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The BYOB Speaker System
The BYOB speaker system combines spruce reflex boxes and open baffles. Nothing special, except everything ... Each stereo channel has 12", 6.5" and 3" super-fidelity paper-cone drivers. All drivers are selected and modified to be a perfect match to what is explained in the speaker chapter, including treated cones, voice-coils and spruce phaseplugs. The BYOB Speaker System is available as a kit only, which contains all drivers (2x12", 2x6.5", 2x3") as well as the crossover components. You supply the wood, make the boxes and baffles and do the assembly. See below the super-fidelity 6.5"
PDF files are available for the construction plans and crossover diagram. PerformanceThe performance of the BYOB Speaker System is A Performance Standard. This is the Sound. I listen to music, all day, every day. In fact I do not know of any other person, who listens as much as I do. If you are a music-lover and listen for long periods of time, you just need better speakers than anybody else. A higher quality becomes a necessity. If you listen only 20 minutes a day, you can get away with usual Hi-Fi, however, the longer you listen, the better your speaker-system must be, just because with time, you will become aware of many distortions that go unnoticed during short listening sessions. Only with time you become aware of many many distortions of conventional hifi-speakers. For example ... you hear different drivers at work, not only music, but speaker-drivers at work. You can hear that timbres are not produced correctly due to unsuited materials, you hear a shouting mess coming from reflections inside the voice-coil and magnet cavity. You hear phase abnormalities from the crossover or dips and peaks in the tonal balance. All this will urge you to put the music off after a while, because you get exhausted with the noise. As a music lover, this will put you in a dilemma: You want to listen, but you cannot stand the mess anymore, you want the experience, but your speakers cannot deliver, you feel your awareness moves outside, not inside. Instead of being relaxed, you become stressed. This is the most basic criterion when accessing any sonic quality. The better the sound quality, the more your consciousness is moving inside. On the other hand: The worse the sound, the more your consciousness moves to the outside. Your awareness is energy. In fact it is the only energy. If it is forced outside you are losing energy, with time you will feel exhausted. Whereas, if you are subjected with a pure undisturbed sound, a beautiful tone ... a single note plucked and your consciousness will immediately move inside, it will drop to the very center of your being, you relax ... thinking cannot go on, eyes close, you become centered, mind stops ... no-mind. This is one of the reason that multi-channel audio will never satisfy you, and it is also the reason why some people enjoy mono. With multi-channel there is too much distraction from tone, while with mono there is only tone. See below the Super Fidelity LF driver magnet assy:
With time I found out myself, that all of my audio designs are made and finetuned in order to center. And then I understood that the whole phenomenon of high-end audio is that of ego vs. meditation. If you have ever been to a high-end fair and have observed a group of adults sitting in a small room with closed eyes, listening to a music reproduction ... What are they doing ? They are meditating. Without knowing that they are meditating, without ever having consciously meditated in their whole life, they are doing it , and the better the sound quality, the easier it becomes and the deeper they go. It is natural, effortless, almost a mechanism. The better the sound, the purer the tone, the deeper you move into yourself. If I look at it this way, given the centering qualities of some audio gear, one could say, we have created quite a large meditation group. Carry on my friends, soon we will take over ... Back to speakers: Much has been said about high-quality fullrange drivers and their attraction. It is the same phenomenon: the lack of distortion and the purity of tone will center you. However at the same time you notice the limited frequency response and perhaps also the unevenness in the response. It is again a dilemma, because as you add drivers or construct a 2-way or 3-way or 4-way or whatever kind of speaker system in order to get full frequency response, you also run into the problem of disintegration of the sound. It will again sound like drivers at work, it will sound like work, not like fun and not like joy. Seemingly nobody has been able to solve that problem, but the solution is so easy. In fact it is irritatingly easy, it is primitive. In the speaker chapter I explain, what I consider a good driver and we start exactly with one good fullrange driver, but we do not stop there. We add 2 other good fullrange drivers, one for high-frequencies and one for low frequencies. So we have 3 good fullrange drivers of similar construction and material (specially treated paper cone). Because they are of similar material and construction, they blend into each other very well and therefore we do not need a complex crossover network. We just use the simplest crossover that is conceivable: The main-fullrange (mid) gets the complete signal, while the HF fullrange gets signal through a capacitor and the LF fullrange gets the signal via a coil. Each driver can have a resistor (5 Ohm) so that it becomes very easy for you to tune this speaker system according to your room and listening preferences. And a high-quality speaker must provide you with some means of adjustment, not every room is the same, not everybody listens to the same records, so adjustments must be possible, and they should be easy to perform by the user. The material for the housing is spruce wood, which is a beautiful and full sounding wood. Just to have those speaker in your room, everything will sound better because of the treated spruce wood, the whole room acoustics improves. Each driver of the BYOB Speaker System has a treated spruce phase-plug. So there are no cavity resonances and no associated distortion products, resulting in ultimate clarity of sound. The outcome of this setup is the perfect fullrange driver. In fact it is impossible to hear that there are multiple drivers at work, because they are of the same material, construction and treatment. The sound is that of no speaker at all. All that is left is focus, purity, effortlessness and dynamics ... just music that you can enjoy for hours, hours and hours. Complete BYOB Speaker System Kit with all drivers and crossover components as shown below: EUR 6000,- plus shipping.
PIease note: My soldering station and other tools shown on the above pic are not part of the kit ;) This DIY kit is simple to complete within a couple of hours, requires minimal woodworking skills plus common sense.
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