I'm NEVER going to a movie theater again...

today we are going to create the ultimate home theater setup look why do people still go to theaters in 2024 it's because they've got giant screens and ridiculously good speaker systems one of my favorite things about going to the theater is their positional audio systems where you hear different sounds move around you in 3D space this is really hard to accomplish at home because not only do you need speakers the whole way around you but you also need them above you too and installing speakers in your ceiling is a complete pain in the ass you got to cut holes you got to pull wires and just generally make a huge mess but what about if I told you there was a better way in fact you might have already seen it and just didn't realize it a lot of high-end sound bars have speakers in them that project sound up and bounce it off the ceiling in order to emulate the effect of in sealing speakers it's actually part of the Dolby Atmos standard and I've always just assumed that those were super specialized drivers that calculate angles and distances and did all sorts of fancy calcul calulations but as it turns out that's not really the case you can create your own 3D positional height speakers with some basic DIY skills and that is exactly what we are going to do today oh and I almost forgot about the screen I'll show you how you can get a screen that Rivals your local theaters with something that can fit in your pocket because today's video is sponsored by xreal and their super impressive lineup of augmented reality glasses we'll talk more about them later but first let's head to the shop and start building these speakers so the very first thing that I want to do on this project is build the speaker cabinet and while we do that I want to do one of my favorite things violating the principles of good speaker design internet audio files will always tell you that it's better to make your speakers with MDF or Baltic birch plywood because of their more uniform density Hardwoods can have both high and low density Pockets that will create asymmetric resonance inside your cabinets that being said I've built speakers with all three materials and I'd be hardpressed to hear any sort of difference between them so my advice to everybody at home would be to just build your speakers with whatever materials you want and don't worry too much about the internet critics what might be an issue however is just how thin I made all of these panels I wanted to make these speakers as small as possible but I also needed a very specific interior volume in order for the drivers to function optimally so the easiest way to do that was to shrink the thickness of the exterior walls however this introduces a new problem it's going to make the cabinets a lot more resonant which is not good for sound quality now I think I found a solution for that that we'll explore later but in the meantime the last step here was just a quick panel glue up to create a single large sheet of wood all righty while we wait for those panels to finish gluing up we are going to cut the front baffles behind me on the CNC we're going to cut them out of MDF but not because of its acoustical Properties or anything like that just because it's cheap and it'll be easy to paint afterwards now obviously not everybody is going to have a CNC at home but don't worry there are other ways to make these baffles the first would be to just use a whole saw and then a trim router to cut out these recessed areas or you could be really lazy and just order them online the speakers I'm building are going to be a modified version of the very popular overnight Sensations and there are a ton of retailers out there who sell kits to make them that include pre-cut cabinets in fact these kits are a great way for anybody to get started in the world a DIY audio and build out a 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound system the rear bath lacked any sort of cutout so to save time I just cut them on the table saw and then laid them all out so that I could give my pieces a quick coat of paint I chose black because I wanted to match my existing speakers but obviously you can do whatever you want here just make sure you seal up all the exposed MDF in order to keep it from absorbing moisture over time with our panels now dry let's talk about how we're going to put them together my plan here was to fold them into boxes so the first thing I did was Mark out where I needed to make all of my cuts there's very little margin for error here so I triple checked everything thing before cutting my miters with my sheets now separated into panels I set up over on the table saw to cut a series of rabbits and Doos for our front and rear baffles the easiest way to cut these channels would be to use a DAT stack but I don't have one of those so I opted for the next best thing and cut them out one blade width at a Time pro tip by the way when you're making a bunch of repeated identical Cuts like this plant it out so that you're adjusting your fence as little as possible that will keep your measurements consistent between pieces and make assembly later on a lot easier as you can see the front baffles slotted nicely into position and as a final detail I cut a small champer on the Leading Edge of each piece normally this type of forward projection would be bad design but it's going to be important later now it's time for my favorite trick when it comes to making speaker cabinets lay out all your pieces edge to edge and then start taping their seams together if you do it right you should be able to fold them into their final shape and have everything line up nicely if not adjust your tape and then just try again when you do finally get it apply some glue slot your front baffles into position fold it all together again and then apply some clamps until the glue dries you might be wondering why I didn't also install the rear baffles at the same time and that's because we've still got quite a bit of work to do inside the cabinets so let's talk about the Crossovers you might be thinking that for Dolby atos hey channels the circuitry inside these speakers would need to be pretty complex but you'd actually be wrong all the crazy positional Wizardry happens Upstream in your AV receiver and we'll talk about that more later but because these crossovers are Downstream of that their only job is to sort high frequency sounds to the tweeters and low frequency sounds to the woofers so what I'm doing here is soldering together a series of resistors capacitors and inductors on a perfor to board that will help to keep everything all clean and organized looking these are a great addition to any speaker build and I'll make sure to include some links to them along with all the other tools and products I've used throughout this project in the video description now there is a significantly better way to do Crossovers and it's probably what I'm going to do for my next speaker build but I'll cover that during the postmortem analysis at the end of the video for now the last step was taking the Crossovers and screwing them to the rear baffles so that they'll be easy to install a little bit later now that we are done with the electronics we have our speaker cabinets here and they are now dry so I think what we had to do is sand them and finish them but that's kind of boring so we're not going to spend much time on this step just going to do it quick to keep things brief I sanded everything down to 220 grit and then rolled on a coat of the same polyurethane finish that I used on all my other speakers so that everything stays nice and consistent now let's talk for a second about the consistency of hardwood all right look at these These are looking really good this is actually really dark walnut which is kind of one of the things I like so much about Walnut is you never really know what you're going to get until you start Milling it down now that we've got these all finished counterintuitively we have to cut into them a little bit normally you'd put the holes for an input plate and a breather port on the rear baffles but with these speakers because of their orientation that's not really going to work so I picked the side that will eventually face away from me and cut them there instead the Breather ports were easy but because the input plates are square I had to cut these holes using an oscillating multi-tool this is my go-to choice anytime I need to cut straight down into a flat surface and it's a really handy tool to have in the shop a quick test Fit made sure my holes were big enough and then we were ready to move on so now I would like to fix a problem that I created earlier in the build because I made the wood of these cabinets so thin they're quite resonant they've got a good drummy sound to them which as you might imagine is not great in a set of speakers so in order to fix that I would like to borrow a product from the automotive World anyone who's ever installed a subwoofer in a car knows all about this stuff Dynamax or rather its generic cousin which you can order off of Amazon for pennies on the dollar this is a foil backed be rubber which you can stick to just about any surface and the beauty of it is that it absorbs vibration and kills resonance so I got a bunch of small sheets that were perfectly size for the inside of our cabinets and then stuck them in place okay now that we got the first one done it's time for a super scientific test here's that one and that one as you can hear it still knocks but this one is quite a bit sharper and more resonant so yeah I think that actually worked quite well oh and as an added bonus this it makes the inside of the speaker look really cool which is obviously the most important thing when you're building speakers so as you can see these sheets drastically reduce the Resonance of our cabinet which should more than compensate for our thin hardwood shells and should make for much cleaner and crisper positional audio all righty now we get to do my favorite part of any speaker build we get to put all the components together inside the cabinet but first let me tell you about the sponsor of today's video xreal and their freshly announced air2 Ultra augmented reality glasses these are the world's most advanced lightweight spatial Computing glasses their dual 3D environment sensors allow for instant real world mapping precise image and hand tracking and 6° of spatial recognition inside their lightweight titanium frames is a pair of ultra sharp Sony micro OLED screens each one is 1080P and can refresh up to 120 times per second for an ultra smooth experience and because those micro OLED screens are so close you get a 52° field of view which is pretty crazy each pair is uniquely calibrated for super accurate colors and thanks to their titanium frames they weigh in at only 80 g making them very comfortable to wear for extended sessions and xreal has got some really exciting Partnerships coming in the near future at CES this year they announced they're working with industry heavyweights like Qualcomm to explore the future of mobile Computing and AR technology they're also partnering with BMW and Neo in the automotive world to explore how AR glasses can not only entertain passengers in vehicles but also deliver realtime information to assist drivers and help them get to their destinations it's all very exciting now unfortunately the air2 Ultras haven't been released just yet but x-rail did send over a pair of their air2 Pros that I will be integrating into my ultimate home theater setup so we're going to have some fun testing these out later but first we got to finish these speakers step number one was creating what looks like a repairability nightmare I installed the rear baffle using a flexible adhesive that will create a permanent airtight seal so that air can only go in and out through the Breather Port this isn't an issue though because a principle of good speaker design is to size all of your components so that they can fit through the largest driver hole so if I ever need to get in there to do anything I can always do it through the woer cutout next I soldered two leads coming off the crossover back to the input plate some people will use crimp-on friction fittings for this but I'm much prefer to use solder as it offers a more permanent and secure connection and similarly I did the same thing for the woofers which are hiive B4 NS and the tweeters which are from day and audio I've got a lot of experience with these drivers as I've used them in many of my other speaker projects not only do they sound great but they also look great with their metallic cones the only downside to them is that most people just assume they're Clips drivers when they see them in person before we install these last two panels here I want to take a second and stuff these speakers this is poly fill and it's essentially the same stuff You' find in a cheap pillow or a stuffed animal this stuff's going to go inside the speaker and it's going to help to cut down on resonance and make the speaker sound a little bit better smells like nothing if you're doing this at home you might be tempted to pack as much polyfill as you can into a set of speakers but there is a balance to be struck here I'd suggest putting in just enough to Loosely fill the cabinet air on the side of underfilling rather than overfilling so so let's talk about the projection at the front of these speakers cuz conventionally speaking this is bad speaker design as the sound waves come off your front driver they're going to reflect off of these edges and you're going to end up with a very muddy sound signature which is not what you want but these are not conventional speakers the goal of these speakers is going to be to shoot sound waves up to the ceiling and then bounce them down so in order to help direct those sound waves we are actually going to line these front projection with some acoustic panels the these will absorb the sound waves and help to uh you know what why don't I just explain this to the voiceover it these will absorb sound waves coming off the drivers at oblique angles which should in theory anyways focus our sound waves into more directional beams that way you're only hearing them as they're reflected off the ceiling now thankfully for me these panels were really easy to cut so I was able to chop them up into smaller pieces and then just glue them in place woo would you look at that our speakers are now done so I think the next thing that we have to do is take them home hook them up to my AV receiver and see if they actually work as height speakers oh and as I'm tilting the speaker like this right now I'm just realizing we still have to make a custom mounting solution that will hold the speakers like this cuz I can't just you know kind of like balance them like that that's not going to work unfortunately anybody who saw my last video knows that this next step is going to be a big pain in the ass my a receiver which is going to be the brains of this operation is hidden in a compartment below my coffee table this magical black box is responsible for figuring out what speakers need to play which sounds in order to create the 3D positional effect so in order to install these new speakers I had to run two lines from it under my carpet and then up the backside of my original tower speakers it did take a while to set this all up but it was well worth it to keep everything looking nice and clean all right there we go like I said before we have a very obvious problem our speakers are pointed directly up at the ceiling and given that our seating area is over there it's probably not going to sound the best so what I want to do is come up with a solution to get these speakers to sit a little bit more like that and in order to do that think we better go use the 3D printer so this is what I came up with and it's not dissimilar from a GoPro Mount if you've ever SE one of those basically you have two halves with some fingers on them and the fingers interlock like that and then if you look over here at this finished one what I've done is I've threaded a bolt through there there's a couple friction washers between the fingers and then on the other side there's a nut so as you tighten down on this bolt it basically locks the fingers in whatever position you want and the cool thing about this is that you can adjust it to basically any angle and a multitude of height so it should give us a ton of flexibility for positioning our speakers downstairs a little bit of double-sided tape did a surprisingly good job of holding my new brackets in place and then it was time to do some calibration over the next couple of hours I did two things the first was testing out various angles on my brackets and seeing what gave the most convincing overhead effect from the speakers and then the other one was running the room correction process on my AV receiver this involves placing a mic at various seating positions around the room and playing a test sound out of each speaker individually the receiver then takes that data and uses it to work some EQ magic to compensate for any asymmetries in the room and any suboptimal placements of your speakers all right so I guess the thing that we have to do now is test to see if they work and it was actually surprisingly hard to find content that I knew had Dolby Atmos and height channels in it as well but I hear Dune on Netflix does it pretty well so I'm going to watch this for a minute and then give you guys my Impressions pretty much right away I was confronted with something that I didn't really expect going into this project there's just not that many sounds that happen above your head as the viewer in a movie what I noticed more than anything thing was the change in height of objects on the screen for instance when these helicopters move from the bottom right to the top left corner you could definitely hear them changing height within that plane but they never really sounded like they were right above my head which makes sense given the context of that scene overall despite my initial misunderstanding I was still really impressed with this technology but that was only the start of my testem the PlayStation 5 just got a software update and now the PlayStation 5 supports Dolby Atmos so let's give that a shot and see if that's any different you know what what I found here was equally surprising at first I thought that Dolby Atmos would only be supported by the latest games because it's such new technology on the PS5 but what I found is that it actually works flawlessly even on older titles I guess somehow they found a way to Port the old 3D positional audio over into Atmos okay that might just be a game changer especially in an older title like this this is like a tech demo from the launch of the PS5 I didn't actually think it was working at first but then as soon as I went into an area where there was stuff happening above my head you can immediately sense that the sounds are coming from a higher plane again it's like the movie it doesn't sound like it's happening directly above your head but you do really get the sense that the sound is coming from a higher point in 3D space bottom line I think this is really impressive and it's going to add a whole new dimension to my catalog of games but what about the screen because as nice as my 75 in TV is is it still pales in comparison to the big screen you get in most movie theaters well that's where xra comes back into the picture like I said before they set over a pair of their air2 Pro glasses and I think they're going to make this TV and most theater screens look like a joke in comparison by utilizing a pair of micro OLED screens they're able to create a viewing experience that's equivalent to watching a 320 in screen from 10 m away so let's get them hooked up and and see what they can do this is what xre calls the X beam and it's a small device that adds a lot of functionality to the air Pros you plug the glasses into this USBC Port here and now you can use the X beam as a media streaming device to play back Netflix Amazon Prime video and it can also act as a chomecast destination but this second USBC Port right here is where things start to get really interesting here we can connect just about any device so if I connect it to my AV receiver I can now use the Air 2 glasses in place of my TV all well still maintaining that whole surround sound experience oh man this is crazy it feels like the screen I'm seeing in Fr my face is at least twice as big as my TV and even brighter too the screens in here are rated at 500 nits which is technically less than my TV however since the Air 2 Pros have these Electro chromatic lenses they block out a ton of incoming light and as a result they feel even brighter than those numbers might suggest wow this is such an immersive experience no matter where I turn my head the screen just perfectly follows I don't know if I'll ever set foot in a movie theater again when you combine these glasses with Adobe Atmos sound system it's like having your own personal movie theater but let's be real part of the fun of these glasses is that you don't need to be tethered in place on your couch by connecting them to a handheld game console like a Nintendo switch or my Rog Ally I can enjoy that virtual 320 in screen wherever I want and they even have built-in internal speakers for when you're using them on the go so if you want more information about the xreal air2 pros or the upcoming Ultras check out the links down in the video description so that is how you build your own DIY Dolby atos height speakers and well they don't work exactly the way that I initially thought they would they do work surprisingly well maybe even better than store bought ones but that doesn't mean that they can't be improved so let's talk about how I could have made these even better because I've definitely got some thoughts obvious cosmetic flaw here uh the grain direction is going in opposite directions that's going to bug me similarly this Gap here isn't ideal and really that brings me to the biggest thing that I think I could have done better on this project I think I could have created a much cleaner package if I had Incorporated the front height speakers into the front Tower speakers now obviously this would necessitate building entirely new front Towers but I think it would look so much better the only downside to doing it that way would be that the whole system just becomes less modular like I could take these speakers and wall mount them if I want to or depending on where we move next I want want to put these somewhere off to the side and then finally to rewind the clock a little bit the Crossovers I could have made those using a custom printed PCB and it would have made the whole thing a lot easier sounds crazy I know but I actually recently learned that you can have these made for as little as a couple of bucks each that's it for me and I will see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Zac Builds

Views: 189,815

Keywords: diy, woodworking, crafts, building, build, diyproject, construction, woodcraft, craft, builds, diy home theatre, home theatre, home theater, diy home theater, diy dolby atmos, diy atmos, dolby atmos, diy speaker, diy audio, speaker build, building speakers, height speakers, diy movie theatre, home audio, gaming, gaming audio, ps5 dolby atmos, playstation 5, 3d sound, positional audio, overnight sensations, diy speakers, walnut, speakers

Id: 9q92zeZ7SX8

Length: 21min 6sec (1266 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024