If you’ve read some of my output on SoundStage! Hi-Fi, you’ve probably picked up that I’m quite fond of DIY audio. I’ll cop to regularly visiting the DIY Audio Forum, North America’s premier message board for building amps, DACs, speakers, and more. Imagine my surprise when I learned that Poland has a DIY forum of its own, and then multiply that by about a billion when I found that the moderators of the site had ponied up for a room at this year’s Audio Video Show.
The best part? They aren’t even here selling anything. I spoke with one of the forum’s representatives, and he told me they’re here just to show off. A number of the forum’s members decided to come together and put together a system to display their creations in front of one of the largest hi-fi audiences in Europe. The ethos was very punk rock, even if the music playing in the room was mostly electronic.
Though the electronics presented here were insanely impressive—more on them in a bit—the highlight in the DIYaudio.pl room was the speakers. Three pairs of speakers were shown, with the cheapest having a parts cost of around just €60, sans cabinets. At the other end of the spectrum were the giant killers, with a bare parts cost of about €5000—and that’s not including each loudspeaker’s dual-cabinet design, though it does include Hypex amplifier modules. The speakers playing when I walked into the room were the middle-of-the-road set, which were based on about €600 worth of Scan-Speak drivers.
And, boy, were they playing! The Scan-Speak midrange-woofers on the compact two-way standmounts were visibly pumping, filling the space with crisp, full bass. It was one of those experiences where it was hard to believe that such small speakers were delivering such deep bass. But DIYers are perhaps fonder than anyone of doing this. Professional firms must look out for their bottom lines; their bookshelf offerings mustn’t overlap with their tower speakers too much, and besides, a higher efficiency spec at the expense of a couple of hertz on the bottom usually sells better. Not these DIY-forum guys, though. And despite the visible midrange-woofer action on the little standmounts, there was not a hint of strain or stress throughout the audioband, to my ears.
The speakers were driven by a formidable amp, one with some very serious VU meters on its face and a gargantuan toroidal transformer inside. The PCBs, chassis, and power supply, I was told, were designed and built by a forum member, though the circuitry was essentially a clone of the power-amp section of an Accuphase E-450 integrated amplifier. The digital signal was decoded by a custom-built modular DAC, affectionately known on the forum as “The DAC.” The DAC is designed to always use an R2R chip, though it can be configured to the builder’s choice of silicon by either Burr-Brown, Analog Devices, or Philips. Controlling all of this was maybe the coolest idea for a preamp I’ve seen, in any room, in any show: it had a faceplate made of Lego pieces.
Got around 800 bucks burning a hole in your pocket and access to a table saw and router? Sniff out those speakers on the Polish DIY message board and build yourself a pair. I dare you.
Matt Bonaccio
Contributor, SoundStage!
