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Build your own high tech speakers: billfitzmaurice.com

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My friend David Brown, a bassist in the Vancouver Symphony, turned me on to billfitzmaurice.com about 5 years ago, a site that sells plans to build your own speakers. At the time, I was trying to figure out how to perform music for viola using Ableton Live and while I was recording lots of ideas, I didn’t have the nerve or confidence to start playing shows. As a way to motivate myself, I thought that building customized speakers for my unique setup (viola, synths, sampled drums and electronics) would be a great idea. I had worked at Our Town Cafe and remembered that one of the regulars, David Montie, had built some benches for the owner, Henry Lee. I called Henry, got David’s number and I hired him to build a pair of of Omni 10 speakers.

It took awhile, but eventually when I formed Chordophone with my brother, these speakers came in handy!

Here’s a pretty low res photo of the left speaker we built at our recent show:

Little did I know that David and I would be working together to this day! I had such a good experience making the speakers with David that I hired him to build a carbon fiber viola case about a year later. We’ve also been down to Burning Man together and I work for him part time at his web design studio, Sparkjoy Studios.

If you visit billfitzmaurice.com , you will see that the plans for the Omni 10 are not longer available, but instead, there are plans for the Jack 10:

Jack Bass/Key/PA Cabs

Jack is our ‘Jack of All Trades’ speaker line: you name it, it can do it. It can be built as an old-school woofer only electric bass cab. It can be built as a modern full range bass or keyboard cab. It cab be built with one or two woofers. It can be used as a PA top along with subs, it can be used as a full range PA without subs. It can be outfitted with a 120 degree dispersion melded tweeter array, or a vertically aligned compression driver loaded high frequency diffraction horn, as shown below. It can be used one per side for small room PA needs, it can be vertically stacked in a line array for thousand seat venues. If maximum versatility is what you need from a speaker of minimum size and weight, not to mention cost, Jack is the cab you want.

In my opinion, for anyone with some basic woodworking skills and tools, buying the plans from the website and building them is a cost effective way to have super efficient speaker enclosures that sound excellent. The plans range from home theatre setups, floor monitors, guitar and bass cabinets to PA cabinets and subs that can be used for large scale sound stages. And if you don’t have these skills, do what I did and hire someone locally to build them for you. Not only are you helping a local tradesman, but you’ll have the chance to meet someone new, learn a few things, and have some fun!

billfitzmaurice.com
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