Speakers & Amps built in Chile

Hi Guys!
I'll tell you some of my backstory with audio:
After a while learning, chatting with some really good engineers that were super kind and generous enough to share me knowledge and feedback. I decided to design and build myself a system instead of getting it from any brand or kit...

My observation was that what you get from a manufactured product was conceived mostly cutting corners and doing a lot of compromises in order to keep it cost effective. Like having a bill of materials of 150bucks in a 1k set of speakers.

So, my reasoning was that you can get a product with orders of magnitude better quality for the same money. With that in mind, i started building my speakers and doing Firstwatt (Nelson Pass) clones. After taking my system to a couple of meetings with the local audiophiles (and compared them against an avant garde + thomas mayer system) some request and partners arrived...

With 2 more friends we started to build audio stuff about 4 years ago... From time to time we get together and design/build some new stuff but just for fun. Besides some tuning and custom builds for friends here and there... We built 3 model of speakers, a class A preamp/power amp combo that evolved to 2 iterations of integrated amps. Now we're building a 4 channel hybrid class A + class D (for the bass) amp to do DSP crossovers.

Here in Chile there are some nice systems, and people enthusiastic enough to spend serious cash for our products.. However was not enough critical mass for us to do a business with it.

so... after all of it, i will share you some details about my lastest speaker design...

 

So, i was always interested in two way (with a big woofer and a horn) loudspeaker... My first ever build was that and i always try to revisit the process and learn a little more about it. One of the special things that we did on this speaker design was use myself as the target user:

I have a medium sized lounge with kitchen dining and seating areas.
I don't like harshness on the treble or sybilances, but i care for a super detailed sound.
I don't care for low power SET amps...

This particular model has some design goals related to it:

1. Big sound yet not "super" big box
2. Constant directivity
3. Large area of sweet spot (I have too many use cases in the room that they are, and i want for them to sound nice in most parts of it).

The build then, was this:

A 10" woofer in a 70 liter bass reflex box (made from solid walnut), finished with rubbing wax+oil.



A 1" compression driver mounted in a 15" SEOS fiberglass waveguide (here's the profile picture).



Passive crossover. That was a PITA to build, in the end the crossover had about 23 components per channel in order to ensure a smooth transition, baffle step correction, phase alignments and all the spikes and notches corrected). This was the measured response of the drivers. Please don't think that this was the sensitivity, we weren't measuring that.




(here we are measuring in my friend's project room, look on the huge open baffles on the side).



I will get back with some more pics and details of this build soon.

 

I see you are based in Chile! Are you familiar with this guy?

https://ludens.cl/index.html

It's one of the few sites I've come across where they talk about winding transformers

 

I know the site. This guy is not involved on the local audio community (i think mainly because he lives in the rural area) but he knows his shit...