Acoustics 101 Pro : Advanced enclosure design

Start designing more advanced enclosures

Finished Acoustics 101? Time to step it up a notch. While we are still going to revisit sealed and bass reflex enclosures, we are going to go deeper into the subject, and touch more advanced stuff. As a bonus, a high output ported enclosure is in the course as well. Besides these familiar enclosures, we going to see some new. Get ready to learn about passive radiator enclosures, 4th order and 6th order bandpass boxes.

Software

Yes, we are going to use software, WinISD. Popular software in the DIY audio community, with lots of features. Don't worry, you can download it for free. What you also get for free is a bunch of excel spreadsheets. These will be used to easily calculate the panel dimensions for each enclosure type. Even if you are not good at math, I'm confident you will find it easy.

3D Modeling

After the enclosures are modeled and the panel dimensions are calculated, we are going to use SketchUp to make 3D models of the enclosure. This has a number of benefits. You can visually check the proportions of the enclosure. You will double check if the panels fit together correctly. You can send someone the drawing with the dimensions. You can do all sorts of things if you expand on this subject. However, bear in mind that this is not a SketchUp course, and it covers only the basics and the stuff you need to make a 3D model of a speaker box.

Building and results

The final part of the course will be me showing you how I build each enclosure. I will describe what I do and you will learn some basic stuff about woodworking so you can build your own speaker boxes (tools required). Each enclosure will be measured and tested. If you have taken Acoustics 201 you will understand what I'm doing, but it's not mandatory. In the end we will compare how each enclosure stacks up to one another by judging the numbers.