Yes, Todd won 1st place. The bass on those was outstanding. The mid and high I didn't think were that great, but I knew what I was listening for with the GR woofers. I'll add here: Todd, the builder, can't listen to these at home any more because he hears the flaws of the GR drivers. Brad and Todd discussed at length how bad they actually are to work with and their inherent problems like high 3rd order issues.
PaulK's drivers were close to $2500 for the pair. He said it should be or he hoped it is his last build in his demo chat. To my knowledge and recollection, he did not mention it this time before his demo, but I know that Dan did it from my conversations over email with Paul.
Thanks, Ben. I went back and updated the list of winners. Now that I am home, I'm also going back and adding more driver and speaker name info to go along with the pictures. Will also add some more pics, as I would like to cover all the loudspeakers that were in the competition, not just the winners. I was also really surprised that Paul did not place. They looked very impressive. Nice furniture grade cabinets. Super high end drivers. Wish I could have heard them, but I got locked out of the listening room between changeovers on this one.
Below: SP51 "Airwave Bluetooth Speaker" by Keith E. Open Unlimited. Drivers: Two SB Acoustics SB10PGC21-4. Crossover: DSP filtering EQ with active 1st order Butterworth HP @ 78Hz.
@Ed_Perkins said:
Thanks too Bill. The bar has certainly gotten higher - many of the speakers that placed look like high end commercial offerings. Way above my pay grade. I plan to go next year as I've never been. It will be a one and done, but would like to make it once.
You're welcome, Ed! Hope you can make it next year.
Below: SP03 "Valnot Speldosa" by James P. (>$300)
Below: SP25 "WOHs" by Camerson C. (>$300)
Below: Inside view of SP26 "The Full Waves" by William S. (>$300):
@4thtry said:
A few OmniMic 40K and DATS LA prototype pictures. Should be available by the end of the year or early next year.
Really appreciate all of the photos and IDs. Thanks for sharing.
You're Welcome! Be sure to go back and look through the pictures once again in the next few days or so, as I am going back and editing the photos to add more detail from my notes and photo logs.
Below: SP23 "Tuco's" speakers by Tim R. @traw These were in the >$300 category. 3 way speaker using the Seas TPCD 6" woofer, TPCD tweeter, and Dayton Audio Epique 7 E180's. Xovers of 300Hz and 2750Hz.
Heh, I've already dismantled the xover on these. Seas provides a recommended passive xover @2.2k as well as a minidsp implementation @3.3k files in their diy Lucid offering. Though my xover completely different, as likely should be when morph into true 3way. I would lean toward using the minidsp for the bass to 2way xover, active passive hybrid.
I messed these up doing too much 'voicing' in small office with my odd genre's (too much instrumental) where started noticing glaring problems at louder spl levels that tried to fix but time ran out. I could really notice on the Bonnie song which had pointed out a peakiness in the 700-1k range that added a notch but gut make feel like that is wrong approach, more fundamental alignment need fixed vs bandaid. Also bass seemed a touch heavy.
So, reverting the tpcd combo into standard 2 way for now.
I also recall I wanting to say intend to 'do no harm' when using expensive drivers but defaulted to my half empty way of talking. Lastly, I almost wanted to say hey, I bought these at 50% cost off that guy, pointing to Vance, but do not think that would've been cool. Bought woofers first paired with titan metal dome, then the tweeter was listed couple months later and I couldn't restist.
All in all, I really like the tone of these drivers, but need more time and learning to get them to a worthy result.
The epic7 bass bins are multi purpose, maybe they'll re-appear in a dayton class entry but I dont know - some burnout with audio in general and some reason a bad aftertaste in mouth after the sdc event, creativity and craftsmanship would limit any success though really intent is to see and hear other's creations. I already have 2 other completed speakers that very happy with that could enter in future, but meh. Having engineer background, performance/function over appearance trying not to be too ugly. I enjoyed Indy so much more.
I hadn't recognized Todd from last year when he had a buzz cut since I chatted with him about the cnc'ing of his cabinets as he also lives in CBus area like myself. Though it was expensive - I'll just keep subjecting myself to dust to my demise. I don't have the luxury of growing hair back .
Did he bring the WO24 2ways last year? If that is the case then I didn't recognize him either. He said he was there the year before, but i didn't remember him.
Yep, 2 sets of white speakers last year in >300 category. One with wo24 and some other with a revelator.
Also a side comment, I think I have learned that what give deep bass response at home might not be suitable for these venues. It seems every little speaker produces plenty of bass when SPL is high enough. Would be interesting to see how speakers sound at 70db. I had assembled quite a few designed diy kits since way back, mid 2000's, where I wasn't happy with them at lower volumes, i gave up and kept to my "reference" commercial speakers since I was so much into diy electronics back then. It's not everyone listen at 85db all day long. However, I completely understand the argument that if speaker sounds good at 85-90db it'll perform well at lower levels. But there must be some quantifiable characteristic for a speaker to respond evenly at various output levels.
With a name like "Finale" I would guess this is Paul's last entry. That would explain going all out on the drivers. If so, I'll miss his classic enclosures and craftmanship. Some begrudged him for using Dan N. to do his crossovers, but I never had a problem with that. AFAIK he always made it public that Dan did the crossover work.
We should be celebrating when people are collaborating and working together to make things better. Hands up if you made your own woofer or tweeter (except for Phuc)
Belated thanks to PE and staff for putting on another great event. Spent quite a bit of time talking to Brian about the new OmniMic 40k and DATS LA. It really seems to me that this might be an excellent combo package for the serious builder. Hopefully the software will work with Windows 7, as I am still refusing to update to 10,11 etc. Even if I buy a new PC, I'm going to purchase a copy of Windows 7 for it.
And congrats to all the winners and everyone else that brought speakers this year. There were some drop outs, but the spreadsheets listed 53 total participants with 21 in "<$300", 18 in ">$300", 6 in "Dayton", and 8 in "Open Unlimited." Lots of hard work, interesting designs, and furniture grade cabinets.
Thank you to everyone who attended! I felt it was a good show this year, the bar definitely keeps getting higher and higher on designs.
As I said at the event, we will have larger stands ready for next year. Ya'll have some huge bookshelf designs!
Finally, we apologize to everyone regarding the last minute track changes. This was not something that anyone was happy about (save for two judges), and we are going to try to avoid this next year.
@Wolf said:
Yeah, Matt's towers were the reference for level setting, and actually ran last as they humored him with a set of feedback sheets. They sounded great to me.
Last, but not least, here are a few pics of Meredith C's "Pi and Morr Pi" speakers. They were the first ones to play in the "Open Unlimited" category. I didn't get any pictures of them at the SDC, as I was searching around for a large dolly to move my speakers into position later (I was 4th in line to play in "Open Unlimited" and I needed to get my large, "multi-cabinet-amp" monster speakers ready to go in the staging area.)
I did, however, take quite a few pics of these speakers at Wolf's InDIYana 2024 event. Below are some shots of Meredith giving his presentation at that event, together with some other more detailed close ups. The concept, as I understand it from reading Meredith's writeup, is a speaker that attempts to eliminate box resonances by eliminating the box itself (all tubes, no box). The front and rear of the woofers are completely loaded into pipes of various lengths to spread out the resonances. Four longer tubes are used to trap the sound coming from the larger rear vents of the downward firing woofer and a large number of various lengths of smaller tubes are used to trap the sound from the vented pole piece. Maybe Meredith can stop by and provide some additional information. It was a very interesting design with alot of potential and it really got me thinking about how much of what we hear, when we listen to a pair of speakers, is simply cabinet resonance, and not the original sound coming from the speaker cones themselves. On the large circular donut cabinets, the drivers were positioned based on Pi or multiples of Pi.
I know Matt wasn't competing. Did you guys get to chat about/listen to his speakers?
@Steve_Lee
I'm not sure if that tweeter is still available new (perhaps not), but those woofers are... and it looks like a design foundation from which you could have a "crack at" too, as we say here in Australia.
A couple years ago, there was a rumor that TLabs was coming back, but nothing surfaced. They are sadly NLA.
The woofers are awesome, and I still love my RSS210HF4s.
They did sound very good.
Comments
Yes, Todd won 1st place. The bass on those was outstanding. The mid and high I didn't think were that great, but I knew what I was listening for with the GR woofers. I'll add here: Todd, the builder, can't listen to these at home any more because he hears the flaws of the GR drivers. Brad and Todd discussed at length how bad they actually are to work with and their inherent problems like high 3rd order issues.
PaulK's drivers were close to $2500 for the pair. He said it should be or he hoped it is his last build in his demo chat. To my knowledge and recollection, he did not mention it this time before his demo, but I know that Dan did it from my conversations over email with Paul.
InDIYana Event Website
Thanks, Ben. I went back and updated the list of winners. Now that I am home, I'm also going back and adding more driver and speaker name info to go along with the pictures. Will also add some more pics, as I would like to cover all the loudspeakers that were in the competition, not just the winners. I was also really surprised that Paul did not place. They looked very impressive. Nice furniture grade cabinets. Super high end drivers. Wish I could have heard them, but I got locked out of the listening room between changeovers on this one.
Below: SP51 "Airwave Bluetooth Speaker" by Keith E. Open Unlimited. Drivers: Two SB Acoustics SB10PGC21-4. Crossover: DSP filtering EQ with active 1st order Butterworth HP @ 78Hz.
You're welcome!
You're welcome, Ed! Hope you can make it next year.
A few more speaker pics:
Below: SP03 "Valnot Speldosa" by James P. (>$300)
Below: SP25 "WOHs" by Camerson C. (>$300)
Below: Inside view of SP26 "The Full Waves" by William S. (>$300):
A few OmniMic 40K and DATS LA prototype pictures. Should be available by the end of the year or early next year.
FST Tower "reference" speakers by Mattp. Drivers: Transducer Labs N26CR2-A tweeter, B&W Continuum LF27170 midrange, and Dayton RSS210HO-8 x2 woofers.
Really appreciate all of the photos and IDs. Thanks for sharing.
You're Welcome! Be sure to go back and look through the pictures once again in the next few days or so, as I am going back and editing the photos to add more detail from my notes and photo logs.
Below: SP23 "Tuco's" speakers by Tim R. @traw These were in the >$300 category. 3 way speaker using the Seas TPCD 6" woofer, TPCD tweeter, and Dayton Audio Epique 7 E180's. Xovers of 300Hz and 2750Hz.
Heh, I've already dismantled the xover on these. Seas provides a recommended passive xover @2.2k as well as a minidsp implementation @3.3k files in their diy Lucid offering. Though my xover completely different, as likely should be when morph into true 3way. I would lean toward using the minidsp for the bass to 2way xover, active passive hybrid.
I messed these up doing too much 'voicing' in small office with my odd genre's (too much instrumental) where started noticing glaring problems at louder spl levels that tried to fix but time ran out. I could really notice on the Bonnie song which had pointed out a peakiness in the 700-1k range that added a notch but gut make feel like that is wrong approach, more fundamental alignment need fixed vs bandaid. Also bass seemed a touch heavy.
So, reverting the tpcd combo into standard 2 way for now.
I also recall I wanting to say intend to 'do no harm' when using expensive drivers but defaulted to my half empty way of talking. Lastly, I almost wanted to say hey, I bought these at 50% cost off that guy, pointing to Vance, but do not think that would've been cool. Bought woofers first paired with titan metal dome, then the tweeter was listed couple months later and I couldn't restist.
All in all, I really like the tone of these drivers, but need more time and learning to get them to a worthy result.
The epic7 bass bins are multi purpose, maybe they'll re-appear in a dayton class entry but I dont know - some burnout with audio in general and some reason a bad aftertaste in mouth after the sdc event, creativity and craftsmanship would limit any success though really intent is to see and hear other's creations. I already have 2 other completed speakers that very happy with that could enter in future, but meh. Having engineer background, performance/function over appearance trying not to be too ugly. I enjoyed Indy so much more.
Contestants giving their presentations:
Below: SP45 "Bella Sonus 8" speakers by Michael H (<$300 category):
Below: SP40 "Faux Pas" by Andrew G. @DrewsBrews $<300 category. Drivers: Tweeter: P-audio pht-409, Mid: MCM 53-1240 CD (Dayton H812/Celestion Hi-9040P), Woofer: MCM 55-3212
MAC thread: https://diy.midwestaudio.club/discussion/2107/klipsch-style-tower-project-on-the-cheap/p1
PETT build thread: https://techtalk.parts-express.com/forum/speaker-project-gallery/1490675-faux-pas
A couple more pics of contestants giving their presentations:
Below: SP39 "Bluze" speakers by Jeremy M. Drivers: MB Quart 95-7118 1" Titanium dome tweeter, Dayton RS100-4 midrange, Dayton RS225-4 woofer, Dayton DS270-PR passive radiator.
Below: SP31 "Cloud Castle" by Phuc D. (<$300 category). Home made drivers? Wow! They sounded fantastic.
A couple more pics of contestants giving their presentations:
Below: SP24 "Quad-linear" by Tony H. (<$300 category):
Below: SP19 "Waveguide Reflex 2" by Bob B. (<$300 category):
A couple more pics of contestants giving their presentations:
Below: Todd K "Front Rowe" speakers. (GR Research T26SG, GR Research M130, and SB15SFCR39-8)
Below: SP04 "Make Momma Happy" by Vernon K. (<$300 category):
I hadn't recognized Todd from last year when he had a buzz cut since I chatted with him about the cnc'ing of his cabinets as he also lives in CBus area like myself. Though it was expensive - I'll just keep subjecting myself to dust to my demise. I don't have the luxury of growing hair back .
Did he bring the WO24 2ways last year? If that is the case then I didn't recognize him either. He said he was there the year before, but i didn't remember him.
InDIYana Event Website
Yep, 2 sets of white speakers last year in >300 category. One with wo24 and some other with a revelator.
Also a side comment, I think I have learned that what give deep bass response at home might not be suitable for these venues. It seems every little speaker produces plenty of bass when SPL is high enough. Would be interesting to see how speakers sound at 70db. I had assembled quite a few designed diy kits since way back, mid 2000's, where I wasn't happy with them at lower volumes, i gave up and kept to my "reference" commercial speakers since I was so much into diy electronics back then. It's not everyone listen at 85db all day long. However, I completely understand the argument that if speaker sounds good at 85-90db it'll perform well at lower levels. But there must be some quantifiable characteristic for a speaker to respond evenly at various output levels.
Okay, now I know who Todd was last year. Thanks, Tim.
InDIYana Event Website
We should be celebrating when people are collaborating and working together to make things better. Hands up if you made your own woofer or tweeter (except for Phuc)
Belated thanks to PE and staff for putting on another great event. Spent quite a bit of time talking to Brian about the new OmniMic 40k and DATS LA. It really seems to me that this might be an excellent combo package for the serious builder. Hopefully the software will work with Windows 7, as I am still refusing to update to 10,11 etc. Even if I buy a new PC, I'm going to purchase a copy of Windows 7 for it.
And congrats to all the winners and everyone else that brought speakers this year. There were some drop outs, but the spreadsheets listed 53 total participants with 21 in "<$300", 18 in ">$300", 6 in "Dayton", and 8 in "Open Unlimited." Lots of hard work, interesting designs, and furniture grade cabinets.
Thank you to everyone who attended! I felt it was a good show this year, the bar definitely keeps getting higher and higher on designs.
As I said at the event, we will have larger stands ready for next year. Ya'll have some huge bookshelf designs!
Finally, we apologize to everyone regarding the last minute track changes. This was not something that anyone was happy about (save for two judges), and we are going to try to avoid this next year.
Thanks for the feedback, Ben!
You are welcome!
Thanks for all the hard work you put in to make it run smoothly, Matt! It was nice to have you at the helm.
InDIYana Event Website
Why do I think you are talking to me...
Last, but not least, here are a few pics of Meredith C's "Pi and Morr Pi" speakers. They were the first ones to play in the "Open Unlimited" category. I didn't get any pictures of them at the SDC, as I was searching around for a large dolly to move my speakers into position later (I was 4th in line to play in "Open Unlimited" and I needed to get my large, "multi-cabinet-amp" monster speakers ready to go in the staging area.)
I did, however, take quite a few pics of these speakers at Wolf's InDIYana 2024 event. Below are some shots of Meredith giving his presentation at that event, together with some other more detailed close ups. The concept, as I understand it from reading Meredith's writeup, is a speaker that attempts to eliminate box resonances by eliminating the box itself (all tubes, no box). The front and rear of the woofers are completely loaded into pipes of various lengths to spread out the resonances. Four longer tubes are used to trap the sound coming from the larger rear vents of the downward firing woofer and a large number of various lengths of smaller tubes are used to trap the sound from the vented pole piece. Maybe Meredith can stop by and provide some additional information. It was a very interesting design with alot of potential and it really got me thinking about how much of what we hear, when we listen to a pair of speakers, is simply cabinet resonance, and not the original sound coming from the speaker cones themselves. On the large circular donut cabinets, the drivers were positioned based on Pi or multiples of Pi.
I know Matt wasn't competing. Did you guys get to chat about/listen to his speakers?
@Steve_Lee
I'm not sure if that tweeter is still available new (perhaps not), but those woofers are... and it looks like a design foundation from which you could have a "crack at" too, as we say here in Australia.
Let me know if I can support you in any way.
BR,
Thanh
A couple years ago, there was a rumor that TLabs was coming back, but nothing surfaced. They are sadly NLA.
The woofers are awesome, and I still love my RSS210HF4s.
They did sound very good.
InDIYana Event Website
I think a ribbon or planar would work equally as well in stead of the TLabs tweeter.
Good to see Omnimic40K there; perhaps that means it’s nearing release soon.
But I don’t know what DATS LA is.
It looks much larger than previous DATS devices. What does it do?
Is it an amplifier as well?