Early on in my woodworking, I built a small touch screen computer and speaker all in one. (I called it The Music Box, and all the worklog pictures can be found here). I’ve always been a fan of music or background in the shop. That music box worked great when my shops were spare bedrooms, but when we bought a house and I moved in to a garage workshop it just didn’t have the ooph behind it to fill the space.
There enters this build. It was a bluetooth speaker that I made about 7 years ago (2017). It was in my shop up until recently, when I moved it in to the living room.
It’s nothing super high end, but was pieced together with a bluetooth driver/amp board, DIY crossovers, and some speaker components. I was following plans from a now idle channel/website (Kirby Meets Audio – Elder Speaker), so I’m by no means a speaker designer. I modified the woodworking side of it to better fit my skills and design ideas, while keeping the internal volume the same to hopefully make sure the audio qualities still remained in tact. It seems to have worked, because I think it sounds quite good for what it is.
Sure, it may not have been the cheapest way to go about getting a bluetooth speaker, but it sure was fun; and a good bit better looking than most.
Here’s a video that covers the process of building the speaker enclosure, with a more deep dive on the actual components that went in to it linked at the end.
The overall design of the speaker was something that took a few iterations to settle in on. Originally the plans called for a pretty standard mitered corner box with a couple strips for feet. When my lack of experience/ability and accurate machines led me down the path of redesigning to suit my skills and tools, I ended up with this new design. I’m glad that’s the way this project turned, as I’m more happy with this design than what the plans would have called for.
The speaker uses two 4″ Dayton Audio reference speakers and a 5/8″ Dayton Audio tweeter. The plans called for a pair of custom crossovers, one for cutting out the highs to one of the 4″ drivers, and the other was a combination of low pass and high pass to drive the other 4″ driver and the tweeter. Overall it’s got a pretty balanced sound that I like. Not too tinny in the highs, and not muddy in the lows.
The design I came up with used through tenons to join the speaker box to the main upright, and rather long through tenons at that. The reason for that was so it could also be used in a horizontal orientation, where those through tenons would act as the feet for the speaker, along with the offset of the base.
This is the configuration I used it in when the speaker was in use in my shop. I could use the space between the base and speaker cabinet on the left as a little spot to store stuff.
Here we can see those through tenons a little better, as well as all the various interface points on the back. The two holes above/below the control panel are the vent tubes. The control panel has the power input, power switch, volume knob, LED indicator lights, and an aux input, though I’ve never used the aux yet.
I’m not sure why it took me 7 years to get around to finishing the video, or getting pictures posted, but I’ve certainly enjoyed the speaker in the mean time. It sounds pretty good, and I’ve spent quite a few hours with the volume turned up to play along with various saxophone music.
I was doing some re-configuring of my workshop, and as a result this was moved in to the living room of the house instead. I mainly use bluetooth ear buds in the shop these days, so I can keep listening when I’m in and out of my over the ear hearing protection, and I can shoot video without worrying about copyrighted music intruding on the audio.
Here was the video with the more technical deep dive on what the actual components inside of this are, but I did not have any video (or pictures) of the actual process of assembling the crossovers themselves. I link to a video in the description of mine that covers that by the person I bought the plans from.
Anyway, thanks for checking it out!
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