I sense a lot of Anti DIY speaker stuff here at times.
So as someone who sank their money into a moderately high-end approach, I feel obliged to respond. Let me first say I have no disrespect for the DIY crowd. Quite the opposite, I'm frequently very impressed with the quality of work a passionately motivated individual can produce in their own garage or workshop. That said, when I consider my personal position and my particular use case for audio equipment, my judgment landed in a different direction.
I started off knowing very little about audio equipment when I started my journey more than a year ago. Part of the process was actually getting enough knowledge about the various components and the underlying principles they operate on so that I could make an informed decision of my own accord, rather than using a salesperson as a consultant to tell me what I should buy and how much it would all cost. I spent over a year doing my research. This included an extensive reading of marketing material cleverly disguised as reviews, pages upon pages & video after video to learn about technical aspects of sound reproduction and audio equipment engineering, and even learning how to interpret objective testing results and calibrating my own listening experiences against them. During the course of this, I auditioned nearly 3 dozen different speaker models from at least 18 manufacturers, with costs ranging from $1,000 to over $32,000 per pair, and which to my own ears ranged from astounding to utterly awful. Significantly, even if I had opted to take a DIY approach, I think I still would have needed to do this, so I would have an understanding of what I should aspire to produce, and what would be a reasonable target.
As a result, I am quite confident that while I could have continued to seek out more options, I made a sound decision for my own case. I have yet to find any cause for even a hint of buyer's remorse, other than I couldn't find acceptably equivalent quality and feature match for less spend. The only caveats were that first, I would not be able to consider something that I couldn't hear beforehand. This precluded a few options, like the Perlisten speakers, that should otherwise have been under consideration. Second, my attempts to audition Revel's speakers were marred by backing equipment overload ($30k+ of Mark Levinson processing and monoblocks on a $7,500 speaker pair that made them sound about as good as anything else in that speaker's price range, really?) or by a terrible room setup that made it difficult to evaluate them fairly. I know they couldn't possibly sound as underwhelming in my own space as they did in a room that made every speaker in them sound muddy. Even the Salon2 pair. How do you even
do that?
Having done all that, couldn't I have then turned around and undertaken a DIY project? Superficially, the answer is yes. However, the practical reality is that I judged this to be a poor use of my time and money. I do not have many of the tools I would need to do the work, nor any dedicated workspace in which to operate them. Just setting up the space to undertake this project would have cost significantly more than some of the speakers I evaluated. Further, for all the theoretical knowledge I've gained in the matter of research, which is by no means exhaustive, I have no practical experience in this sort of construction project. Implementing it would almost certainly take significant time and effort beyond what I'd already expended, and I am fairly certain it would take multiple iterations of materials to get something reasonably close to what would be acceptable. That's assuming that with my limited experience and skill, such an outcome was even realistically feasible in a reasonable timeframe, which is highly questionable. Given the other life and hobby considerations that consume my money and time, and given the quality of output I can get from a quality product derived from someone else's research and labor dollars, the value assessment for my specific use case approach was trivial to make.
So rather than taking a pro- or anti-DIY space, I instead submit that circumstances will vary between individuals. It's reasonable to ask questions to understand if someone has made an informed decision when choosing to spend what may be a subjectively large amount of money to your view. Ultimately, if someone expends the effort to make an informed consideration and decision on what approach fits their needs, people on both sides should respect the decision they've made for themselves.