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When ya just gotta have at least something to listen to...
When I first moved to Korea before I had time to build something, I found these old boxes at a junk shop near my apartment. I stuck in the Audax 8" and propped up the Audax tweeter on top and I had sound! Of course it was a bit boomy with the additional 8" driver hole so I plugged it with the throw pillow...made it a resistive vent, yeah, that's it! Pretty pathetic I know!
Eventually, I got started building... (Sometime in 1994) Davis 17KLV6 and Morel MDT30 (or maybe 28) in a vented enclosure.
The only building material I could find was a 10 mm thick low quality plywood. As you can see in the photo I used a lot of bracing! Once the basic box was built I covered it with a black rubber material about 1/8" thick and then added another layer of the 10 mm plywood. They didn't look that great but they weighed a ton and were...are, pretty solid.
These were built in the late 80's sometime. They used two Audax 8" drivers, a Focal 5" and a Focal tweeter. When finished this was a 4-way active system. The woofers were two 12" Peerless drivers on each side in square boxes with one woofer on top and one on bottom. I haven't found any old photo's of these. The Focal drivers weren't that great and I had to modify the midrange to get it to work at all. The dust cap was a very soft material and you could hear it flapping in the wind at high output. You could actually see it collapsing! I coated it with epoxy to eliminate the problem and have hated Focal drivers ever since. Later these cabinets were cut in half and made into four smaller speakers. The Focal drivers were replaced with Morel tweeters.
And then came dipoles...
My first experiments with dipoles were done using Scanspeak drivers and Vifa drivers. These simple baffles gave me enough idea of the potential sound quality to know dipoles were going to be the way to go.
Later, by mid 1996 I was back in the states. The system on the outside here were built while still in Korea using Scanspeak drivers in the main panels and Madisound 12" drivers in the dipole woofers. The other system sitting inside these were built about the same time by a friend. He had convinced me to try Scanspeak drivers and I had convinced him to try dipoles. Both these systems sounded pretty good!