This is actually a gift. A friend of mine (Heidi) is a music lover with a pretty decent CD Player and integrated amp (Acurus brand). But downright mediocre speakers (Anthony Gallo Micros).
Why the N1 and not the NX-Bravo? Pure chance. After I built out my LineForce arrays, I was looking at the backup tweeters I had for my old Super 7's, which were in a box in the garage and I hadn't looked at in 6 years. I open the box and see one of the unicorns. A pair of deep back cup Neo3 tweeters!!! So I reach out to Danny to see if he can help me put these unicorns to good use.
He says it'll work perfectly for the old N1 kit, and not only that, the new NX-Bravo flat pack will fit the old tweeter, no problem. I buy the flat pack, the M130 5.5" woofer and various caps/inductors/resistors, plus hookup wire.
This time I decide I want to learn how to veneer a speaker, so I buy some nice blond ash veneer, paper backed, some heatlock veneer glue and various tools to do the veneering work. I thought veneering would be easier than painting, but I was wrong, hahaha.
Veneer stuff all from here -
https://www.veneersupplies.com/I watched Peter's youtube videos on veneering the X-LS (also with rounded edges). It was enormously helpful. Video is here -
X-LS Speaker Cabinet Wood Veneering .
All needed parts:
Assembling the crossover:
Very nice flat pack!
A friend of mine has a router table so he did the roundovers on the front and back of the speaker. Thanks Mike!
Beautiful rounded edges:
Ash veneer arrives. This is pretty thick veneer. It ends up looking really nice in the end, but it was really hard to work with. Next time I'll use a thinner veneer.
Heat glue. I had a little left over after this project but not much.
Helpful tools for making the cut lines:
Final cut lines. I found regular scissors were fine for actually cutting everything. Since most edges were oversized and would be trimmed down by the router, no need to be super precise with cuts here:
All cut:
Speaker covered in heatlock glue. You can't see it, but the paper-backed veneer is also coated with heatlock glue. Time to iron!
Veneering done, time to put in the crossover and wire up the drivers, hammer in the port and the tube connectors:
All done:
The back is the one place I made a mistake. The veneer was so damn thick, I wasn't able to get through it with a single cut with a new razor blade. As I said before, next time I'll use a thinner veneer and that should make this part a lot easier:
After assembly I took another week to really fine tune the speakers and dial them in so they went from 'very good' to 'outstanding' sound. I was really happy with them. If I ever am forced to sell my giant speakers, I could very easily live with this speaker. I imagine the NX-Bravo is even better.
This past Tuesday I took it by Heidi's and hooked everything up. She's older and on a fixed income and could never afford a pair of speakers at this level of quality, and she was absolutely gobsmacked after we got them installed in her system. Her reaction was "I've listened to this CD hundreds of times but I have NEVER heard the music before now!". That made me feel pretty good
