Each year Scott Clark, physics teacher at a small Texas high school, gives his students a really interesting and fun project. This is the third straight year for this project.
The project is letting the students design and build a pair of speakers.
Students are placed into small groups to work on these projects. I think as many as seven pairs have been made per class, and this year there were five pairs.
Typically inexpensive drivers have been used, some bought and some donated. Paper cone woofers have been preferred as they are easier to work with and work well with low order networks. If you have drivers that you can donate this is a really good cause.
Several times during the year Scott has brought students here to GR Research for a day of acoustics 101. I teach them how caps, inductors, and resistors all effect the response of woofers and tweeters and let them watch as measurements are taken with different types of networks and what effect they have on the response.
Afterward they get to listen to various forms of music on my reference system and sometimes several different speakers. It is really fun to watch these young high school students get their first exposure to high end audio and to listen to them talk about all the things they heard in the music playback that they didn't know was there or had never heard before.
Each year when the kids have completed their projects (near the end of the school year), Gary Dodd and I drive down and spend the day there. I measure and test their speakers. Then we set up a modest system and Gary and I listen to each pair of speakers, write about them and score them.
This year the listening system consisted of a EL-34 tube amp kit that Gary designed for the kids to build as a special project. A couple of the kids and the teacher (Scott Clark) built one of the tube amp kits. For a pre-amp we used one of Gary's, now famous, batter powered tube pre-amps. This one belonged to Scott Clark and is finished in high gloss Mesquite wood. It looks really good. For a source we used a Rega Planet CD player. All was connected with Electra Cable interconnects. Some OFC speaker cables were used and some cheapy power cords.
This year the kids got a little more daring with these. A couple of guys did a three way design that was very ambitious. Several of the girls had designs with higher order networks that even used some notch filters. One design even had a third order network on the tweeter and woofer. One pair even used two woofers below a tweeter.
The listing room is a stage in the cafeteria. With the curtain drawn across the front and with curtains on the sides and rear it actually makes for a very good listening area. It is a large open area with no real wall reflections. Surprisingly we get really good bass response as well.
All five pairs sounded very good. I mean VERY good. Hats off to these kids.
Gary and I had recently been to the Lone Star Audio Fest. Exhibits consisted of several long time industry professionals, and serious hobbyist. Personally I liked the inexpensive arrays designed by Fred Thompson better than anything else that was there, and they were playing these on pretty modest components. Anyway Gary and I both felt that as a whole all of the speakers built by these kids and played on this system, sounded easily better than, to at least as good, as anything shown at the Lone Star Audio Fest. These kids speakers were really that good.
Another thing to note is that these kids have no measuring system at all. All crossovers were designed by factory provided specs and response curves. Some design software was also used to calculate needed values.
Below are the measured response curves of their speakers.
I think the kids did really well and earned a well deserved congratulations from Gary and I. I think we all (all of us audiophiles) need to send a big thank you to Scott Clark for giving his students a great project like this, not only letting them learn about speaker design but allowing them to get excited about and have an appreciation for high quality music reproduction.
BTW, the three test songs used for today were tracks from Jennifer Warnes, Lyle Lovett, and Veana Teng.
