Years ago in my Jensens Stereo Shop days, before AVA, my partner and I built and sold our own loudspeakers. It was in the day of cheap speakers being pushed at the chain audio stores when that was big business.
Our claim to fame then was wired Dynakits for the factory wired price (we could build them really fast) and our famous SONIC EIGHT loudspeakers.
These were my partner, Paul Jensen's, design; a pretty darn nice two way piece using a whizzer cone 8" woofer and a 3" paper cone tweeter, and a really complex crossover network - - - a single capacitor in series with the tweeter.
No help from Dennis Murphy then.
The speaker was about 12" x 10" x 24" in size. The critical part of Paul's cabinet design was to have nothing left over from a 4 x 8 sheet of 3/4 inch plywood than some sawdust. He was a penny pincher and that was the reason we did pretty well. The sawdust he saved and burned for winter heat.
The Sonic Eight was built completely with UNFINISHED raw external grade plywood, knotholes and splinters and all. It has a lovely cane type grillcloth. The customer had to do whatever finishing they wished.
We sold them for all of $55.00 a pair and they were way better sounding than the chain store pieces at four times that price, but we will admit were not quite as attractive. We sold them as fast as we could build them to college students and the like.
Paul brought me one pair to go to a young married couple. I noticed this pair actually had the big stamp "Class A-D plywood" or something like that done right across the top surface of one speaker. I asked Paul why he had not sanded that off. He answered, "thats finishing" enough said.
The reason for my narative is that perhaps you guys could convince Jim Salk (
www.salksound.com) to build some of his new lovely Songtowers for you out of unfinished plywood too. That might bring the price down a lot.
I suspect he would rather die first.
Just a thought.
Frank
