We often get inquiries from DIY enthusiasts or speaker manufacturer startups who ask if we can help with designing a speaker system.
What we can help with is to give some general advice about choosing components for existing speakers.
As we do not work directly with speaker system design, we cannot help with:
- Designing crossovers for a random set of drivers
- Designing new and upgraded crossovers for both new or vintage commercial speakers
- Redesigning commercial speakers to use a new set of drivers, including designing the new crossover, the new baffle (front plate) for new driver placement, time alignment, etc.
What it takes to design a speaker system:
Using driver data alone and only doing a software simulation is not sufficient to design a speaker system.
Using the manufacturer’s driver data in a software simulation is only the first of many steps required to properly design a speaker system, hereunder the crossovers.
To properly tweak the crossover design, you will always need to have the drivers mounted on the actual baffle and make measurements of amplitude, phase, and impedance.
You must firstly import this data to the simulation software to generate the crossover and then make test crossovers to measure and listen if things worked out correctly and to your preference.
All this requires that the designer has the speakers in hand in the workshop.
If you are looking to commission a pair of speakers from a speaker designer to personal sonic preferences, make sure that you have a dialogue and even some test listening sessions, so there is an consensus about what is meant when you ask for speakers that live up to superlatives like: Warm sound, natural sounding vocals, good for jazz and rock music, etc.