Speaker Enclosure by Todd Burch

[Tien Pham]

Hello to All,

I am not a wood worker and recently joint the forum so I can get in touch with Todd Burch for a potential wood working projects.

Todd Build a pair of large speaker enclosures for me in Oct./Nov. 2004. The enclosure dimensions are 68" H x 13" W x 22" D with solid curly mapple on all the edges. With every thing installed, each speakers weight roughly 350 lbs.

Todd is a perfectionist and his work reflected this. That was one of the main reason I searched for Todd on the new wood working project. Unfortunately, he is simply too busy right now to do any project :-(.

Following are pictures of the speakers in my living room placing beside a 70" LED/LCD TV. The room height is 9ft.

The enclosure was built extremley well and had survived being moved twice from my old house to storage and from storage to new house without any issue.

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[Todd Burch]

I remember those beasts!! Thanks for posting Tien! Glad to hear they have held up.

I remember Tien was very reluctant to leave high $$ speakers with me for measuring until the project got underway. He was so nervous!!

That is 1" thick MDF with maple veneers, and lined on the inside with this thick heavy black adhesive backed mat. The insides are fairly complex too.

This was my first project to use a waterborne lacquer to keep it from excessive yellowing. It looks the same as I remember from 2004.

Todd

[Keith Outten]

Wow, those are serious speakers :)

Todd, welcome back to The Creek. You have been gone for awhile and it's always good to welcome back one of our plank owners.
.

[Brian Effinger]

Wow, that is a large herd of speakers! Nice cabinets Todd.

I'm not into the audio world, so I have to ask, what is the benefit to all of those speakers? I assume that they are not all the same (frequency?)?

[Todd Burch]

Beats me Brian. I just make the speakers to his specs. (I didn't make the cabinets)

Thanks Keith!

[Tom Giles]

I'm not into the audio world, so I have to ask, what is the benefit to all of those speakers?

Bragging rights??????

[Thomas Bank]

Do they go to eleven? :cool:

[Tien Pham]

Typical speaker is point source where a single tweeter/woofer handle an audio frequency range. For example, a tweeter typically handle frequency from 2000 - 20,000 Hz, the midrange woofer handle frequency from 80 - 2000 hz and the subwoofer handle frequency from 20 - 80 hz. With point source speaker, the sound pressure attennuate with squared of the distance.

The speaker in the picture is a called line array, where the row of tweeter doing the job of a single tweeter in point source and a row of woofer doing the job of single midrange woofer in point source. You can read about line array here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_array

There are many advantages with line arrays such as minimal vertical reflection. The height of the sound stage ends at the end of the line. If it was up to me and money was not a major issue, I would have gone with a speaker 8 ft tall and I don't know if any local cabinet maker would want to build a cabinet that big.

Another big advange of line array is the sound degrade linearly with distance from the speaker and it is very high efficient where a 25 watts amp is good enough to drive the speaker.

As for bragging right, I did not think about that when I built the speakers but later every one came to my house commented on how impressive the speakers are and how good they look (a testiment to Todd work).

The big down sides to line array are cost, size and they need to be in a big room. Typical audio stores do not carry them because they are too expensive and not many people want to spend that much money on audio. My pair cost me roughly $ 10,000.00 in material. If I have to buy them from specially store, they would cost around $ 40,000.00 a pair.

[Bill Wyko]

The mids look like a Focal but I cna't tell what the planar ribbons are. What brand are the speakers? I own Audio 2000 so I have a good understanding of what you have there. Nice job. I've tried to use a ribbon tweeter in cars but because they disperse almost 180 degrees one way but only about 20 degrees the other way, it wasn't practical. When you can do them in a tall cabinet as you've done here, they can be some of the most exquisite sounding speakers around. If you get a chance, check out my website www. tucsoncaraudio.net. we do some pretty cool stuff too.

[Tien Pham]

Bill,

Following is the specs for the parts in this speaker:

Tweeter = Fountek JP2 but Fountek later renamed it NeoCD2

http://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/ribbon-tweeters/fountek-neocd2.0m-blk-5-ribbon-tweeter-rectangular-flange-black/

Midrange woofer = SEAS Excel W15CY-001 (E0015) 5.5" magnesium Cone Woofer
http://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/approx-5-woofers/seas-excel-w15cy-001-e0015-5.5-magnesium-cone-woofer/

Subwoofer = Peerless 12" XXLS

Subwoofer amp =Keiga KGND-52100-SP 1000 Watt Digital Amplifier
http://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/keiga-amplifiers/keiga-kgnd-52100-sp-1000-watt-digital-amplifier/


So each cabinet has 8 ribbon tweeters, 10 Seas 5.5" woofer, Two Peerless 12" XXL woofers and a Keiga 1000W amp.

I have not ventured into Car audio but my brother in law was. I think my home audio hobby already put us in the poor house so there is no way my wife is going to let me pickup the car audio hobby. LOL

[Tad Capar]

One of my first projects on consignment, back in early '80, was pair of speaker boxes that housed KEF speakers sold back then as kits. It was 5 sided solid oak box with the cloth grill on front of it. It does not quite compare to these speakers posted here, just brought back the memory how it all began for me.