Convert Floor Standing Speakers to Bookshelf Speakers

I have a pair of Mission 773 floor standing speakers. They sound great, but the finish (black wood effect vinyl) has started to peel off, it is possible the previous owner let them get slightly damp or the material has over time become too tight and come off on its own. I think it's called Sheffield Oak Umbra Vinyl Fablon.

I am thinking of rehousing them in a smaller enclosure so that I can fit them on shelves. My question is, if I maintained the distances between the different speakers in the new enclosure, will a new enclosure be detrimental to the sound? I would like to go for a black wood finish, which shows the natural wooden texture. What wood should I use and what thickness? What do I do about feet?

How about something likeOak Crown Cut Plywood MR Veneered 1 Side Only?

 

Changing the size of the cabinet will probably have a far more detrimental effect on sound quality than the material you use. Cabinet volumes are carefully calculated and evaluated by most (if not all) good speaker manufacturers to optimize the sound. Deviating from that will likely hurt the sound quality.

 

Mission 773 speaker is a respectable (not great) bass-reflex 2-way low power system. I think the configuration is called d'Apollito, 2 bass/mid speakers in parallel with the tweeter placed between them. You may find that the tweeter actually has its own little rear enclosure inside the cabinet. The spacing of the drivers on the front panel is not so important (probably just as close as possible). The bass response depends a lot on tuning the enclosure, the volume in litres inside the cabinet, internal damping material, the diameter of the vent and the length of the vented tube. There is a golden rule for ratios of height/width/depth plus off-centre placing of drivers which only top-level designs employ, i.e. left/right speaker placement IS important.

The very best loudspeaker drivers in the world sound terrible in a bad enclosure. Furniture designers stay away!

I have done similar things myself converting to active crossovers (more amplifiers), but always changed cabinet to non-vented, which requires much higher power level to the bass. So, you throw away the crossover or add a lot of attenuation to the tweeter. I could introduce you to the concept of "acoustically-small" bass enclosures, often using armoured glass for stiffness! Look for Siegfried Linkwitz on the web.

But this is a whole new world, probably biting off more than you can chew. You seem to be more interested in the aesthetics and reducing the size to fit on a shelf. I can tell you that you can get magnificent results BUT only after lots of experimentation. Probably better to buy something fit-for-purpose, but quite frankly modern speaker systems are cr*p compared to designs from the '80s/'90s. We are living in the video age - kids are more interested in the club environment

I have done these things to make money - producing small studio monitors which sound very similar (in the near-field) to the very best floor-standing speakers money can buy. My customer is the studio sound engineer, not Joe Public.

 

In short, sktn77a summed it up better than I did (about 30 minutes before me). But I am an audio-geek and like the challenge of chasing the rabbit down the hole.