Gadgetory

if you're anything like me you probably spend a lot of time in peaceful solitude contemplating the mysteries of the universe and when you're not doing that relaxing at home with a glass of white wine listening to the soothing melodic tones of your favorite artists on a high-end speaker setup but when it comes to home audio our high-priced off-the-shelf designer models really worth what they cost or is it possible for someone without a lot of experience and audio engineering or even woodworking to put together a set of speakers that can stand up to them for a fraction of the cost let's find out shall we Tunnel Bear is the simple VPN app that makes it easy to browse privately and enjoy a more open Internet to try tunnel bear for free check out the link in the video description we set out to build a set of try tricks MT MTL speakers that we bought from Parts Express calm this kit is one of the simpler ones and often recommended for people just getting into DIY audio and it checks off a couple of key boxes for us promising high audio fidelity at a relatively low cost and while it's too early to say much about sound quality the cost comparison looks pretty good by building our own cabinets rather than buying prefabbed ones we shaved almost $100 off the price even after accounting for buying our own construction materials and renting the tools we didn't have making our total cost around a quarter of what I paid for the CAF q 500s in my home theater that we're going to compare against so let's get started our cabinet is slightly different from the one that would be supplied by parts Express as we ended up adopting some modifications suggested by regalia Knox comm if you're interested in reading about his experience building the same speaker set and a more in-depth guide to construction check out the link below we built both speakers out of one four by eight sheet of MDF board cut into two by four strips for ease of transportation we first marked out all the pieces we intended to get out of each sheet then cut them with a combination of the table and circular saw a good carpenter will tell you measure twice cut once and while that's undeniably great advice here in the studio we tend to follow the cut pray love then keep on cutting philosophy that I learned from that doctor that I used to visit back when I wasn't covered by the company health plan I don't know if I'm going to let Tyler write these scripts anymore anyway once we cut all of these we needed to put holes for the woofers and tweeters in the cut of wood that will be the front of the speaker I'm sure there's a specific name for that piece but I don't want to baffle you or me with too much audio terminology so we'll just call it the front we used a router and a jig to get the circle cuts and recesses if you want tips on how to make your own jig for doing circular cuts like this check out this link with all our pieces ready it's time to stick them together we want to leave one side off the cabinet for now so that we still have access to do all of our wiring protip it's very important to drill pilot holes which we totally nailed and to use cabinet screws with countersunk holes in the first place so you don't have to go back and redo them to end up with a more clean look with our cabinet fully constructed the next stage is to put together our crossover the crossover is the part of your sound system that takes the single input signal coming from your stereo computer TV or what have you and that breaks it up into multiple output signals containing different frequency bands that are then sent to the specialized loudspeakers best equipped to handle them our try tricks kit contains two woofers and one tweeter woofers handle lower audio frequencies while tweeters are designed to handle the higher end of the spectrum you can learn more about this here the try tricks uses a second-order crossover which means it uses a double filter to separate out the frequencies one two the woofers and one two the tweeter when building a crossover with multiple inductors it's important to set them up so the inductors don't talk to each other this has nothing to do with our constant fear of a machine uprising by allowing electronics to communicate but rather to do with preventing the two coils from creating mutual inductance by being orientated in the same direction in order to avoid that we're going to lay one horizontally and the other one up vertically then once you've soldered all the connections between your inductors capacitors and found you can place the crossover in the cabinet mount your speakers and wire it all together to avoid having excess wire cluttering up your interior drop wires down from your speaker and cut them at the appropriate length to meet up with your crossover the woofers in this system are wired in series which means their resistance is added together increasing the overall resistance that the amplifier sees and letting it run cooler and more efficiently after the wiring is all taken care of we just stuffed this baby full of nylon fiber and seal it back up at this point a master carpenter might go straight into painting or covering the cabinets with vinyl but we're going to have to do a little bit of cosmetic tweaking and much like my aesthetician our primary tools are going to be polyfill and a power sander now that these speakers look a little more like the version I saw on Pinterest it's time to find out how well they perform our three lucky volunteers were blindfolded and subjected to these speakers and my Q 500s and they were then asked if they could tell which was which and to score the audio quality on a scale of one to ten one sounded like sharper like the high notes are like all a little bit clearer but the second one it sounded better in the low but the it was just kind of drowned out in the middle let's go first one like an eight okay and then the second one like a six okay I think first one was better get on the ladder and more sharp I got kind of more dull and I think I break them probably seven and six the second set was okay in the highs in the mid so it's still a little cloudy to me and it was in desperate need of a subwoofer for me I do have a first one like seven and a half so there you have it in the end our subjects could tell the difference but our DIY build came in only slightly beneath the speakers that I spent a large chunk of my youtube money on for my birthday earlier this year so if you're looking to put together an audio system I'd recommend saving a considerable amount of money by putting it together yourself although I would add the caveat that if you really want to make sure you end up with a solid final product it's probably worth it to pick up a kit with pre-cut cabinet pieces unless you are extremely confident in your woodworking skills just like how if you're not 100% confident in your website making from scratch spills you can use Squarespace Squarespace has twenty four seven support via live chat and email it's only twelve bucks a month you get a free domain if you by Squarespace for the year all of their fantastic and beautiful templates feature responsive design to your website scales to look great on any device and every website comes with commerce their cover pages feature their Apple Bob news compatibility their logo designer pretty much you name it it can be done in the cloud on Squarespace so check it out today you can get a two-week trial for free with no credit card and start building your website now and when you decide to sign up use offer code LTT to save 10% so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed check out the link to where to buy DIY speaker supplies on Amazon in the video description also check out our merch store check out our community forum which is awesome and if you want to go up here you can check out our latest video over on channels super-fun