Cracking Open Tannoy M1's For DIY

Hi Chaps,

I am about to embark on a DIY speaker project. It will basically involve dismantling my Mercury M1's, using the same drivers (in fact the same crossover etc) and putting them into a floor standing cabinet.

I've not got around to the figures yet but need to pull apart my M1's first. BUT how do they go together?? I am going to unscrew the drivers tonight and have a look but from what I can see it looks like the whole cabinet is glued together, no screws anywhere :banghead:

Could anyone who's had any experience with this offer any advice?

Cheers,
Rick

 

Sorted. For future reference and if anyone else take son such a project you essentially have to take them apart from the outside in as there is no access to the inside without removing drivers etc. The only way would be to literally crack open the cabinet, which is pretty much a last resort.

What I did was removed both the front drivers, unplug them from the (surprisingly thick) cable going to the cross-over. Then I took the binding posts out to which the cross-over is attached and that just left a cabinet full of wool.

As a side note I was a little concerned to find so much wool in a ported design, surely the idea of the wool is to damp the sound/air down (so reflectors would allow better air flow)? Either way it won't exactly aid air flow to the port will it....

 

That sounds like some of the designs I've been inside. The wool as you guessed is to try and stop the honk and chuff of ported designs. What sort of floorstander are you going for, transmission line quater wave, horn ? Or something really exotic.

 

the "wool" may also be there to increase the cabinet volume that the driver see's

 

Yes I was keeping simple....my head still hurts from working out the stufffing in my transmission lines!!

 

Thanks for the info on what the rock wool is used for, didn't think of those. I am toying with the idea of transmission line, but am looking for basic designs to be looking more deeply into.

The woofer is a 130mm Tannoy design and the tweeter is a soft dome, so, any ideas on what might be best for such driver sizes?

This is my first attempt and I'm looking forward to getting on with it, but there are many designs and quite a bit of math's to get round first!! The only criteria is that they are floorstanders, I just want to see how much better these drivers can sound in a custom design....

So any advice and help is much appreciated

 

drop me a pm with your email addy and I'll post some pics and plans to you.

 

have you got the theile small specs for the driver? without these its going to be a bit of guess work

 

Thanks for the diagrams and data Zanash, some pretty serious stuff there :duck: I like the design though, very tidy. If I go ahead with that design there are a couple of questions I would need to ask you!!

I have e-mailed Tannoy for the Theile spec's on those drivers, I will let you know how I go on, thanks Hippy.

Forgive my stupidity but on looking further into transmission line speakers, I am having a bit of difficulty understanding where the treble in these designs comes from. Do you have to mount the tweeter in a separate enclosure or is the idea that a transmission line pair of speakers is used with smaller units which provide the upper frequencies?