This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Okay, quick pop quiz. What is the most valuable
real estate in the world? Is it New York? London, Hong Kong, maybe. Those are all good guesses,
but ultimately incorrect. The most valuable real estate
in the world is desk real estate. I don't know about you guys at home, but
I am constantly running out of desk space. And also, I just like to keep a nice,
clean looking desk. So a couple of weeks ago,
my beloved desktop speakers just died where they started
making this horrible noise. I had to unplug them and ever since
I've just been using the built in speakers in my monitor
and it's been pretty horrible. So I figured this is a great opportunity
for me to build my own desktop speakers. And then I thought, Wait,
what if they were more than just simple speakers? Maybe through some clever design I can regain some very valuable desk
real estate. Sounds like fun. Let's head to the shop. All righty. So inside this box, we have everything that we are going
to need in order to make these speakers and some pretty unconventional stuff
in here. These aren't going to be
your normal speakers. But before we can get started on that, we have to build the cabinets
that the speakers are then going to go in. And even the cabinet's are pretty
unconventional, if I'm being honest. I think this design is going to make
some audio files out there prettier. Now, look,
I will be the first person to tell you that you do not need a ACNC
to make your own speakers. However, like I said before, these aren't
going to be your normal speakers. You can see that I'm actually carving
some really tight channels into these pieces
that needed to be millimeter accurate. You'll see how it all goes together
in a second. But for now, I cut two front panels,
two rear panels, and then two bass pieces. As you can see,
these pieces didn't really fit together. And that's because trying to cut the thickness of a piece of wood
on ACNC is a huge waste of time. So in order to make everything work,
I use my planer to sneak up on the exact thickness
that I need. Similarly, it's also a huge waste of time
to do simple straight cuts on the CMC. So I separated and then trimmed down
the sides of my new bass pieces using my miter saw and table saw. With all that being said,
we're still not done with the CMC. I still had to cut the openings
for the speaker drivers. Normally you could just do this step
with a holster, but these speakers feature an interesting overlapping driver design
that required that special machine touch. Oh, and I also more test out this area
on the underside of the bottom piece, which will be used for a special bonus
feature that we'll talk about later. So thank you for bearing with me
through all that cutting and carving. But now I think you can kind of see
how this speaker's starting to take shape. You have a couple of cutouts here
for the speaker drivers. Volume control down here and then import
as well as a breeder port back here. And obviously,
there's something missing here. There's no side panels. So what are we going to do about that? Well, it's a good question,
and I'm glad you asked. Just right here,
I have some p95 acrylic sheets. These are basically frosted,
clear acrylic. And I'm going to use these
to make the side panels for the speakers. Now, a spec this is the point in the video
where I'm probably going to alienate quite a few audio files out there,
although I probably already alienated them by building
the rest of the speakers out hardwood. But hopefully I can win them back
because these frosted sheets are actually going to be integral
to the way this speaker functions. In my defense, I did try to research
if acrylic is a good material for speaker cabinets,
but there just wasn't much info out there. So it's going to be really interesting
to see how these speakers perform once they're done. Now let's talk cutting acrylic
because it's actually really easy. It cuts just like hardwood. A fine finishing blade will give you
a nice smooth cut with no chips and taro. One thing you do want to note,
though, is that P95 acrylic only has its frosted
texture on one side. So if you want everything
to look consistent, you got to make sure you keep track of
which side is which. As a final step, I sanded the acrylic
with a fine grit sandpaper to remove any truly marks
and to make the edges nice and smooth. Oh, then if you're going to do this
at home, be careful, because I did slice my finger open pretty good on the sharp,
polished edge in acrylic. Now that we have over acrylic panels cut,
we get to do a fun thing and also kind of a scary thing
because I've never done this before. We are going to fuze all of these guys
back together, reuse this stuff. Well done. Three. So from what I understand,
this basically will melt the acrylic and allow you to fuze two pieces into one single applicator
that looks like a hypodermic needle. So it's kind of scary, to say the least. So basically I set this whole thing up
like a big miter box, glue up the blue tape pieces
will act as little hinges and make sure that all three panels stayed more
or less perfectly aligned with the prep work done. It was time to crack the code
of how to open the well-done bottle and then suck some up to give it a weld on the best
possible chance of adhering. I thoroughly cleaned off
all the seams prior to filming this. Apparently, clean and smooth is the name
of the game when it comes to Weld. So my plan here is pretty simple. I'm going to play a quick
bead on this edge here, folded on itself and then slot it into the front panel
in order to hold them all together. The part that nobody prepared me for
is that Weld on is actually thinner than water. So getting it to say just inside
the miter was basically impossible. And to make matters worse,
if you get it on the frosted side of the acrylic,
it'll remove the frosted texture. Lucky for me, I had the frosted side
facing up, so at least gravity was working in my favor. It's about 50 minutes later. Let's see if our first minor is now
at least tightened it together. So the thing about this stuff is that it's supposed to slowly
get stronger over time. So when you first sit here, it
it does grip pretty quickly, but it doesn't reach full strength until like 48 hours later
or maybe even a couple of weeks later. Oh, that seems like it's dry ish or fake. Want to be pretty careful with one? Suppose I could observe that. Oh, I don't like that. Now, at this point, I'm sure many of you are wondering why
I even chose to use a YouTube first place. The original genesis of the idea was that
I wanted to show off the cool internal workings of the speaker space. But then I realized there were speakers
who mostly just wasted space. So by using the frosted acrylic,
I could actually turn that empty volume into something functional.
And what do I mean by that? They've got let me just show someone both physical
what we wanted for our acrylics to dry. Let's move on to less fun things,
aren't they? This is easy. This is going to actually save this. Not normally that easy. What I want to talk about is this. This will look to Playbar. And it's like,
just like I put a pair of these in my office for filming,
and either I put them directly at me, in which case they're too bright
or I avoid them away from me. And then they just go out the window
in my office. So I thought, Let's get back
to incorporate these into these speakers. Well, I try to figure out the secret
to disassembling these lights. Let me tell you about the sponsor
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Now let's get back to this project. So I think if I just pull this out. Yep. There we go. So that is our PCB
with all the lighting strips on it. And we get this too. Yeah, there we go. That's our heat sink
and a little bit of shielding. So if I actually get in real close here,
you can see one of the things I like so much about Philips Hue Lights
is that they actually have individual pixels for both warm
white and cool white as well as rugby. So you could actually get some really nice, really clean colors
out of these LED lights. You know what I just realized
that I was a little bit of an idiot and I didn't take these apart
ahead of time and measure them to make sure they were
going to fit in here. And now it's not. It's just a little bit too long. You know what? I think that's okay. I think I can just hack a little bit out of the front
and rear panels and it'll still work. I guess I could put it an angle like that. But now let's let's hack
a little bit out of the front rear panels. Before we do that, though,
I noticed a pesky little problem. The Heatsink and its current form
was going to obscure the LEDs, so I decided to quickly
flatten it over the bench face and then I was ready to mount everything
on to the speaker base and figure out exactly how much the front
and rear panels I needed to remove. So in order to get this to fit over a new PCB,
we just need to remove a little bit of material here, something like that,
and a little bit like that. On the other side,
I want to go all the way through, but just enough
so that this can slot down over top of it. You guys all know that
I am not a huge fan of hand tools, so to mortar solar panels, I use the former bit on my drill
press to do the majority of the work. Unfortunately, after a quick test of it,
I realized that the panels were rubbing on the PCB just a little bit. So reluctantly I used a hammer and chisel
to square them off. But don't tell anybody. All righty. When you look at that,
we now have our wood done. We have our acrylic done. And now before we get to hooking up
all the electronics, the internals of the speakers, I'm actually just going to take a quick
second and sand and finish all the wood. My number one tip when it comes to finishing is to do it
before you assemble everything. Trust me, nothing is worse
than trying to sand a bunch of interior corners with a little sanding block after
you've already put everything together. And the same thing goes for applying
the finish. You'll have way less drip marks
if you do everything out in the open. So match these speakers to my desk. I use the same finish that I used on
my desk. It's hold up great over the last
three years with zero coaster use. So really,
I don't think I could ask for much more. If you want to get some for yourself,
I'll include a link for it along with all of the other products and tools
I use down in the video description. And there we go. All six of our wood pieces are now sanded, finished and looking pretty nice
if I do say so myself. So now we are ready to do some assembly. Neither wood glue nor acrylic glue really
works that well to bond the two together. But what I have found that works
well is the glue. So I squeezed out a thin bead into the sea
and C cut channels and then slowly lowered
the acrylic and position. Truth be told,
these channels are so tight I'm not sure that I even needed to use glue,
but hey, better safe than sorry. And speaking of a tight fit,
sliding the tops onto the bottoms required a bit of percussive force,
but realistically you want these joints to be as tight as possible
so that the speaker panels don't rattle around
when you're actually using the speakers. Now that we have our speaker
cabinets assembled, we can start putting all the internals
into them. However, I made a very stupid mistake that's going to take a little bit of time
to fix. This guy right here is a little Pi LP 48 and it's an internal amplifier
for the speakers. You see, most DIY
speaker kits are passive speakers, meaning that you have to have an
external amplifier in order to power them. But again,
this build is all about saving decimals. So I didn't really want to have
an external amp that was going to clutter up my desk. And as an added plus,
this thing is also a Bluetooth receiver. So to allow my phone to connect
to these speakers as well as the computer. So when I first unboxed all these parts,
I took a look at this board. I was like, Oh, sweet look, you got
two wires coming off the backside of it. Connect
those to the driver and bingo, Bango. You're good to go. However, in these speakers,
we have two drivers. You have a tweeter for the high end sales
and you have a woofer for the lows mids. But we've only got this one
lead coming off the board. So how is that going to work? What we need is a crossover or a circuit that separates
the mids and lows from the highs. Normally you would just melt this
on the bottom of your speaker cabinet. However I am I infinite wisdom have mounted the lights right
in the perfect place to put the crossover. And I can't just put the crossovers
above the lights because while they're low block
the lights. This one isn't so bad. I think I should just be able to put it
right about there. However, I think this one I'm going to have to modify a bit
because it won't fit as is. Apologies for the poor focus here,
but basically I just used an angle grinder with an abrasive disc
to grind off the parts of the crossover board
that I didn't want anymore. After I did that, it fit quite nicely. Now, for those of you who don't know
what a crossover board is, don't worry. This was actually my first time
using one too. But I am here to tell you
that they are awesome. Basically, it's
just the small perforated board, but those perforations
allow you to pull the leads of the various capacitors and resistors through the board
and then tie them together. On the opposite side. You can
then solder them, trim off the excess, and what you're left
with is a really clean crossover that can easily be mounted
inside the speaker cabinets. And while we're on the subject of things
that make your life way easier, I also got these automatically adjusted
wire strippers just feed the wire in and boom, you're ready to solder money
well spent. After I got to the speaker lead started in place,
I was then ready to mount the crossovers. I didn't want them sitting directly
on the wood of the cabinets, so I actually put little isolating rubber feet under all four corners
and then screwed them down. You know, people like to make fun of this
little 12 volt drill that I have, but I keep it around the shop
precisely for situations like this. I don't think any of my other drivers would have fit inside the speaker cabinets
the way this one did. There we go. It actually fits so cramped in there,
but fits well. The crossovers are the way it was time
to connect the drivers. These speakers are a variation
of the very popular Zino kit. So you've got five inch daytime woofers
with these really cool aluminum cones. You'll see those in a second that are
paired with one inch soft dome tweeters. The plastic surrounding the tweeter
is called a waveguide, and it's supposed to help the tweeter sound more natural,
but it also recesses the tweeter for an almost perfect time alignment
with the woofer down below. After those were done, I connected the front volume
control panel, press it into place, and then finished up with the rear
input panel. Now that we got everything hooked up,
I think now is a good time to do a quick sanity check. Let's plug these guys in and see
if I can get any sound put out of them. Hopefully I didn't cross any wires
and or massage or anything. Plug this in here and immediately
burn them. So that's a good sign on for. Oh, please, a little chime like that pair so you can play any music
that isn't copyrighted. So. Wow. Okay. It was working woofers, working all their loud L Yeah. Oh, still the air coming in the ports, so. Oh, all right. Well,
that is enough to get me very excited. So what do you say we finish these things? So there's still actually
a couple of things left to do. Without a power source, these LEDs
aren't going to do me much good. So I fed through and reconnected
their original factory power cables. And speaking of LEDs, my next video is all
about how you can make your own LEDs. Smart lights using cheap off the shelf
control boards and a little bit of free open source
software. These Philips Hue lights are nice,
but they're also crazy overpriced in the interest of repairability
and Upgradeability, I opted to simply screw the top and
the bottom half of the speakers together. Now we are ready to integrate the last
space saving feature into the speakers. So earlier in the build,
you may have noticed that I cut these recessed areas
in the bottom of the speaker cabinets and also for the last 30 minutes or so,
I've been working off of this format. So what we're going to do is we are going
to cut some small sections of the format and we are going to place it here
into the recessed area. You see one of the secrets
to getting the best possible sound quality is separating your speakers
from whatever surface they're resting on through some sort of
isolation layer. My old speakers sat on thick foam blocks,
which worked well, but were ultimately pretty ugly
and took up a lot of space. So just like on my wooden Xbox build,
I use Super 77 spread he sieve to attach the foam
simply spray on a nice the coat, give it a few seconds to stack up
and then press it in place. It's really easy to use and a handy
product that's worth having in your shop. And now we have some nice clean isolation
pads that you can barely even tell are there, except for this telltale little shadow
line the whole way around the base. I've been waiting a while to do this
because I didn't want to scratch that acrylic accidentally. Oh yeah, that's place. A little bit of glue residue,
but we can get rid of that. So on. I really, really like the look of that. It is beautiful. You can just barely make it. Some of the internals
that looks really cool. Well, then what do you guys say
we take these guys home, see how they sound and see how they look
when they're all lit up. And then also we'll talk about
a couple of things that I'd probably do differently if I had to do these over. Okay. Yeah, I am very happy with both
how they sound and how they look. So let's talk about sound quality first. I mean, first of all, I'm like a man
coming out of the desert because I've been listening to everything through the built
in speakers on this monitor. But these sound great, way better bass
I ever expected. And you know, they are only 40 watts,
but they get way louder than I would ever run them. Now, some of you guys might remember from
my last goal, I was a little bit worried about the acrylic side panels rattling
kind of like that. But I am happy to report that
that is not an issue on these speakers. So I think going with the thicker quarter
inch material as well as adding a whole bunch of glue
to the whole thing, really helps out. Like even at max volume, there's not
a single rattle coming out of the speakers and Oh man, do I ever
just love the limp aspect of these things. I think that LED lighting inside of there
looks so good. Oh, and check this out because I used
Philips Hue lights in the speakers. Well, now the lights are, you know tied into the rest of Philips
hue lights in my room. So they're all synched up and I can change them all in one single
lighting together. That being said, not everything is perfect here, so let's dive
right into the post mortem analysis and talk about what I would do differently
if I had to do this project over it. The first one is lighting
related from certain angles. You can see the individual
led diodes of the strip light in there. I think in the future
what I might do is 3D print a little diffusion dome that I can
then put over top of the leads to make them a little bit softer
and a little bit less noticeable. Next, I think I just missed some good opportunities to integrate
even more features into these speakers, like how cool would have been if there was a little USB charging hub
integrated into the base of the speakers? Or what about a headphone jack? So I had a nice convenient place
to plug in my headphones. With all that being said, overall, I am very happy
with how these speakers turned out. I think they look great here on my desk
and they really help to clean things up. Oh, and I'm sure some of you
probably noticed an RTX 4080 kick around in the background. I bought that because I'm going to upgrade
my desk PC over here and I'm also going to water
cool it at the same time. So you might want to get subscribe
because that's going to be a pretty over-the-top project. I got a lot of fun stuff planned for that.
