#speaker enclosures

[stone-cold-groove]

Find out what it’s like. Ad for JBL professional sound reinforcement speakers - 1977.

[squeezebottle]

Also amp cabs are EXPENSIVE. The price you pay for a decently enough built cabinet is probably about what it's worth. Even if $1000 seems like a lot of money, if it's like a 4x12, that has at least $400 in speakers alone, but probably more. The wood varies greatly but even if it's good quality plywood that's another hundred or so at least. Paint/Stain or Tolex isn't SUPER cheap. Nested metal handles, at least another $25. Then someone actually is building it. Then before that someone had to design it. Working with Thiele-Small parameters SUCKS. The way I build them, each one takes at least a week from start to finish because everything is done by hand.

Like if I was going to sell this 1x15 that I am building retail, it would probably be at least $450. If I end up making that 3x15, retail would be closer to like $1250. And that's at reasonably acceptable, sole proprietor, small business profit margins. If I had even a single employee helping me out the prices would at least double. Which is why most people, even the expensive ones, use plywood and particle board and cover it up with Tolex rather than actual hardwood.

But yeah, shit be expensive.

[squeezebottle]

The fun survey is completed and the results are very interesting. From all of the non-musicians, I received exclusively suggestions of going with the Neodymium-driven speaker. From all the musicians I talked to, I received exclusively suggestions of going with the Ferrite-driven speaker. Ferrite is pretty much exclusively the material for "traditional" speaker cabinets for guitar and bass. Neodymium is slowly supplanting it for "stage" and "club" sound; in other words those gigantic arrays of speakers that they have hanging from the ceiling on either side of the stage. The reason for this is that Neodymium speakers have that boost in the midrange, so the sound projects further and "sounds" louder, just by virtue of how it creates and sustains the sound pressure. 

The other, unwritten consideration I've had was that Neodymium is considerably more expensive. This is likely going to change over the course of the next however many years, but for now the same size and specification speakers it's around a third more expensive for the neo over the ferrite.

I think though for this project I'm going to go for the Neodymium anyway though because I am curious about 1) how lightweight I can make a cabinet and still have it be and "feel" solid. 2) it's going to be a sealed enclosure and part of me is going to be very curious whether the whole cabinet "dances" with the mechanical pressure of the vibrations with such a light speaker inside. And 3) it's going to be a sort of dress rehearsal for the possibility of making a 2x15 cabinet that is not over 50 pounds. or possibly even a 3x15 cabinet that is not over 70 pounds; in other words, things that people can actually lift. The 3x15 for instance would be less than 2 feet wide and less than 5 feet tall; so in other words similar dimensions to the classic Ampeg 8x10 stack, but around half the weight. But we'll see what the 1x15 actually weighs, because I'll be able to roughly extrapolate the numbers by just doubling or tripling.