Welcome! The objective of this site is to share what I’ve learned from over 25 years of building loudspeakers. I built my first pair of loudspeakers when I was 14. I pulled a pair of drivers from a Panasonic boom box and built an enclosure made of particle board and OSB. I also pulled a two pairs of paper cone tweeters from two other speakers to round out the design. It was my first and only TTW speaker.

Using the original capacitors, I wired the top tweeter with an on/off switch so I could have a treble boost/cut. I “added” some bass output to the diminutive 5” Panasonic woofers by porting the system with paper towel cardboard tube, tuning the port was by ear of course. Shortly after building that system my good friend Bones became interested in speaker building and picked up Designing, Building and Testing Your Own Speaker System by David B. Weems, I “borrowed it” from him and I still have it, thanks Bones! I quickly learned that building loudspeakers was much more complex than I had thought. Hopefully I’ve learned a few things about speaker design since then. 


The “Big Guys”, near completion in the “little shed” which was our workshop. Pete’s house was speaker building central for our teenage years. Many late nights were spent listening to Fugazi, Greatful Dead and Megadeth while we were building speakers. The mid/high tower next to Pete had four Pioneer ribbon tweeters and four dipole MCM midbasses. The woofer tower had four 12" woofers with a giant slot port. I remember moving them to Pete’s basement and the wooden stairs were deflecting with every step down. These things were heavy! Double layer thick with ¾" MDF on the inside and ¾" plywood on the outside. When all was said and done, they sounded good!

Pete aka Bones (left) and Me (right) w/ the “Big Guys” 1994:

Dorm Speakers



My USAF dorm stereo from 18 years ago:

Dorm Speakers

This system used an active crossover, notice the DSP crossover above the sub woofer.