"Don Pearce" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 22 May 2006 11:58:24 GMT, "Ian Iveson"
wrote:

Now you've gone too far. DIYers may not be able to produce an equivalent
speaker
as cheaply as a commercial one, but every commercial speaker can be
improved.
DIY for economy is mostly dead everywhere, not just in electronics. Unless
you
include kits. DIY now is about quality and style.

No, commercial speakers *have* been improved. That is the point They
are the product of careful initial design, then redesign and tweaking
both in anechoic chambers and real listening rooms. That is a luxury
most don't have for diy. They build one set, then live with the
result. The chances of a happy result of being better than the
commercial equivalent are vanishingly close to zero.


Absolutely not the case.

DIY speaker builders almost invariably build more than one pair of
speakers - I know diddley doo about it all, but even I'm on my fifth pair!
(Two of which are/have been for other people!) Also, I believe many DIYers
will spend quite a bit of time tweaking a a pair of speakers after they have
been built, before they consider them *finished*.

Where DIY speaker builders differ from a commercial enterprise is that they
tend to tweak (different drivers and other components in the case of
speakers with crossovers) in the actual room they are going to use the
speakers in and using kit they already own. My own speakers already sound
better than a number of commercial pairs I have here, which have never
suited the room! I double-checked this only a day or two ago - my Pinkies
are *consummately* better in my room than a pair of very respectable JM-Labs
floorstanders (and a pair of even more respectable Ruarks) I have here.

Until you hit the 'sky's the limit' for price (Wilson &c.?) all speakers are
built to a price and it's common knowledge that 70/80 % of the costs of a
pair of speakers (before marketting and advertising &c. are added in) go
into the cabinet. A DIYer has the option to spend the money on the *sound
quality* - where it counts.

All this proclaiming that DIY can't beat commercial is just so much dogma -
any DIYer with sufficient skill/talent/expertise/resources and *funds* can
match the commercial sector in just about any field if he chooses to. Most
commercial enterprises had small, domestic beginnings from what I can see of
it, anyway!!