<https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/nucleus-my-attempt-at-building-the-best-sounding-small-speaker-i-can.290403/>
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"I'd like to share with you guys something I've been working on and off for a while now. I call it, the Nucleus, and it is my attempt at making the best possible sounding small speaker I can possibly make without too much regards to budget. I thought it would be much more interesting to try to build something that far outperforms anything commercially available, and something that hasn't really been tried before: making a small speaker sound truly good.\n\nGoal: To make an extremely high fidelity small sounding speaker with strong bass down to 45Hz in an enclosure no bigger than 0.1 cu ft.\n\nhttp://i64.tinypic.com/53r1n6.jpg\n\nI wanted something that's visually obtrusive, so after much modelling, I ended up settling for a speaker that is 13'' wide, 5'' high, and 5'' deep. This is built on 1/4'' plywood of the highest grade to maximum internal volume. The midrange chamber inside acts as bracing for the speaker to provide additional strength. A nice rosewood stain was used to finish the enclosure.\n\nThe drivers consist of the Scanspeak Illuminator D3004/6020 for the tweeter crossing to the the Scanspeak Discovery 10F/8424G midrange at 3000Hz and crossing to the Tangband W4-1720 for the woofer at 300Hz. 2 custom Peerless 4'' passive radiators were used to tune the speaker to 46Hz. A miniDSP 2x4 is used as an active crossover as well as 2 SMSL SA-50 amps powering the drivers individually. The miniDSP was absolutely critical in bringing out the magic from these amazing drivers. Not only this is used to do 4th order crossovers, but it was necessary to correct box resonance from the high Q, diffraction effects of the baffle, and most importantly, the bass boost for woofer to bring out the bass, as well as the high pass filter and the limiter to keep the woofer in check.\n\nIf I'm going this far for this project, I might as well pull out all the stops. Extensive testing was done to tune the speakers. And the results? A speaker.that measures ±1dB from 100Hz to 16KHz with a -3dB roll off at 20KHz and a rise in bass response starting from 100Hz to +3dB at 50Hz. Here's a measurement done in anechoic chamber. There is no smoothing applied to the graph. Any smoothing to the graph will result in essentially a straight line. All the little bumps are actual response of the speaker as the microphone is very very high resolution. The chamber was only good down to about 100Hz, so that's where it stops. The second picture is an outdoor ground plane measurement for the bass. Again, that's with no smoothing.\n\nhttp://i64.tinypic.com/2rw2oht.jpg\n\nhttp://i66.tinypic.com/2ebwav9.png\n\nSo how does it sound? Just utterly fantastic. It is surreal hearing such high fidelity coming out of something so small. The Scanspeak drivers are truly excellent that just oozes detail and resolution. The clarity and detail is just outstanding that rivals some of the best speakers I've ever heard. The bass coming out of this speaker is truly astounding. The Tangband woofer is outstanding. It just pumps smooth and strong deep bass that is rather unbelievable from a speaker so small. At normal to above average listening volume, it absolutely sounds like a subwoofer is playing as the distortion is very low even at very high excursion levels. I've bought this to the office where I was pounding the speakers with rap and it just blew me away how much deep bass this speaker can produce. One caveat though, some music that really uses the stereo effect sound a little weird a mono, but that's just because there's only one speaker. But still, I am beyond happy how this turns out. It was an absolute blast designing and building this speaker, and it is truly satisfying when things come together beautifully. Small speakers can't sound good? You can't get bass from a small speaker? Oh yes, you absolutely can."
<https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/nucleus-my-attempt-at-building-the-best-sounding-small-speaker-i-can.290403/>