After a month my enclosures are done & have been gathering dust in my office for a couple of weeks until I was able to find time to put it together last weekend. I've been busy with work lately & my family did some volunteer work in Villamor the past 2 weekends for the victims of Yolanda.
I inquired from known enclosure fabricators here in the forum but due to sked conflict & time constraint I just decided to ask my suking karpintero to build them for me. He doesn't have any experience fabricating speaker boxes so it took us more than a few back & forth discussions...ganun pala talaga kapag parehong first time
So after some issues with plywood finishing, sizes of wood available around etc. I decided to go the engineered solid wood route. The finish is still rough, we just applied varnish and that's it. Ipaayos ko na lang finishing pag may time na. Below is the built pic:
These are Mark Audio Alpair 10P Gen 1 drivers on Pensil enclosures. How does it sound?...Well, I promised myself to be objective about giving my listening impressions & not let my excitement get in the way.
I've only been in the audio hobby for 2 years now, I don't have many gear as I like it simple & don't want to spend a fortune on this hobby, my priorities with family outweigh any hobby but I like to think I know a good sounding audio setup when I hear one.
My objective for this build is to produce a pair of speakers with very good to excellent midrange as I find myself listening to a lot of jazz, acoustic, neo-classical/classical music lately (ganun yata talaga ang tumatanda
) It is also the reason why I chose the paper cone drivers. I opted for the pensils because they are front firing & doesn't require much space from the wall, they will be put in a smallish 16sq/m room. Let me tell you these drivers doesn't disappoint and something tells me they will sound better after a couple of hundred hours.
I'm still listening at low to moderate levels per recommendation of the manufacturer and I can already tell that these are smooth sounding speakers with a lot of detail. I also noticed that there isn't much difference or no difference at all when listening on axis vs. off-axis(20-30degrees). Listening late at night when everything is quiet made me hear details in songs I never knew were there before. I've been listening to speakers with tweeters as far as I can remember but I'm not missing them on these pair. The low end is still inconclusive at this point since it is not recommended to listen to heavy bass sounding music until the burn in period is done but I can hear coherent low end on jazz materials. Piano, in my observation is what most speakers I've heard are having problems in terms of producing natural sound and in these speakers I'm hearing the most natural sounding piano timbre on my system.
So are these the best sounding speakers I've heard?
NO. go to a hi-fi show & you will hear better sound but the price difference is heaven & earth. And these speakers can give them a run for their money
Are these the best sounding speakers I have owned?
YES, as mentioned I don't own many but these are the best sounding speakers I can afford or willing to spend on.
Would I recommend this to others?
YES, but it's not for everyone.
I am loving the DIY route, the first time I hooked them up was like the when the bulb started glowing up in my first science project when they made us light a bulb using batteries in parallel/series circuit
Now, on to my next DIY project...a tube amp, will probably get a kit for newbies like me and hopefully I won't blow our house to dust
Another pic:
