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I’m re-cabineting my Pioneer drivers. They are from a pair of CSM-555s I bought way back in the 90’s. The old cabinets have gotten pretty beat up over the years and they were no great furniture objects to start with. In fact they were dirt cheap in terms of construction. Less than 1/2” cheap MDF. No internal bracing. No damping. POS crossover. Plastic-y drivers. No gaskets on the drivers.
Weirdly, I think they sound pretty good. So about a year ago when I got into audio, I decided to measure them in room. And the performance wasn’t horrible. THD was around 5% for everything above 100hz (I think, I will post the original measurements later), and noise was below the sound floor of the room. But there were resonances and a few valleys and humps.
So I decided to build new crossovers. I converted an old sound card to make impedence measurements of the drivers and used the dual weight method to reconstruct the Small/Thiele parameters. I modeled numerous crossovers in SpeakerSim. Settled on one and built a pair. This got me a smoother response giving me about 5dB more headroom for my automatic room correction software. But there were still some resonances.
So I thought I would try building new cabinets for them as it would be a good way to learn CAD/CAM and my CNC machine (which I needed to do for other art projects I am working on). A year on now and I am getting the first cabinet prototype (after modeling more than 5 fully developed cabinets) pretty near the point of testing so I thought I would start this thread.
I’m using 3/4 MDF for everything except the baffles which are 1.5” at their thickest. Along with internal bracing, they will be damped and the drivers will be gasketed. Without the plans feet. They are 44” x 8” x 15” and the top, bottom, and sides are all angled in at three degrees. I’m planning on painting them dark gray. Pics below and more posts to come.
Weirdly, I think they sound pretty good. So about a year ago when I got into audio, I decided to measure them in room. And the performance wasn’t horrible. THD was around 5% for everything above 100hz (I think, I will post the original measurements later), and noise was below the sound floor of the room. But there were resonances and a few valleys and humps.
So I decided to build new crossovers. I converted an old sound card to make impedence measurements of the drivers and used the dual weight method to reconstruct the Small/Thiele parameters. I modeled numerous crossovers in SpeakerSim. Settled on one and built a pair. This got me a smoother response giving me about 5dB more headroom for my automatic room correction software. But there were still some resonances.
So I thought I would try building new cabinets for them as it would be a good way to learn CAD/CAM and my CNC machine (which I needed to do for other art projects I am working on). A year on now and I am getting the first cabinet prototype (after modeling more than 5 fully developed cabinets) pretty near the point of testing so I thought I would start this thread.
I’m using 3/4 MDF for everything except the baffles which are 1.5” at their thickest. Along with internal bracing, they will be damped and the drivers will be gasketed. Without the plans feet. They are 44” x 8” x 15” and the top, bottom, and sides are all angled in at three degrees. I’m planning on painting them dark gray. Pics below and more posts to come.