Question about disassembling speakers

[steveloaf]

I have built a handful of cabinets and have noticed something odd about the latest ones I put together.

On the first one I built I mounted the PC speakers in their original cases inside of the cabinet. For the rest I removed the speakers from the plastic casing and mounted them directly to the wood facing outward.

All speakers sets I used are powered with a base unit. (That too was  removed from the case it came in)

The oddity is that the first machine has great sound and really booms. The rest were weaker and had less base. The brand of speaker IS different on the first machine but they aren't THAT much different in the cost and quality. (All were cheap @ around 15-20 bucks)

I was wondering if anyone else had noticed sound quality dropping when removing speakers from the factory casings. I like the professional layout with them removed but if sound quality is going to suffer I'd rather mount them intact.

[krick]

Speakers are specifically designed to work acoustically with the enclosure.  If you remove the enclosure, you often lose the sound.  That's why making a "bass box" for the back of a car isn't as easy as slapping speakers into a wooden box.  There's a whole science to it.

The speakers that you took apart were probably "bass reflex" speakers.  Here's some info from the Crutchfield site...

"Q: Does "bass reflex" mean a speaker puts out a lot of bass?

A: Not exactly. Unlike an acoustic suspension speaker that uses a completely sealed, airtight enclosure, a bass reflex speaker includes a tuned port hole in the cabinet to produce more bass output in a specific frequency range.

Bass reflex speakers are highly efficient, and will usually play louder than acoustic suspension speakers when driven with the same amount of amplifier power. However, they may sacrifice some bass accuracy in exchange for the added bass output."

In my cab, I have two arcade cabinet speakers that I purchased from Bob Roberts for $4 each. I believe they are "acoustic suspension speakers".  They are designed to work with the acoustics of a standard cabinet.  I drive them using the amplifer that I took out of a pair of gutted PC speakers.  They sound pretty good to me.

You might want to check out OSCAR's speaker how-to page...
http://www.oscarcontrols.com/speaker/index.shtml