Audio projects

Audio projects

Or... the story of my DIY audio attempts.

It all started in the head, so to speak, in 1983, in endless conversations in my hostel room in BIT Ranchi, with my friend Gautam Mani. It grew to an actual DIY project in 1986, in another hostel room a thousand miles away. I've written about it elsewhere. After that "ampli-speaker" project, nothing further happened till about 2002.

In parallel with these events, a series of music systems passed through my life. The earlier ones were at my parents' place. When I began earning, I bought my first system in 1997. I bought a much better one on a drizzly night on 30 December 2000, and that started my journey into the world of "high-end" audio systems. With this system, I was re-visiting old and long-forgotten territory, but was accessing a much more vast repository of knowledge and opinion: the Internet. And this world of new information, coupled with my dark DIY past of 1983-1986, was pushing me once again towards subversive thoughts of building my own. I ordered my first pair of good speaker drivers in 2002: a pair of expensive Jordan JX92S full-range drivers. I studied the box options on E J Jordan's Website and built a small ported 18L box, fixed the drivers on them, soldered the copper wires from the speaker terminals to the drivers, and I'd made my first DIY speakers after a gap of sixteen years. I was back in DIY audio.

I read everything I could, including old-fashioned texts printed on paper, called books, which few online DIYers appeared to be reading any more. I also discovered these places where DIY people hang out on the Net. I first discovered Audio Asylum but it wasn't all that interesting. These chaps seemed to be making modifications to existing commercial gear, not building things from scratch. I then discovered diyaudio.com and settled down with those guys. I found that people didn't chop my head off even when I asked questions. I've remained on that forum till date, and see no signs of my leaving. I've also discovered some really great guys and great speaker projects on the DIY forum of htguide.com.

Diyaudio gave me a whole new set of real-life flesh-and-blood friends, who welcomed me into their hopes and dreams, fed me dinner and beer, put me up for the night, listened to music with me, and guided me. Corbato, George, and Variac and so many others, all became and remain very good friends. But I would have been nowhere in the DIY audio scene was it not for Angshu. When a dumb guy like me starts out on a totally new journey, he needs a guide, a guru if you wish. This someone must be incredibly patient, and almost super-human in his willingness to help. Angshu has been all that, and has not yet committed suicide, nor lost his sense of humour.

I still remember the night when I got MLS measurements to work on my system. Angshu was in Bombay that night --- he stays in Delhi --- and he had just returned to his hotel room after a long day of work. And at ten in the night, I called him up (or did he call me?) and we started talking about how my SPL measurements were simply not working on Speaker Workshop on my laptop. He then walked me through the debugging, on the phone, step by step, for the next two hours. When it actually worked, it was past midnight. I still remember that eureka feeling, and that deep feeling of pure relief that I had Angshu at the other end of the phone line.

Even today, I see the dozens of people struggling with the Wallin jig (Angshu had told me: "Forget the Wallin jig completely! Just build an impedance jig on a prototype PCB and get going."), I feel lucky I found Angshu.

Angshu and my other DIY friends have kept me going. Other veterans from far away have stepped in and helped, patiently writing email after email in response to my endless queries. Hugh Dean from Australia and Randy Slone from the US have responded so many times to my queries that I can almost write a small book by just putting those letters end to end. (No, I won't do it ... that was just a "figger of speech".) I owe all my DIY projects and achievements to my DIY friends and to diyaudio.com.

I now recognize why I chose to invest in a full-range driver in 2002; I hadn't realised it at the time. I went full-range because I was afraid of crossover design and speaker measurements. Angshu almost took me by the hand and helped me overcome this fear. It took him and me three years to reach where I have reached today, but I've completed my first non-trivial speaker design. That is the Asawari. This is 2006, and my journey has started in earnest once again.

I will keep describing my projects on these pages, but I will not bother to make nice one-page reports out of them. I will write more in the style of a journal than a well-structured DIY project report. I will be describing what I thought, what distractions I underwent, what dead ends I ran up and down, and all sorts of other things. I am not interested in making neat little product descriptions out of my journal. Some of you will find my writings long-winded and boring, and others will (I hope) like the journal approach. Both of you are welcome.