YourITronics

As i said in part 1 of this project i wanted to build a 2.1 system with good sound using most of the components i already owned and keeping the costs as low as possible.  Since the satellite speakers are not going to be used below 100Hz you can fit almost any 6.5″ woofer in there and since the box is closed. You can also use speaker filling to match the Qtc of the satellites with the subwoofer’s low pass filter. However you need to focus on voicing. Crossover between woofer and tweeter is very important and many times i found it’s making a big difference in sound. If you open most mainstream commercial speakers you will see a only a capacitor and/or resistors or something like that.

Now the subwoofer, since i don’t have much information on the drivers i have, i had to do some measurements. I found a Qts of about 0.76, Fs – 46Hz and Vas – 36l. Yes, i guess it’s made in China. No matter, it will fit a 60l (internal) box very well. The box will be sealed because the woofers are not that good and i will place it in a corner this way i will gain up to 6db in output. The thing about rooms is that their dimensions equals the wavelength for low frequency and this leads to room modes and room gain. If you have a subwoofer you might have experienced that in the room there are certain places where the bass seems to disappear. Take one step away and the bass appears again. This is due to room modes. Going lower in frequency there will be no more waves in the room and the room starts to pressurise and you have a gain going 12db per octave.

This is a generic box. You can fit in there a couple of 10 inchers too. What you must look at is strong motors in the woofers. Big magnets, thick top plates, big diameter voice coils all this will help the woofer perform in a sealed box.

Now to the build itself, first i cut the material i need using a circular saw.

After all the wood boards are cut, i use glue the boards together. Use of clamps makes things easier. Bracing the box and making the joints as solid as it possible will lead to best results. Heavy is good in subwoofers! After the glue is dried i applied the carpet on the box, corners protection, handles and connectors.

Once subwoofer construction was completed i focused on it’s amplifier. I had a car amplifier with it’s smps busted and i thought it’s just what i needed because it already has adjustable low pass filter. The corner frequency can be selected from 40Hz to about 200Hz. So i removed the defective smps and i installed a mains transformer rated 150VA which gave me +/- 35V dc after rectifier bridge. Also used 10’000uF caps for filtering. In most car amplifiers the case is used as a radiator so i had to put new radiators for the power transistors. All this and the amp board i put in a deceased Pioneer Cd player case.

Here’s the 2.1 speaker system:

Time to power the system. The satellite speakers are amplified by a JVC integrated amp and the subwoofer by it’s own amplifier with each channel to its woofer. Set the subwoofer low pass filter to about 100 – 120Hz. Sound was good however some tweaks were still needed in satellite crossover, it sounded bright. Waveguides rule! Here are frequency response graphs. Between two horizontal hard lines there is a 3db difference divided into 5 other thinner lines. The roll off after 10Khz is caused by my old mic.

– satellite speaker                           – whole system

I compared the sound of this 2.1 system with a pair of Cerwin Vega CLS-12. On the high mid-range and highs my system has more detail. I think that tweeter with the waveguide is too good to be used with this system haha. Ofcourse the CLS goes deeper and with a couple dbs louder and the big difference is seen when you turn the volume up. The 8″ woofers from my sub can’t keep up with the 12 inchers from the CLS but they do have a fair amount of excursion as you can see from this small video:

Here are the dimensions of the speaker cabinets and the crossover schematic with one modification the 6.8uF cap from the tweeter high pass filter must be changed with a 4.7uF cap.

This is it for now, I’m sure there will be more changes to the crossover and probably i will test other drivers for subwoofer as time goes by but for now i’m pleased with the result. I wanted a 2.1 system to use with my PC because the two CLS-12 speakers are too big to be placed near my desk.

Anyways if you have some woofers, drivers, tweeters, horns my advice to you is to get your tools and try and build a speaker for them and you might be surprised with their sound and you will have lots of fun in the process specially when you will blow your friends’ commercial setups.

In the first part i presented some of the woodwork on the satellite speakers and a first schematic of the crossover. These days i had time to finish the front baffles, made the edges round, cover the speaker with dark colored carpet and install the drivers and crossover for testing and voicing.

The rounding of the baffle’s edges is done using a 8mm round-over bit on the router. Make sure you get the board fixed so that u can push the router in the edge.

8 mm router bit

Once this is done i applied the first layers of black paint and glued the baffle on the rest of the cabinet. While i was waiting for it to dry i carpeted the back plate. When you chose to use carpet it’s a good idea to install the back plate a little inside the cabinet and this way to leave an edge. This will allow you to glue the carpet and not leave any visible marks at the joints. After the back plate the sides, top and bottom will be carpeted in one piece.

The front baffle was cut with 3mm more on each side so that the carpet would go right at the same level

The satellite speakers are almost done at this point, it is time to install everything inside for the first tests. I chose to fill the cabinet about 70 to 80 % with wool and this way lower the total Q of the speaker to somewhere around 0.8. This can be a high value but since i will use active filter on the subwoofer matching will be easier.  The first version of the crossover network was done in air just for testing. It seems the waveguide gain was slightly higher than expected so the initial L-pad had to be changed. Also the cut frequency was little too high for the tweeter. Since i wanted the option of bi-amping i decided to add a tweeter protection circuit i had in my schematics notebook which I’ve seen used in some professional speakers. After these changes in crossover came another session of listening tests. There was still a part in the upper midrange (voice sibilance) i found to be too emphasized. Adding a resistor of about 1.5ohms in series with the inductor in the high pass filter lowered the Q and smooth the sound.

In the last picture you can see the Zobel network which is an impedance equalization

These are 2nd order filters so you need to reverse polarity of the tweeter, connect the plus of the tweeter to the minus of the filter and vice versa. Otherwise you will have a big dip in the frequency response caused by the phase shift of the filters. Another thing to be careful about is not to connect ground of the high pass and low pass filters if you’re using bi-amp connector. The strap at the connector takes care of that. The radiator i used on the TIP transistors may be an overkill but better safe than sorry.

I did an experiment with a baffle step circuit. From a certain frequency the directivity of the speaker becomes focused and this may appear as an increase in sound pressure level. A baffle step attenuates the response a little from that frequency up. Usually i don’t use it for i didn’t find it necessary. In this case however i got better response on bass at the expense of overall efficiency. However once i will add the subwoofer to the system this circuit might not be necessary. In this case the circuit is made of a 2.7mH inductor in parallel with a 8 ohm resistor connected before the crossover. Baffle step circuit is impractical when using bi-amping though.

Here is simulated baffle step responses using Edge software:

To be continued:

- Measurement of on-axis and off-axis frequency response

- Building the subwoofer

Yes, it is an Arduino board, but I omitted to mention in the title not to discourage those who doesn’t have one, because the project needs just a few passive components beside the ATmega168 you can even build it on a breadboard.

The project is a great example of the AVR micro controllers speed since it does a real-time audio signal sampling and output on the PWM channel, it has also a couple of audio effects like reverberation, overtone. Because it isn’t a dedicated audio DPS it has some limitations, like 15kHz sampling rate, 512byte ring buffer, 8bit PWM which handles the digital to analog conversion, so don’t expect for high quality sound output. Consider this a scaled down audio effect generator, it covers the basic effects and is a great introduction for more complex audio processing

ATmega audio processing: [Link]

This is the final version of the spectrum analyzer, this is the version that will get shipped to buyers. The two boards can be connected either by cable or one on top of each-other trough pin headers. You need to specify the model you want on ordering. You can get the kit assembled or unassembled, for this there are two separate products in the shop(for assembly guide check the forum).

I’ll post some of the most important features and specifications here:

Dimensions:

• motherboard: 81×88 mm.
• matrix: 236×72 mm.

Power:

• 7,5 V 1 A DC (the maximum current draw is 600 mA).
• power is supplied to the board trough a 2,1 mm DC power connector.
• you can get this type of adapter from Youritronics shop.

Input signal:

• signal level 200 mV
• Audio input is supplied to the board trough 2 x RCA connectors.
• you can get this type of cable from Youritronics shop.

Features:

• 20×20 led bargraph display (red or green).
• 9 display modes selectable trough button 2 present on the display board.
• on/off (standby) control selectable trough button 1 present on the display board.
• ISP (in system programming, if you have an AVR programmer that supports this feature, you can update the firmwire if new version is released)

First units were shipped,  and I’m curious about what you think related to the project so visit the Youritronics forum and share some of your thoughts also if you have any questions you can ask them there.

You can now chose between 9 display modes and you have on/off(standby) control, My favorite is the first mode