Weird Woofer Speaker Cabinet

thingiverse

Well, I don't consider myself any sort of audio expert so there's that and I'm putting that out there. I found a good looking small woofer speaker that I pulled from some old equipment and I wanted to make a speaker cabinet for it. So without a speaker cabinet the woofer pretty much cancels it out because when the speaker moves outward the pressure from the front will swirl around to the back and back the other way when the speaker goes in. So there has to be if nothing else a wall to prevent that action and that makes the front project outwards. The back would of course project backwards and reflect off the walls which depending on the distance could either cancel the wave or amplify the wave or cause distortions. So the idea would be to make a wave guide from the back to the front that is the distance of the 250hz wave so that it comes out the front at the same time the next pulse arrives to amplify that frequency. That appears to be about a foot (or some such length, I forgot what I calculated it to be now but that's how I came up with the length of the wave guide). That makes one narrow peak to be amplified but not much for the other frequencies. The offshoots that you may have noticed are to try to widen the frequency response so that more frequencies from 0 to 500hz will be amplified. Or so I figure, I'm not sure if it helps a ton or anything. I could be way off on audio theory as this is mostly just what I figure and what I've sort of heard people say without any real verification on my part. I also read that the wave guide really shouldn't have any flat straight spots so I have it curve all the way through it except for the side walls. I'm not sure how important that is but I did it anyway and it gives it a cool sausage look. Besides that I wanted to put a void all the way around the cabinet except for the front and the side walls so they are thick to also give a void to sort of muffle any vibrations from getting out and causing cancellations or distortions (not that it's super at doing that, tho). So with that in mind, I made this weird looking speaker cabinet. I tried printing it whole three times but my printer would get about 30% through and shift and therefore failing the print. So what I did instead was to slice the cabinet into 6 20mm slices and then superglue CA them together. The CA glue I got was Loctite brand and was gel kind so that it gives a little more working time. Still not a perfect print but it came out OK. The advantage was when I tried to thread the wire, it made that a lot easier. I probably should make that easier to do if when printing the full model instead of the slices (maybe an exercise for the one wanting to do that - add a better wire hole). I used a 2.1 bluetooth stereo board that I got on ebay for about $21 (Bluetooth 5.0 2.1 Channel Power Audio Stereo Subwoofer Amplifier Board 50WX2+100). So two 50W speakers and one woofer speaker. The other speakers are 3" car 50W 2way speakers. On my Android phone I have PowerAmp app which has a nice equalizer feature which I sort of made into a V shape. The board also has treble and bass volumes and woofer frequency selection and volume, and a master volume. Sort of playing with all of those things I've gotten the sound to sound pretty good. I tried it out on TobyMac's Light Shines Bright, No Ordinary Love, and Feeling so Fly because those songs are bass heavy and also tried it out on just about all of his albums to get the sound to my liking. Songs like The Elements, Everything, and I just need You sound clear as a bell and full. I mean the bass won't rattle your house or your bones but it definitely thumps better than no cabinet, better than a plain wall, better than a cabinet without a wave guide, and certainly better than a piezo speaker so :-) so I'm pretty satisfied with this project for a no-experience-non-audio-engineer as myself. It makes a decent set of speakers for a shelf system if I do say so myself for sure. I love hearing the bass brought out much better than without and better than just the two left and right speakers for sure. Again, I don't have high-dollar audio equipment that puts out frequency tones and records and graphs the response and whatnot but just by ear it certainly sounds clear and full to me which is what I was after. Anyway, if you make one, I hope you enjoy, and please post your make, and let me know your music listening feedback. If you have equipment to measure the frequency graph, I'd be curious to know how bad I did (or how good I did if that's possible). Here's my other cabinet for the other two two-way speakers: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4877286