3d Printed Speakers
Introduction
There’s a YouTuber I’ve always loved staying up-to-date on — his name is DIY perks.
One of his most recent videos has to do with him designing his own set of 3d Printed Speakers. The idea of designing and printing a set of high-quality speakers greatly interested me so I wanted to tackle the challenge as well.
His design was well-suited for spaces with a lot of vertical space as the speakers were intended to be placed alongside a larger monitor/TV set.
However, this use case was completely different from my intended application, so I decided to use this video to learn more about the fundamentals of speaker design and produce my own version of these 3d printed speakers.
This post will tackle the journey I embarked on to create my very own 3d printed speakers
The design Process
What is my vision
Speaker Brainstorming
To begin the design process, I wanted to first figure out what form factor I wanted these speakers to be in. For my specific use-case, I knew I would place these speakers on my computer desk, underneath my monitors. To achieve this goal, I would have to make speakers that are much wider and shorter than the DIY Perks video. I decided to sketch up what I wanted that to look like.
Along with this selected form factor, I wanted to make sure these speakers were relatively affordable, yet upgradable if I deemed this design a success and wanted to make a more complicated version. There were three different speaker configurations I considered:
2.1 Speaker System (2 Speakers, 1 Subwoofer)
5.1 Speaker System (5 Speakers, 1 Subwoofer)
7.1 Speaker System (7 Speakers, 1 Subwoofer)
The DIY perks video utilized 2 subwoofers, 1 tweeter and 1 woofer in his design. This seemed like a great solution for a speaker system that would fill an entire room, but since my design will permanently be on my computer desk, I did not think I needed as much power as the original design had. Therefore I wanted to create a 2.1 Speaker System that was a hybrid between a soundbar and traditional drivers.
This design would allow me to place all the electronics in the soundbar unit and make the driver units as small as possible. If I were to want to upgrade this design in the future, I can keep the soundbar system the same and add a tweeter into the driver units.
Time will tell how effective this solution is to ones currently on the market, but I can evaluate that once I get into testing.