For some reason the picture of the right speaker didn't come through.





And a classic.

James,

No I haven't swapped them side for side yet, I shall in the morning.
My wife gets pretty irritated when I crank the music above 95 db in the evening.

But I did stumble into a very meaningful upgrade in my sound.

I was moping around cursing the very idea of these speakers or the ridiculous idea that I could even build speakers to begin with, when it occurred to me that my JRiver software has a equalizer inside of it.
A couple minutes of button pushing later, I had found the equalizer and had added a little "chest" that was missing from vocals.
Things are much much better now, enough so that I put away the lighter fluid that I was going to use to set them on fire.
Though sometimes a good sacrificial burning makes things right, tonight isn't going to be that night.

I've spent the last few evenings listening to my new Isobaric speakers and am starting to get a handle on them.
First of all they are power hungry.
My 80 wpc Angela-Gilbert Yeung plays them well, my Torii surprisingly plays them well also.
The Torii's 25 watts are what the cattle guys I grew up with called "Heavy on the hoof". It punches all four woofers hard!
My ZKIT 60 plays them well, but without much headroom left in them.
My Ampapa el cheapo amp, with 120 watts, just ain't got the umph to push them at all. Sometimes you "gets whats you pays for."

I think that the reason that they are so amp sensitive is because they like, no, need to be pushed hard to sound really good. Like 90+db. Right on the edge of being too loud for even me.
Played at more sane levels they are OK, but loud makes them come alive.
The bass really shines at higher levels, so controlled.
The full range drivers that most of the signal are routed through are really pleasant to listen to. I bet that after the drivers and the crossover break in they will be even better.

So as of right now I'm going to say that these speakers are a success. I might in the future explore these waters again, there are some sonic plusses that I am intrigued by in this build.

I might try some different crossover stuff to see if I can get them to be a little more palatable at lower volumes. Perhaps some different bass drivers are needed.
But that is in the future, hopefully I have more chances to try "stuff" out.

You all have a great day!

I like that you keep it moving, Donnie. (Sometimes with a nudge from the neighbors).

As the kids say, "No pictures or it didn't happen".

Here are some glamor shots of my Neighbor's Infinity speakers, in process.

The cabinets are in glorious shape for something 35 years old.



They have been stiffened up, then cleaned and finally a coat of ceramic coating for car finishes. Shiny!

Now the drivers weren't in near the shape as the cabinets. The foam was plum rotted off like the teeth of a meth-head.



The re-foam kit showed up this afternoon just as the temps hit somewhere between Bessemer Furnace and Lava.
I toughed it out in my garage and got all of what remained of the old foam and glue off and glued the first bits down. The instruction said to let the new glue set for a couple of hours, I figure that tomorrow morning is a good amount of setting.

I need to come up with some felt to fill up where the old crumbling stuff was, but thats no hill for a climber.

This morning finds me listening to the Infinity RS4000's that I re-foamed.
I'm driving them with my Torii with pretty good luck.
Vintage speakers driven by tubes always seems to work well.

The only down side I have so far is the woofer driver on the left one will sometimes buzz a bit. Truthfully I think it is something wrong with the driver itself, I keep checking my glue job and nothing looks wrong.

There was a spare foam surround sent with my order, I may get annoyed enough to cut the offending repair apart and try to redo my efforts to see if it improves itself.
To be truthful, I know myself enough to know that sometime later on today I will be back out in my hot garage starting over on this speaker.

Action photo from my listening position:



By the way, as I'm listening to these speakers I am also reading up on the Amp Camp Amp.
I'm totally out of my wheelhouse here. I don't know nuthin' about no electricity!
But money has been spent and parts are rushing in from Italy and Massachusetts as we speak.
Time to man up and learn how to do this.

Wow! That's a new adventure Donnie--I believe you will be both up to the task and enjoying the challenge!

Donnie’s on fire!

I get the oak thing. If it's quarter sawn and has some nice tiger stripe action going on I can tolerate it. I built a large book shelf out of solid quarter sawn oak years ago and I spent more time on the finish trying to hide the fact that it was oak. I found a recipe in an old refinishing book using beetle dung as a base ( i think i still have the bag of unused dung ) and pounded so much deep red tint into it with a hand waxed final finish you could hardly tell it was oak when I was through.
My mind is trying to hear the tonality of a solid oak cabinet.

MM,

I don't think that a wooden chassis would work for these amps.
They are class A and from what I read, put off a lot of heat, so they need the aluminum heatsink and finning.
Plus aluminum one's have all of the silk screening on them to make them a little cooler looking. Also I paid for them!

As far as using thin wood for speakers, from what I have read you want as dense of a cabinet as you can make so that the only sound comes from the drivers, no uncontrolled vibrations that change the sound that is fed to them.

But I have also read that several British speakers use thin walls to help the radiation of the sound.

My stuff is usually built so sketchy that the cabinet construction is the least of the problems with it!  

Well my chassis for my Amp Camp Amps arrived today from Italy.
They showed up right after I finished cleaning up the mess I made cutting up material for speaker stands.

So hopefully tomorrow I will get going on my amp projects again, or finish up assembling the speakers I'm building, or do more stuff on the speaker stands for the new speakers that are going to be powered by the amplifiers that I need to finish building. Or nap all morning and worry about all of it another day.
Retirement is a wondrous thing.

I did have a bit of trouble today with my fancy pants Bosh plunge router.
You can change it from plunge base to just a normal round base by pulling the spindle/motor out of one base and putting it in the other base. Well my spindle unit is seized inside of the plunging base and no amount of pounding on it with a gigantic brass chunk will free it up, frustrating.
Maybe tomorrow, (if I don't nap the day away) I will be able to extract it. If not maybe a trip to Hobo Freight is in order.

Ha Ha!  Nice Lon.  
Donnie, I have to say I am enjoying your updates on your projects and especially your added touch of humor.  You crack me up with your creative remarks!  Keep ‘em coming!  From a man with too many tubes!

Well today was hot, but things got done!

I started by gluing the backs onto the second oak single driver speaker (I need to come up with a much less clumsy name for them).

So while the glue was drying it was time to dig into the Amp Camp Amps (ACA). Things were unpacked and released from their mummified shrink wrap. I think they would be able to save $20 by not putting 6 mm of wrap around them.

So me being the excitable boy that I am (RIP WZ) I immediately bolted them all up, a half hour and they both looked great all screwed together.

 

Well then I pulled up the instructions for how to put the guts inside of these fine looking cabinets, guess what? They needed to be apart to bolt stuff together, so back apart they came, only fifteen minutes there because I knew how they go together!

Well the struggle bus was just warming up for the rest of the day's activities.

I actually read through the instructions (or as it turned out, what I thought were the instructions) and started screwing stuff together and burning my fingers with my soldering iron.
So about a hour into this I'm reading about twisting the green wire with the white wire before soldering them into place. Funny thing, I didn't have  any green wire in either kit, hmmmmm?

Well it became terribly in focus when I figured out the link they gave me to look up the instructions were for version 1.6 and I was building version 1.8. Time to back up and start anew.

So a lot of the wires were the same but a couple of wire colors changed and one or two went to different places.
I'm looking at this as a learning experience and will come out of this a better man.

I finally got hot, tired and hungry, found a good place to stop at and cleaned up my mess.

After eating some supper I felt revitalized, so I went back into the breach once again, this time to focus on the now dry glued up speaker.
I didn't really want to go on into finishing yet, first of all my damn router is still stuck and it is hard to put corner radiuses on with a semi sharp 50 year old Buck pocket knife. Yes I have carried the same pocket knife since 1973, I got it as a 13th birthday gift!
Anyway back to my speakers, I made some short speaker wire leads that came out of the bottom firing ports, stuffed some pillow stuffing in the cavities ($3.99 at Menards as opposed to $15.00 at the parts houses, it is the same stuff) drilled the holes for the drivers to be screwed down into, screwed the drivers in, and bam, I had working speakers.

I brought them into my listening room, propped them up on some 1, 2, 3, blocks on my short speaker stands and plugged them in.



Neal Young is currently singing in his nasally way, not bass monsters but very coherent. I will suspend judgment until they get all of the details put into them, like the aforementioned radiuses and some finish stuff.

We will see what tomorrow has to trample my optimism!

Nice work Donnie. Let us know if we need to send Lawyers, Guns and Money (if the shit hits the fan…)