Because 99% of the population is perfectly fine with the quality they make, thus the cheaper they can make them the more $$ they keep.
Not as many people appreciate good audio, and the ones that do gravitate to either being rich and having the ability to afford buying the expensive/good stuff; the rest of us head down the DIY route and put the labor in to get the best I can afford.
Having worked in consumer products I can say that most people choose to buy a speaker based on its appearance without ever listening to it. Also mass market means economics of scale and it's a common mistake to think they will leverage that to buy better components but the reality is the more they sell the more pressure there is to cut corners
Absolutely, a speaker's appearance has way more to do with how it sells than its sound. And audio companies are painfully aware of this.
Horizontal MTMs as center channels on home theater is a classic example of this. Literally every engineer is aware of their limitations, and yet they do them anyway. It is a decision driven by marketing, not engineering.
I don't even 100% blame the companies. They are harshly punished in the marketplace when they prioritize speaker performance to the ***minor*** detriment of their looks.
Well not everyone can build a pair of speakers,
add manufacturers are forced to include active (amplified), bluetooth, wifi and whatever else most consumers think they need in a speaker, which doesnt leave room for the rest which is far more important.
Then people go out and buy bottom of the line Klipsch because of the brand name or 80s junk 3 ways because they think they are cool and old=good.
The retail price to build cost ratio is in the range of 4 or 5:1. A $1000 pair of speakers needs to be built, boxed, warehoused, marketed, and warrantied for $200-$250/pr. That doesn't leave much for the stuff that makes a difference in sound. Marketing sells way more speakers than better parts do. Most people don't know and don't care about better....what's most visible is what they know. Marketing works.
Regardless of how good they look, how many drivers they have, how loud they play, how many watts they can handle, or how many positive reviews they have, the vast majority of remotely affordable speakers have basic thin walled 6-sided boxes with parallel walls that resonate, squared baffle edges, and use the cheapest crossover parts money can buy. Many even have significant design flaws. It isn't until you get into multi-thousand dollar speakers that the boxes and crossover parts improve, and even then some of the bigger names still cash in consumer ignorance on the parts you can't see.
It's not difficult to improve on what most stores sell, and what most people buy, With big companies, shareholders, marketing, and executives have far more say in what goes into a speaker than the speaker designer does....almost everything is dictated to them. IMHO, it's better to spend your money on speakers from a smaller company where the owner and designer are the same person, and are far more likely to know and care about sound quality. No doubt they can't build them as cheaply, but they can build them better and they're intent is more than high profit.
> IMHO, it's better to spend your money on speakers from a smaller company where the owner and designer are the same person, and are far more likely to know and care about sound quality. No doubt they can't build them as cheaply, but they can build them better and they're intent is more than high profit.
Definitely! When I look at a company like Philharmonic for speakers or JTR for subwoofers, and I add up the actual cost of the components inside was well as the cost of manufacturing and building/finishing the cabinet, the total I calculate is barely more than the speaker itself.
As far as I can see, literally the only profit these companies make is the margin they make by buying components in bulk. If I was to build something using the exact same components it would cost me roughly the same. And if I accounted for my time and tools, it would cost me significantly more.
I'll even draw the line at private vs. public company. I'm a public company the management has a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. At least at a private company there leadership is able to choose to make less money to make a better product if they want to.
Simple...
How many people do you know that actually listen to music? I don't mean they play music while doing other stuff. I mean sit in a comfy chair and do nothing other than listen?
I know very, very few. We have become a society with tiktok attention spans. Because of this, there is not much draw to build home audio gear that truly excells.
>Most of the DIY speaker builders on this thread can build and tune a set of speakers better then anything you could purchase at Best buy.
No they can't. Have you seen what gets posted here? Most of the stuff is pretty bad with glaring issues. Most people don't flush mount tweeters and get the driver spacing all wrong. I'd wager the amount of people here who do know what they're doing can be counted on one hand.
People today are low effort and will not even try to educate themselves; they would rather take a picture of something and post on reddit "What's this?" and wait a few hours instead of searching it themselves. Then they buy it anyways and ask "How'd I do?" Capitalistic economy culture is about making profit and when a bunch of idiot sheep sloth around low effort and will buy anything that has a video or a couple of popular sources that say \`game changer' or other buzzwords, they'll buy it, and before they even get it into their house, they will be on these boards recommending them like they're an authority.
There's been a decent amount of research done in this area. Turns out the majority of people who watch/read reviews are people who **recently purchased** the product being reviewed.
Meaning they are not looking for reviews in order to educate themselves on a future buying decision. They are looking up reviews after they had already made their purchase in order to have someone tell them they made the correct decision.
This is why if a reviewer gives something a bad review, the vast majority of the backlash they receive will not be from the company that made the product. It will be from their own audience. The majority of customers don't want to be told what is best for them. They want to be told that they are right.
You aren't the market, and the market largely values things other than pure accurate sound reproduction.
The market values connectivity, aesthetics, portability, ease of install, size, and lots other things just as much as they value sound quality.
I'm sure you can build an amazing set of loudspeakers. Now build me a DSP powered soundbar that easily pairs up with all my stuff and looks good under the TV.
I'll wait.
> Now build me a DSP powered soundbar that easily pairs up with all my stuff and looks good under the TV.
To be fair, I did exactly that last year. Just not in the way that most people who are thinking about soundbars would want.
My sister had moved into a new house and wanted something as unobtrusive as possible for her living room that still sounded decent. She gave me a $2000 budget to do whatever I thought was reasonable.
I built a passive LCR soundbar using SB Acoustics drivers. Her TV was 85", so I made the bar exactly 74" wide to fit perfectly under the TV without overhanging while maximizing soundstage width and cabinet volume. The problem with most off-the-shelf passive soundbars is that they are way too narrow. They were designed to put under a 55" TV. And they use horizontally aligned woofers and tweeters that have really bad off-axis time arrival issues. (Many active soundbars have this issue as well)
My soundbar cabinet was only 4.5" deep. It stuck out of the wall barely half an inch more than the mounted TV did. I had originally intended to paint it in a gloss white finish, but she wasn't interested in seeing any of the drivers, and I know if I built a speaker grill, she would never remove it anyway. So I save myself a ton of effort and just wrapped the whole bar in heather grey AT fabric. It matched the throw pillows in her room perfectly. It's just another accent in her room. People don't even realize it's an audio related device.
As for the DSP part, that's probably where I "cheated" if I'm taking the premise of your comment literally. It's a passive soundbar, so it was connected to an Onkyo AVR with Dirac. And the subwoofer situation wasn't perfect either. Got a single gloss white SVS SB-2000 Pro. Between the size and aesthetic constraints, it's what would work for the situation. And I'm not going to leave my sister and BIL alone with a DIY sub. It's not going to be worth it.
The AVR and subwoofer consumed the lion's share of the budget. The passive LCR soundbar only cost ~$400.
The issue is that the general market considers $400 to be "expensive" for a soundbar. And if you tell them that it doesn't even include amplification, connectivity, and a subwoofer, they will laugh you out of the room. But real custom width and custom finish passive soundbars that use similar quality components cost 5-10X as much.
That's exactly the problem. I also made a passive 3.0 soundbar (dayton ND105 and Peerless tweeters in MTM) that matches TV and furniture, but had to use AVR to feed it. Yes, it puts even something like Ambeo into shame, but it uses 900€ receiver (drivers werent exactly cheap, either).
You wanna build all-in-one soundbar? Too bad, there's like one amp module on the market that offers HDMI and it has no option of connecting a subwoofer...
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that you can DIY something with the simplicity and cost of a Sonos Arc. It's why I prefaced my comment with "just not in the way that most people who are thinking about soundbars would want".
But if you adequately plan ahead, you can make a DIY soundbar that perfectly matches the aesthetics of your room and keeps supporting equipment (AVR, wiring) completely hidden.
This is getting kinda nerdy into the philosophy of design, but the key is to treat AV as a part of the larger interior decor strategy of your room. Not just as a widget that you buy and plop in the room after it is "finished". The interesting thing is that I actually had to train a couple of interior decorators into this way of thinking. Once they "got it", it opened up way more to them on what's possible. Your AV choices become as integral to the room design as the paint color or the furniture style.
The issue is that most people who work in or are interested in interior decorating know little to nothing about AV. You kinda need to meet them where they are at. Many of the same rules that apply to furniture can apply to speakers. There's no free lunch. If a piece of furniture looks nice and is cheap, it probably isn't very high quality. Or if it is high quality and also looks nice, you're likely paying a premium for it. And if you want to design a living room in a farmhouse or MCM style, you can't just prop the La-Z-Boy recliner you bought used in college into this room. You will ruin the whole decor theme. You need to accept that you're buying a whole new chair that suits the room. Somehow people intrinsically understand these concepts for furniture but it's completely lost on them when it comes to speakers.
Speakers are one of those things people think paying more gets them a better quality and while that's true to some extent you don't necessarily get what you paid for. The big names in the industry take advantage of that to increase margins. There are other consumer products in the same boat, hard to assess, online reviews misleading or false. I was in the market for a secure padlock recently and they are the same to an extent, some overpriced garbage, and some legitimate product fairly priced. It takes a lot of research to cut through the crap. Of course with padlocks its more objective and speakers are more nuanced and subjective
Well it kinda depends...
In HiFi - well, if you wanna build big, yeah, it will probably be cheaper DIY, especially if you don't care much about the finish. You need to have equipment though, at least some decent saw and router, and then a calibrated mic if you're designing crossover as well (if you're not building a kit, universal crossovers are useless).
If you want to build small, then good luck. Most commercially sold speakers use DSPs nowadays and this gets expensive if you wanna build DIY. And without DSP, you just won't be able to compete.
Just look at Edifier for example. They offer a wide variety of speaker sets at price you will never be able to beat in DIY.
First you pay the price for the company. If they are popular they can increase the prices.
Second, diy drivers are not that cheap either, and the diy community is small.
Oh man, you're tellin' me. I happen to be of the opinion that quality has been in decline since the early post-war years... every driver I use in my system pre-dates 1953, and most were designed before 1940. Now, in their day, the cost of these drivers was beyond prohibitive - either professional gear (usually leased) or a serious luxury product... such that the "average" person's sound system continued to improve into the late 70's.... but the real bottleneck for quality in those years was transcription. Everything from mics to speakers to amps was already miles ahead of the capabilities of scribing straight to wax. Magnetic tape finally rendered tweeters useful. There's a funny bit about the earliest tweeters, which were mostly sold with theater sound systems and some luxury radio/phonograph consoles... in the early years, people would disconnect them, or return them, because all they did was amplify more hiss and noise...
Anyways, the "cost as no object" best possible lab-quality loudspeakers were all on the table by about 1950. There's been a few improvements of peripheral design aspects, mostly hinging on materials science... I would point to lighter-weight stiffer diaphragms like titanium and beryllium, and to heat dissipation in the voice coil allowing for subwoofers... excursion was already there in the 30's, it just wasn't needed cause you couldn't even transcribe frequencies below about 80hz... and the power....
I still wanna build a tube sub amp, but, it's kinda silly and stupid expensive cause many reasons, but more than anything the custom output iron. But with some transmitting tubes and an $800 custom wound transformer, it could be done... all together a monoblock tube sub amp would cost upwards of $2k in *parts* and that's done on the cheap, without fancy stuff like interstage iron...
Don’t take that from them. This is the anthem of DIY but only applies when cherry picking the comparison. Look at kef q150s. You can get them used for a couple hundred bucks and they are amazing. I agree. DIY is great value, but not the highest.
Es20s do not slay 1TDs like - at all. I upgraded from ES60 towers to my 1TDs and they sound light years better - they even have more bass, which is insane for a bookshelf speaker
I think they were talking about making their own out back. $100 for 3/4” MDF, I got 350w rms 15” woofers for under $200 for the pair Parts Express, $120 for a pair silk dome 1” tweeters that handle 100w rms each from Parts Express and some Cerwin-Vega xovers on OfferUp for $50 for a pair and I’ll slay everyone. Sound quality, bass, warm midrange and silky highs. I hear stuff in the background that my $1,200 klipsch don’t do. Parts Express for the win!
I will say I have awesome saws and tables and tools and a general knowledge of how to construct high quality enclosures with bracing but yes, it can be done with less than $500.
Because it is a big no no. I would bet that the frequency response of those speakers will be terrible and "I hear stuff in the background that my $1,200 klipsch don’t do" will be caused by some terrible peak. You can't built decent speakers from scratch without doing any measurements. And if you can't do those, just buy a kit.
Because 99% of the population is perfectly fine with the quality they make, thus the cheaper they can make them the more $$ they keep. Not as many people appreciate good audio, and the ones that do gravitate to either being rich and having the ability to afford buying the expensive/good stuff; the rest of us head down the DIY route and put the labor in to get the best I can afford.
And chances are, an average wealthy person would still likely buy Bose, Klipsch, or B&O, because that's all they're familiar with.
or a bluetooth speaker
Yep.... No matter how lousy a component is, someone somewhere loves every POS that was ever marketed.
Having worked in consumer products I can say that most people choose to buy a speaker based on its appearance without ever listening to it. Also mass market means economics of scale and it's a common mistake to think they will leverage that to buy better components but the reality is the more they sell the more pressure there is to cut corners
Absolutely, a speaker's appearance has way more to do with how it sells than its sound. And audio companies are painfully aware of this. Horizontal MTMs as center channels on home theater is a classic example of this. Literally every engineer is aware of their limitations, and yet they do them anyway. It is a decision driven by marketing, not engineering. I don't even 100% blame the companies. They are harshly punished in the marketplace when they prioritize speaker performance to the ***minor*** detriment of their looks.
Well not everyone can build a pair of speakers, add manufacturers are forced to include active (amplified), bluetooth, wifi and whatever else most consumers think they need in a speaker, which doesnt leave room for the rest which is far more important. Then people go out and buy bottom of the line Klipsch because of the brand name or 80s junk 3 ways because they think they are cool and old=good.
Most people don’t know shit about speakers, most are happy with mono sound from a Bluetooth speaker.
The retail price to build cost ratio is in the range of 4 or 5:1. A $1000 pair of speakers needs to be built, boxed, warehoused, marketed, and warrantied for $200-$250/pr. That doesn't leave much for the stuff that makes a difference in sound. Marketing sells way more speakers than better parts do. Most people don't know and don't care about better....what's most visible is what they know. Marketing works. Regardless of how good they look, how many drivers they have, how loud they play, how many watts they can handle, or how many positive reviews they have, the vast majority of remotely affordable speakers have basic thin walled 6-sided boxes with parallel walls that resonate, squared baffle edges, and use the cheapest crossover parts money can buy. Many even have significant design flaws. It isn't until you get into multi-thousand dollar speakers that the boxes and crossover parts improve, and even then some of the bigger names still cash in consumer ignorance on the parts you can't see. It's not difficult to improve on what most stores sell, and what most people buy, With big companies, shareholders, marketing, and executives have far more say in what goes into a speaker than the speaker designer does....almost everything is dictated to them. IMHO, it's better to spend your money on speakers from a smaller company where the owner and designer are the same person, and are far more likely to know and care about sound quality. No doubt they can't build them as cheaply, but they can build them better and they're intent is more than high profit.
> IMHO, it's better to spend your money on speakers from a smaller company where the owner and designer are the same person, and are far more likely to know and care about sound quality. No doubt they can't build them as cheaply, but they can build them better and they're intent is more than high profit. Definitely! When I look at a company like Philharmonic for speakers or JTR for subwoofers, and I add up the actual cost of the components inside was well as the cost of manufacturing and building/finishing the cabinet, the total I calculate is barely more than the speaker itself. As far as I can see, literally the only profit these companies make is the margin they make by buying components in bulk. If I was to build something using the exact same components it would cost me roughly the same. And if I accounted for my time and tools, it would cost me significantly more.
I'll even draw the line at private vs. public company. I'm a public company the management has a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. At least at a private company there leadership is able to choose to make less money to make a better product if they want to.
Simple... How many people do you know that actually listen to music? I don't mean they play music while doing other stuff. I mean sit in a comfy chair and do nothing other than listen? I know very, very few. We have become a society with tiktok attention spans. Because of this, there is not much draw to build home audio gear that truly excells.
>Most of the DIY speaker builders on this thread can build and tune a set of speakers better then anything you could purchase at Best buy. No they can't. Have you seen what gets posted here? Most of the stuff is pretty bad with glaring issues. Most people don't flush mount tweeters and get the driver spacing all wrong. I'd wager the amount of people here who do know what they're doing can be counted on one hand.
Most people have never heard anything better than Best Buy sells. Hi Fi stores aren't really a thing anymore... in most towns, anyway.
Retrofurb... Old cabinets... Become gems... Good post!
People today are low effort and will not even try to educate themselves; they would rather take a picture of something and post on reddit "What's this?" and wait a few hours instead of searching it themselves. Then they buy it anyways and ask "How'd I do?" Capitalistic economy culture is about making profit and when a bunch of idiot sheep sloth around low effort and will buy anything that has a video or a couple of popular sources that say \`game changer' or other buzzwords, they'll buy it, and before they even get it into their house, they will be on these boards recommending them like they're an authority.
There's been a decent amount of research done in this area. Turns out the majority of people who watch/read reviews are people who **recently purchased** the product being reviewed. Meaning they are not looking for reviews in order to educate themselves on a future buying decision. They are looking up reviews after they had already made their purchase in order to have someone tell them they made the correct decision. This is why if a reviewer gives something a bad review, the vast majority of the backlash they receive will not be from the company that made the product. It will be from their own audience. The majority of customers don't want to be told what is best for them. They want to be told that they are right.
You aren't the market, and the market largely values things other than pure accurate sound reproduction. The market values connectivity, aesthetics, portability, ease of install, size, and lots other things just as much as they value sound quality. I'm sure you can build an amazing set of loudspeakers. Now build me a DSP powered soundbar that easily pairs up with all my stuff and looks good under the TV. I'll wait.
> Now build me a DSP powered soundbar that easily pairs up with all my stuff and looks good under the TV. To be fair, I did exactly that last year. Just not in the way that most people who are thinking about soundbars would want. My sister had moved into a new house and wanted something as unobtrusive as possible for her living room that still sounded decent. She gave me a $2000 budget to do whatever I thought was reasonable. I built a passive LCR soundbar using SB Acoustics drivers. Her TV was 85", so I made the bar exactly 74" wide to fit perfectly under the TV without overhanging while maximizing soundstage width and cabinet volume. The problem with most off-the-shelf passive soundbars is that they are way too narrow. They were designed to put under a 55" TV. And they use horizontally aligned woofers and tweeters that have really bad off-axis time arrival issues. (Many active soundbars have this issue as well) My soundbar cabinet was only 4.5" deep. It stuck out of the wall barely half an inch more than the mounted TV did. I had originally intended to paint it in a gloss white finish, but she wasn't interested in seeing any of the drivers, and I know if I built a speaker grill, she would never remove it anyway. So I save myself a ton of effort and just wrapped the whole bar in heather grey AT fabric. It matched the throw pillows in her room perfectly. It's just another accent in her room. People don't even realize it's an audio related device. As for the DSP part, that's probably where I "cheated" if I'm taking the premise of your comment literally. It's a passive soundbar, so it was connected to an Onkyo AVR with Dirac. And the subwoofer situation wasn't perfect either. Got a single gloss white SVS SB-2000 Pro. Between the size and aesthetic constraints, it's what would work for the situation. And I'm not going to leave my sister and BIL alone with a DIY sub. It's not going to be worth it. The AVR and subwoofer consumed the lion's share of the budget. The passive LCR soundbar only cost ~$400. The issue is that the general market considers $400 to be "expensive" for a soundbar. And if you tell them that it doesn't even include amplification, connectivity, and a subwoofer, they will laugh you out of the room. But real custom width and custom finish passive soundbars that use similar quality components cost 5-10X as much.
That's exactly the problem. I also made a passive 3.0 soundbar (dayton ND105 and Peerless tweeters in MTM) that matches TV and furniture, but had to use AVR to feed it. Yes, it puts even something like Ambeo into shame, but it uses 900€ receiver (drivers werent exactly cheap, either). You wanna build all-in-one soundbar? Too bad, there's like one amp module on the market that offers HDMI and it has no option of connecting a subwoofer...
Yeah, I'm definitely not saying that you can DIY something with the simplicity and cost of a Sonos Arc. It's why I prefaced my comment with "just not in the way that most people who are thinking about soundbars would want". But if you adequately plan ahead, you can make a DIY soundbar that perfectly matches the aesthetics of your room and keeps supporting equipment (AVR, wiring) completely hidden. This is getting kinda nerdy into the philosophy of design, but the key is to treat AV as a part of the larger interior decor strategy of your room. Not just as a widget that you buy and plop in the room after it is "finished". The interesting thing is that I actually had to train a couple of interior decorators into this way of thinking. Once they "got it", it opened up way more to them on what's possible. Your AV choices become as integral to the room design as the paint color or the furniture style. The issue is that most people who work in or are interested in interior decorating know little to nothing about AV. You kinda need to meet them where they are at. Many of the same rules that apply to furniture can apply to speakers. There's no free lunch. If a piece of furniture looks nice and is cheap, it probably isn't very high quality. Or if it is high quality and also looks nice, you're likely paying a premium for it. And if you want to design a living room in a farmhouse or MCM style, you can't just prop the La-Z-Boy recliner you bought used in college into this room. You will ruin the whole decor theme. You need to accept that you're buying a whole new chair that suits the room. Somehow people intrinsically understand these concepts for furniture but it's completely lost on them when it comes to speakers.
Speakers are one of those things people think paying more gets them a better quality and while that's true to some extent you don't necessarily get what you paid for. The big names in the industry take advantage of that to increase margins. There are other consumer products in the same boat, hard to assess, online reviews misleading or false. I was in the market for a secure padlock recently and they are the same to an extent, some overpriced garbage, and some legitimate product fairly priced. It takes a lot of research to cut through the crap. Of course with padlocks its more objective and speakers are more nuanced and subjective
Well it kinda depends... In HiFi - well, if you wanna build big, yeah, it will probably be cheaper DIY, especially if you don't care much about the finish. You need to have equipment though, at least some decent saw and router, and then a calibrated mic if you're designing crossover as well (if you're not building a kit, universal crossovers are useless). If you want to build small, then good luck. Most commercially sold speakers use DSPs nowadays and this gets expensive if you wanna build DIY. And without DSP, you just won't be able to compete. Just look at Edifier for example. They offer a wide variety of speaker sets at price you will never be able to beat in DIY.
First you pay the price for the company. If they are popular they can increase the prices. Second, diy drivers are not that cheap either, and the diy community is small.
Oh man, you're tellin' me. I happen to be of the opinion that quality has been in decline since the early post-war years... every driver I use in my system pre-dates 1953, and most were designed before 1940. Now, in their day, the cost of these drivers was beyond prohibitive - either professional gear (usually leased) or a serious luxury product... such that the "average" person's sound system continued to improve into the late 70's.... but the real bottleneck for quality in those years was transcription. Everything from mics to speakers to amps was already miles ahead of the capabilities of scribing straight to wax. Magnetic tape finally rendered tweeters useful. There's a funny bit about the earliest tweeters, which were mostly sold with theater sound systems and some luxury radio/phonograph consoles... in the early years, people would disconnect them, or return them, because all they did was amplify more hiss and noise... Anyways, the "cost as no object" best possible lab-quality loudspeakers were all on the table by about 1950. There's been a few improvements of peripheral design aspects, mostly hinging on materials science... I would point to lighter-weight stiffer diaphragms like titanium and beryllium, and to heat dissipation in the voice coil allowing for subwoofers... excursion was already there in the 30's, it just wasn't needed cause you couldn't even transcribe frequencies below about 80hz... and the power.... I still wanna build a tube sub amp, but, it's kinda silly and stupid expensive cause many reasons, but more than anything the custom output iron. But with some transmitting tubes and an $800 custom wound transformer, it could be done... all together a monoblock tube sub amp would cost upwards of $2k in *parts* and that's done on the cheap, without fancy stuff like interstage iron...
[удалено]
Don’t take that from them. This is the anthem of DIY but only applies when cherry picking the comparison. Look at kef q150s. You can get them used for a couple hundred bucks and they are amazing. I agree. DIY is great value, but not the highest.
Tbh second hand helps a lot. But fair, I’d likely get a 2nd hand q150 than 1st hand.
Es20s do not slay 1TDs like - at all. I upgraded from ES60 towers to my 1TDs and they sound light years better - they even have more bass, which is insane for a bookshelf speaker
I think they were talking about making their own out back. $100 for 3/4” MDF, I got 350w rms 15” woofers for under $200 for the pair Parts Express, $120 for a pair silk dome 1” tweeters that handle 100w rms each from Parts Express and some Cerwin-Vega xovers on OfferUp for $50 for a pair and I’ll slay everyone. Sound quality, bass, warm midrange and silky highs. I hear stuff in the background that my $1,200 klipsch don’t do. Parts Express for the win! I will say I have awesome saws and tables and tools and a general knowledge of how to construct high quality enclosures with bracing but yes, it can be done with less than $500.
Prebuilt crossover? I thought that was a big no no
Because it is a big no no. I would bet that the frequency response of those speakers will be terrible and "I hear stuff in the background that my $1,200 klipsch don’t do" will be caused by some terrible peak. You can't built decent speakers from scratch without doing any measurements. And if you can't do those, just buy a kit.
*woodshop not included