to resell, but I've got a few with bad woofers. My son took an interest to this whole fiasco and we discussed replacing the woofers, but since these sound so bad, I started thinking out loud and we ended up discussing a total upgrade. I don't really have the ambition to do a scratch build, especially considering what MDF costs now, so I want to reuse the cabinets, and would like to make my life even more difficult by trying to avoid enlarging any of the driver cutouts, but I'm flexible on that.
This is what I'm starting with:

Drivers consist of a 10" woofer with a 9.25" cutout, a 5" sealed back midrange with a 4.125" opening, and a horn tweeter with an opening of 2.75".
On a side note, the "crossover" on these is a joke. The woofers play full range, the mids have a single inline cap, as do the tweeters. The output on the mids is so low that you could disconnect them entirely and probably not notice.
My design goals are to have a speaker with a considerably improved sound quality (this won't be difficult - the bar is set very, very low), driver costs under $100 total, and a more pleasing aesthetic. I'm really after a Cerwin Vega party speaker type of sound that sounds good loud and isn't fatiguing. I'm not going to be playing Brahms on these, I'll be playing Metallica.
I'm having a bit of difficulty in selecting drivers. For the woofer I think I've settled on the Dayton Classic 10" (DC250-8). It models reasonably well in this enclosure with an F3 of 38hz and only a very mild bump in output around 50hz, which honestly, is fine with me for this type of speaker.
For the midrange, I'm a bit conflicted. The idea of some of these sealed back mids appeals to me because they're a simple drop-in replacement for the existing hole, but this will either require a notch to get rid of the high Q spike on the low end, or a higher crossover frequency than I'd like. Either way, these won't extend low enough for me to cross the woofer to the mid at the baffle step transition, which would have been ideal. Another option is to suck it up and build a sub enclosure behind the midrange, which opens up the option of using something that can cross down near the 300 baffle step transition range. It also lets me use the 4" paper woofer buyout that PE has for $5.80. Even though this driver is 16 ohm, it looks like the sensitivity is high enough to work with the Dayton Classic woofer. If I build a 5" cube behind the mid opening, I model about a 3dB bump at around 250hz before it rolls off sharply. This should lend itself well to a somewhat simple high pass filter for the mid.
So, if I go with the Dayton woofer and the $6 mid, that leaves me just under $12/each for tweeters, which obviously isn't much. I could go with some variety of the Peerless BC25s, or maybe try out the Apex Jr tweeters that sell for $15/pair. Those have a pretty hot top end, which I think would be a nice book end for the bump that the woofer has at the low end.
For aesthetics, I don't really plan on doing much, but these enclosures are pretty beat and most of them have a bunch of screw holes from various mounting brackets that were installed from their years in bar rooms and other public places. I'm figuring on filling the screw holes and either painting them black or maybe laying a new fresh layer of vinyl wrap.
At this point I'd love to get some general feedback from the collective about the plan. I realize 100% that these aren't going to win any awards for sound quality, but my goal is just to have a fun project with my son, and re-acquaint myself with the overall process of using Soundeasy, designing and implementing some filters before I get back into trying to use up some of the higher quality drivers that I've been sitting on for over a decade.
Comment