"Actually, my goal was to have a unique pair of speakers unlike anything else anywhere on the planet. I'm extremely flattered that you and other people like the look of my embellishment of your speaker. I also figure that only a fairly small group of people would actually be interested in speakers with such an unusual look, and I might be persuaded to share my design.
I design houses for a living, and cabinet building is just a hobby. I don't have time or sufficient facilities to produce another set of enclosures. Mine came out good, but maybe only 90% of they way to what I would consider a professional standard. The guts are right on, and I suspect these perform as well acoustically as you intended them to.
I increased the interior hieght of my enclosure by about an inch to help provide space for my trim. I reduced the interior depth by about a quarter inch to maintain almost exactly the same internal volume that you had established. Really, I just planted trim and filler material on a slightly modified version of your box. I'd really wished I'd had access to cad-cam machinery when I built these. I could have used your box and added a little more filler to come up with the exact same look.
This is maybe the fifth kit I have built during the last thirty years. The last one was about fifteen years ago. That was a dynaudio kit, and it also turned out well. This is the first enclosure I have built with more than three drivers, or with the cross-overs not pre-assembled.
I had help from a number of people while building these. A co-worker's husband is a talented young audio engineer/speaker designer. He helped me assemble the cross-overs. He was impressed by the your design and quality of the components. His designs are in no way like yours, but he has started having a professional cabinet shop produce his prototype enclosures for him (not an option for me). I would like to have him test my speakers some day, to see how close I came to your results. His testing equipment is not portable, and niether are my 200# apiece speakers,so I'm left simply enjoying the fact that they sound good"
"Hello Al
Some honest comments I can make so far is that the speakers have a high level of clarity, and good spacial imaging. I'm hearing a greater level of detail on recordings I had been used to listening to with other speakers. The R8s sound good at low and moderate volumes, and they can play fairly loud, with reasonable caution, and with modest power input.
Some not necessarily to quote information: I am in the middle of a major remodel, and my temporary listening environment is less than ideal. Size wise it's good, but the room is way to live (mostly hard surfaces). I've had about 16 hours of play time so far, listening to a wide variety of musical catagories, at a wide variety of listening volumes. I've pushed the bounaries a few time. I don't know if the speakers are 'broken in' yet.
My equipment is mid-fi. I'm listening to cd's exclusively, with fifteen year old Rotel solid state equipment. The Rotel cd player is a little newer, and a fairly nice one. Yes, I still have a turn table, but I never use it. I'm using a pair of Rotel amps (mono-block mode) with way more power than I need.
For my first quiet listening, I had the speaker cable polarity reversed. The speakers still sounded o.k. Upon correcting that, I realized my 15 year old copper stranded cables had oxidized badly. I then purchased AudioQuest 14AWG UL/CL3 cables (I'm just a mid-fi king of guy). I think it made an audible differance.
The speakers meet my expectations. I'm told that things like the amount of acoustitic dampening material will change the sound. I think my fabrication was adequate. I would assume that only testing equipment could determine if I closely matched your specs. My only criticisim so far is that higher pitched vocals sometimes deteriorate into a slightly crackeling 's' (which I have never heard any speaker, no matter how 'high end' not do), and that some intermittent low base sounds (acoustic base, moderate volume) can slightly push the ability of the woofer section to maitain tight control. I wasn't necessarily expecting otherwise, I think they sound good. I'd be interested in listening to my speakers using different amps some time.
An indicator to me of sound quality (clarity and tranparency) is when you do not realize how loudly the speakers are playing, until you try to talk to some one, or you realize it sounds crystal clear some distance from the house while taking out the garbage. My R8's do that pretty well."
These are the comments of our customer.
