Big Brain Engineering

It was winter of junior year, my two bookshelf speakers needed something to support the low frequencies. Subwoofer time! Again, being an engineer, size, shape and marketing was never a concern. The dayton audio DCS385-4 15" classic subwoofer went down to 19hz. I think I can do better than that. Plugging in values to WinISD gave me a -3db of 17hz! Nice! Time to empty my wallet. 1 week later I got this box: I went and bought a sheet of 4 x 8 1/2" thick MDF, and had home depot cut it for me. Surprisingly, it only took me one sheet. dimensions were 2' x 2' x 3', with an outer volume of 12 cubic feet.  Assembling it was a whole another circus. I used wood wood glue and did the sides. To brace the box without another trip to home depot, i used wooden curtain rods (boy was my mom mad when she found out)   The braces were going to take up lots of vibrations. Chemically, PVA isn't a very strong glue. but when bonded with wood fibers, it is stronger than wood. Thi...

As pretty as JBL's copper domed speakers looked, they all sound sub optimal in my opinion. Either way, I needed a pair of bookshelf speakers. It was junior year of high school and I decided to buy myself a gift, a project. The transducer selection was quite a difficult process, until I saw the prices. I sorted from low to high and filtered by full range speakers on parts express. I settled on the Tymphany TC9FD18-08. Not the optimal for good bass reproduction, but high frequencies were decent, at least in the on axis response. overall nothing a good box can't fix. While I waited for the parts to arrive, I plugged in values into winISD, a speakerbox modeling program. I got a final box size of .494 cf and a rectangular port of 4.7cm by 8.2cm with a length of 42.86 cm. What I realized, was that because I do not have a marketing team, this box will end up being ridiculously huge. after modeling it in Autodesk Inventor, based on the materials I had laying around, I started b...