Speaker Manufacturing In The Kitchen

Hi,

Well I had a few neodymium magnets laying around and an hour to put on last night so I decided to make a ribbon tweeter! I had some steel bar I got from B&Q for something else but only needed a bit of it so I cut off two 20cm lengths and then glued some magnets to it. I then glued some cut off scraps of CPU heatsink between each end to separate the bars.

I cut a length of aluminium foil, standard stuff from the kitchen cupboard, and fixed it to each end with some double sided sticky-tape.

It worked!

I then went back to the table and glued on some more magnets and cut a more accurate, not so wide bit of foil (it was too wide before, lacking high frequencies) and then pleated it by squashing it between two bits of single sided corrugated card.

A fair bit of fiddling to get it to sit nicely between the magnets and away we go!

I added a 470uF cap to cut the very low frequencies which helped. I also put in a 2 ohm resistor just to give the amp some load. I could use a smaller cap, but I quite liked getting lows out of it! Just can't go louder than normal speech level, lol.

And how does it sound? Well, it works surprisingly well!! In fact I am amazed when I think that I made the whole thing in about 2 hours from scraps I had laying about the house.

I took a recording of it, which you can hear, yes there is bass! The mic is about 4 inches from the ribbon so thats why you can hear the bass but it is actually coming from the ribbon and you can hear it if you are close. It sounds a bit clearer in real life.

http://www.audiosmile.co.uk/Ribbon.mp3







Like I said, not bad for something done in the kitchen, and looking as it does

 

Smart!

 

That's really cool, well done!

 

Holy shit - now that's what I call DIY

 

Nice job Simon.
How long til the Tenson 'Stats are unveiled.:boogie:

 

Excellent.

Plasma tweeter next? That would be a challenge!

 

And to think of all that money that's been wasted on Quad electrostactics!
Seriously though, I'm very impressed - well done.

 

Cool, I like it and after listening to the sample it sounds better than I'd ever imagined, certainly useable and with further refinements such as thiner alu, FEMM modelling of the magnetic gap as well as finding a sweet spot for the ribbon size vs. dispertion vs. low crossover and finally a transformer. You could be onto a winner.

Let us know when you start taking orders

 

I did consider doing some FEMM modelling before starting but decided it would just ruin the fun

 

That and the fact that trying to understand the FEMM package has been known to cause brain tumors.

 

Well that doesn't sound very fun to me!