Trillium progress

I've been building a pair of loudspeakers for my stereo. I named them the 'Trilliums' which is a rather ironic name, given that the name refers to a small, rather pretty flower. These things are by no means small and as for pretty, well...

Designing and building loudspeakers is a very difficult thing to do. I've spent a long time (as in years) learning about the drivers (tweeters, midranges, and woofers), the enclosures, and the crossovers. It's all very complicated. But I've finally moved past the 'armchair designer' phase.

Building the enclosures has some challenges, like cutting the facets on the front baffle (see picture below), but designing the crossover will be the hardest part. The crossover is the circuitry that sends the high frequency sound to the tweeter, the middle to the midrange and the low frequencies to the woofers (in case you didn't know that). There are software packages that make this much easier, but it's still very complicated.

Yesterday I finished the first of the two enclosures. I installed the drivers and lugged it up into their future home (living room) to see how they'll fit in. Andrew helped me with the hoisting (that's hoist, not foist). I'd guess it weighs over 80 pounds and might break 100 when it's done.

Here's a picture:

Isn't it Heeuuuge? Personally, I think it dominates the room too much. But, Gem likes them (a lot) and that matters more than what I think (hey, if they sound good, I'm happy). The enclosure is currently raw medium density fiberboard. Later, I'll cover them with a fancy veneer. I'd love to use birdseye maple, but that would run about $600, so I'll probably use something like curly cherry, curly maple, movingue, or mottled makore).

Anyway, I'm having a lot of fun with it and they should be pretty awesome when they're done. By the way, the facets serve the purpose of reducing diffraction of the sound waves off of the flat baffle surface. Just one instance of the complications involved. They do look cool, too. :-)