DIY Doesn't Save You Money

[Music] [Music] [Music] these days as consumers we are absolutely spoiled for choice take this drone for example this drone is capable of flying to hundreds of meters in the air capturing crisp 4k footage and what it costs like 400 bucks i think a lot of people get into diy because they think it's a good option to save money but i am here to tell you that that is not the case let's roll the intro [Music] today we are going to be building a diy sound bar or more accurately we're going to be building a diy center channel for my surround sound setup i want to put a big disclaimer right up front if you're watching this because you think that this is going to teach you how to save money by building your own speakers then i'm sorry but i'm going to have to disappoint you over the course of this build i'll probably spend two to three hundred dollars of my own money and then 10 to 20 hours of my own time even if i count on my own time as worthless i still think it's a better value proposition to just go to the store and buy a decent mid-range sound bar however if you happen to be like me and enjoy building things well then you definitely came to the right place because today we are going to build a badass speaker that sounds amazing and along the way i'm going to teach you about a million different things that can affect the sound quality of your speaker truth be told this is not my first speaker build so behind me here you can see i have two matching bookshelf speakers that are based on a diy kit called the overnight sensations and then over in the corner here i have a clip subwoofer that i've modified to match a lot of people have spotted these in the background of some of my other videos and asked me to do a follow-up so i did a little bit of research online and i figured out that paul carmody the guy who designed the overnight sensations also designed a matching center channel the center channel is a bit rarer so i had to do a little bit of digging in order to find one but i finally found somebody selling a kit i ordered the parts and that's what we're gonna build today i figured i get to upgrade my surround sound setup and fulfill viewer requests at the same time it's win-win so without further ado let's get into this build here in front of me we have all the stuff we're gonna need to build these speakers we have the wood for the cabinets and then the various components that actually go inside the speaker itself we're gonna set this stuff aside for the time being and focus on the woodworking and start by building the box for these speakers in keeping with my previous design my woods of choice for this build were walnut and ash the walnut i cut into two inch and four inch strips and the ash i cut into narrow little one inch wide pieces for the accent strip you might also notice that i made a new addition to my table saw that's a magnetic feather board and if you've never seen a feather board before think of it like a helpful friend who isn't afraid to get their fingers within an inch of the saw blade to help you get the perfect cut so what you see in front of me here are the two halves of our speaker cabinet or they will be as soon as we glue them together now many people don't realize this but the internal volume of a speaker cabinet is actually an important part of its design so i had to make sure these glued up boards were big enough for the job at hand thankfully i was working to the specs of a kit so i didn't have to do too many complex calculations however i was going off the beaten path a little bit here the instructions included with my kit only gave me the exterior dimensions of the cabinet and assumed it would be built out of half inch mdf seeing as i was actually making it out of 3 4 thick hardwood i had to make a few allowances remember like so many other things in life when it comes to building speakers it's the internal volume that counts wait that's the expression right so you know what while we wait for these to dry why don't we cut the front and back panels out of the sheet of mdf mdf is the ideal material to make a set of speaker cabinets out of but i don't know i really like the look of a real hardwood so i'm willing to take the sound quality hit in order to get that look but the front and back panels i'm gonna paint so why not make them out of mdf the reason mdf is superior to wood is because it's uniformly dense wood being a naturally occurring material has all sorts of low density and high density pockets this can cause sound waves to reflect differently off different parts of the wood and muddy the reverberations now the degree to which this actually affects sound quality is probably pretty minimal and i don't have audiophile like hearing anyways so i'll gladly accept the sound quality hit to have nice looking cabinets but if you want the best sound possible just use mdf all right these guys look dry now let's take off these clamps and clean them up on the drum sander with the clamps off it was time to do my usual clean up and leveling over on the drum sander i've shown how useful my drum sander is in the past for doing large table tops and stuff like that but i think it really shines when it comes to sanding multiple smaller components provided they're all the same thickness there's no reason you can't run a bunch through in parallel like i did here back over on the table saw i carried a second design theme over from my original speakers that front chamfer again this is one of those things that technically hurts sound quality for the best possible sound you want the sound waves to come off the drivers and not be interrupted by any extrusions just like the mdf versus hardwood comparison though the degree to which this actually matters is probably lost on my uninformed ears but at least now you know if you have better ears than i do and you want to build the best speakers possible the next thing i did was cut some half inch dados for my two mdf panels this would have been faster and easier with a proper dado stack but on my table saw switching to a dado stack also requires switching to a different break which i didn't happen to have at the moment so i took the scenic route and cut my dados one blade width at a time after a quick test fit of the front panel i switched over and started cutting one for the rear my friend the featherboard was also massively helpful here too it kept the wood perfectly aligned with the blade the whole way through the cut which ensured my dados had a uniform width so believe it or not these two pieces here are going to form the entire exterior of our cabinet this is gonna be the top piece this is gonna be the left piece it's gonna be the bottom and this is gonna be the right obviously we have two pieces here so we're gonna need to cut them into four using the miter saw when it came to cutting these miters i had two main challenges one was getting perfect 45 degree cuts and on this front having a well calibrated saw really makes all the difference some saws can be out by as much as half a degree from the factory and while that might not sound like a lot it can add up pretty quickly when you're working on a box like this the other thing i had to watch out for was making sure my mirrored pieces were the same length both the top and the bottom had to be the same and so did the left and the right to keep myself from making any mistakes i clamp some stop blocks in place and butt my pieces of wood to them before cutting this is the easiest way to get accurate repeatable cuts on a miter saw alright so let's do a little test assembly here get this slotted in this guy goes here come on there we go so at this point i think you guys can kind of understand how this is going to go together so the next thing we have to do is cut the openings for the drivers in this front panel here believe it or not the location of and the distance between drivers is also an important factor in sound quality starting to get overwhelmed by all the things that can affect sound quality yeah me too at this point i felt like i had made enough intentional sacrifices in that department so i laid out all five drivers just like the instructions told me to that's right five drivers four three-inch woofers for the mid-tones and one one-inch tweeter for the high-pitched sounds i cut the three-inch holes first with a sacrificial piece of mdf underneath the front panel to make sure i didn't get any backside blowout sitting here watching this footage is a great reminder that i need to get some sharper hole saws it's tough to tell if they were cutting through the mdf or just friction burning their way through once that was done i switched over to an equally dull one-inch hole saw and cut the tweeter hole after that it was back over to the assembly table for a little bit of painting we are almost ready to start assembling the speaker cabinet but i think i'm going to paint these panels before i assemble it because it's always easier to paint stuff before you assemble it the paint i'm using here is an ultra flat dark gray which matches the other speakers of my setup i chose to roll it on because i prefer the texture you get from a roller versus a brush but that's really a personal preference thing and as far as i know it doesn't have any impact on sound quality i rolled two coats on the front one on the back and then left it to dry this is feeling pretty dry so i think we are ready to start assembling the hardest part about assembling this cabinet was keeping all six of its pieces aligned and in place thankfully i have a little trick to help with that i like to tape the corners of boxes while assembling them this keeps everything where it's supposed to be but still allows you enough flexibility to fold the pieces up and into position with my tape hinges in place it was just a matter of applying a little bit of glue to all the seams and then slowly and carefully folding the cabinet into its final shape clipping the whole thing together was a bit tricky but if you've seen any of my other videos you know that i'm not scared of a little clamp challenge this actually would have been a great time to use one of those strappy picture framing clamp things unfortunately i don't own one of those but i still managed to get it done with my regular clamps i think those are all tight this is all looking good so i'm going to leave this to set up overnight and tomorrow i'm gonna come back and we are going to start on wiring this thing up doing the internal crossover and all that fun stuff where i'm really way outside of my depth so tomorrow's gonna be an interesting day but this is looking really good so far so i am quite excited to keep going on this all right everybody it's the start of day two here in the shop and i think we might actually finish this thing today i mean knock on wood i don't want to jinx things the actual cabinet itself is looking great i got all the clamps off it we still have to do a little bit of a little bit of a touch up we have to sand and apply the actual finish to it but other than that it's largely done one thing we do have to do is cut a hole in the back of it here a little access hatch so that we can do all the wiring of the internal components and mount this plate i'll explain a little bit more about what this plate does when we actually get to that point so let's do that first and then we will do all the sanding and finishing and then we can get into a whole bunch of soldering if you don't have an oscillating multi-tool in your tool kit pause this video right now and go order one seriously these things are so handy especially the cordless ones without mine it would be really annoying to cut this access hole after the fact oh and don't worry the panel that goes over this hole is slightly larger than the opening so i didn't have to worry about making my cuts particularly clean okay got that cut let's do a quick test fit and yeah that is pretty perfect and they're nice doesn't vibrate all right let's move on to some finishing as you might expect with a build this small the finishing was pretty quick and painless so i'll breeze through this part i sanded the whole cabinet to 220 grit gently rounded off all of the hard corners and then brushed on a few coats my favorite hybrid polyurethane normally i roll my finish on but since there were so many tight interior corners i opted for a brush instead if i were to do this build again though i might actually apply one or two coats to the cabinet pre-assembly and then do a final touch-up coat after to avoid all this cutting let's let that dry and while it's drying we'll get started on the internals of this speaker in front of me here i have all of the various internal components of the speaker system or i guess in the case of the drivers i also have some of the external components as well before we get going too much on this i want to give a quick shout out to uh meniscus audio group they are the company that i bought this kit from this video is in no way sponsored by meniscus audio group but they just did such a good job putting together this package that i wanted to shout them out very high quality components at a great price and the instructions these instructions are awesome this is a second speaker kit i built these instructions blow that other kit's instructions out of the water super easy to follow if a dummy like me can do it you can do it too so this is the panel that gets mounted to the back of the speaker and on it we are going to mount and wire up a crossover a crossover is a circuit that sits inside your speaker that separates your input signals and sends the right frequency sounds to the right uh drivers honestly a lot of these components i don't really know what they do i think some of them are capacitors some of them are resistors but that's the beauty of working with a pre-made kit like this you don't actually need to know what all the various things do you just have to be able to follow along with a wiring diagram that looks like this and solder it all together prior to actually soldering everything together i did a quick dry run to figure out the spacing and location of all the various components once i was confident i knew where everything went i started permanently mounting things in place i screwed down these terminals but for basically everything else i just use ca glue a couple of drops and then a quick hit of the catalyzing spray is all it takes some people use hot glue and i think there's even actually some specialty glues made specifically for speaker components but it's hard to beat the convenience of ca glue from there it was just a matter of twisting together the various component leads soldering them together and then trimming off any excess when you're soldering you should try to avoid heating up the solder and then dripping it onto your braided strands it'll work but it looks ugly instead hold your iron to the component leads until they get hot enough to melt the solder and then feed the solder into the strand okay so i think that's our crossover all wired up and ready to go so now let's move on to wiring up the actual drivers this should be pretty straightforward just cut wires strip the wire and then crimp them onto these little connectors don't have a proper pair of crimpers but these pliers seem to be getting the job done all right cool connect this onto here and then this end of it connects onto the speaker like so so pretty simple you just have to do that like four five six more times i don't really know we're gonna have to do it quite a few times uh it wasn't that bad a few minutes of stripping and crimping later and i had all the drivers hooked up so this crazy bowl of spaghetti you see in front of me here should now be a 100 functional speaker system unfortunately i forgot to bring a amp with me today so that i could test this before assembling it but thankfully all these little quick release connectors should make it relatively easy to troubleshoot the setup if i did anything wrong we're almost ready to start installing all this stuff in the cabinet but we have a couple more jobs to do before we can do that the first thing was just reinforcing all my crimps with a little bit of solder this just made sure that those wires were firmly attached to the connectors because honestly i didn't really trust my crimping job the second thing i had to do was remove a little bit of material from each of these holes i cut them tight to the diameter of the driver but as you can see here when you attach the wires they stick out a little bit so these notches are just to accommodate that extra mass also quick side note you can see i'm using a drill here but really a dremel or a die grinder would have made this job a lot easier i think we're finally ready to start assembling we got all our prep work done first thing we're gonna do is the two outer pairs this is a great example of do as i say and not as i do always always always test your electronic components before assembling i was flying completely blind here and had no way of knowing if the speaker would work once i plugged it in and yet i did it anyways so basically what i'm doing here is recreating that twisted bowl of spaghetti from the workbench except now i'm doing it inside the speaker cabinet i'd connect the wire to the driver thread it through the box and connect it back to the crossover once i was satisfied that my leads were connected and in the right place i weaved in some sound dampening material and did my best not to knock off any of those leads that i had just worked so hard to place i'm pretty sure this is the same stuff you'd find inside of a cheap pillow and what it's supposed to do is absorb and dampen any sound waves bouncing around inside the speaker you don't want those dirty second hand sound waves you want the crisp fresh ones coming directly off the driver finally it was time to start screwing everything in place and i can't believe i made it this far without talking about these three inch drivers they're basically the entire reason i chose the overnight sensation kit once i saw that cool metallic bronzy color on them and imagined how it would look paired with a nice walnut i was sold these ones specifically are called the b3 ends by hi-vi who also happens to make the tweeter i used here the t20 but that doesn't have a metallic front so it's hard to get nearly as excited about it also check out these cool hex cap screws that came with a kit at first i was a bit bummed because this meant i would have to screw them in manually but in retrospect i really dig the industrial vibe they create hardware is a super underrated part of design and with those last few screws in place we are now done or at least i hope we're done so because i didn't bring some sort of amp or driver to drive this thing with i don't really know whether or not everything's working in there so we got to take this thing home and hook it up to the sound system at home to know whether or not we're done so let's go do that oh this is a bit nerve-wracking i still have no idea whether or not this thing is going to work once i plug it in so i should have clarified this earlier but this is considered a passive speaker which means that it needs to be plugged into an amp or in my case i have an av receiver underneath my tv in order to power it and make sound come out of it so we're gonna hook this thing up and pray to the electronics gods that i did all the wiring right i guess i've never shown this on this channel before but i actually tried to take as much stuff as i could and mount it to the back of my media center i have my ps4 here power bar and all the wires it just helps to kind of keep the whole front of it looking nice and neat and organized anyways back to the job at hand this should be as easy as just threading this wire in here this one in here threading them both back through this conveniently located hole and then connecting them both to the center channel output push this back into place i got my laptop set up over here with some music that i can actually play on this channel without getting a copyright strike so we are going to test this in three two one okay oh i don't know oh it's not coming out of this speaker okay uh hold on one second this could still be a little bit of a receiver issue and not a speaker issue is [Music] all right now they're working and they sound great obviously i know it's not gonna translate super well through video because you're at home so you're listening on your own speakers so you're just gonna have to take my word for it these sound really really good now quick word of warning if you're thinking about attempting a project like this at home then just be aware that it is going to turn you into a little bit of an audio snob i know i said earlier that i wasn't much of an audiophile but after doing a couple of these speaker builds it's definitely pushing me more in that direction i used to be the type of person who was perfectly happy listening to the free pair of headphones that you got on the plane these days not so much i definitely notice a lot more when it comes to audio quality than i ever did in the past so i guess the moral of the story is you shouldn't build your own speakers they're time-consuming to make they're expensive and they turn you into an audio snob that is unless like i said earlier you really happen to enjoy building things the way i do i think these speakers look great and i had a great time making them and on that note i think this is the perfect time to end this video so thank you so much for watching if you like this video please like comment and subscribe not only would i personally appreciate it but it also helps my videos to reach a wider audience if you really like this content consider becoming a supporter on patreon for all the added bonus content i do there all right i think that's it and i will see you guys in the next video where hopefully we will be making some outdoor furniture for my vacant terrace out there see ya [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's a reminder

Channel: Zac Builds

Views: 704,263

Keywords: center channel speaker, speaker build, diy speaker, dayton audio, diy audio, speakers, diy center channel, diy speakerbar, overnight sensation, woodworking, woodcraft, diy, diy woodworking, diy electronics

Id: 9Vw2fEg33Yk

Length: 19min 58sec (1198 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021