Pro Vs DIY Bluetooth Speaker Build!

Pro Vs DIY Bluetooth Speaker Build!

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Well, check it out. I just got my new Bluetooth speaker, and I cannot wait to share it with you guys. Oh wait, what? I ordered a Bluetooth speaker, not a punch speaker pass.

Well, looks like we might just have to build our own Bluetooth speaker that is going to be fine. All right. So if I'm being completely honest, what you just saw, there was a little bit of acting. I know, I know I had you all completely fooled, right? So here's what really happened. A couple of weeks ago, I ordered all of these Bluetooth speaker parts because I wanted to make my own custom Bluetooth speaker. And then I thought, No, you know what? Let's order two, because I'd love to give away one of these speakers at the end of the video.

And then I thought, Hey, will it be fun if I completely ripped off John Lucky's concept of pro versus beginner projects? So what we're going to do is actually make two Bluetooth speakers. one is going to be really simple and easy to make, and then the other one is going to be a little bit more complex and a lot fancier when we're done. And I know what you're thinking and the answer is yes, I'm going to be keeping the nice one for myself and then giving away the simple one at the end of this video. So with that said, let's head to the shop and get started on this build. OK. OK, I'm kidding, obviously, I'm

going to give the nice one to you guys and then keep the simple look for myself. Well, let's get started on this build. Now that we're here in the shop, we are actually going to take these spare components and set them to the side for a little bit, what we're actually going to do is start by building the cabinet for our simple speaker for Bluetooth speaker kit like this.

All you really need is a box to put all the components in. And last night I was messing around at ESOL, which is the ANC control software for the car, and I noticed that they have a box making plug ins . So all I had to do was punch in the dimensions of the box I wanted and it spat out all of these really cool looking jigsaw pieces. And then I had to add a couple of spots like here for the speakers themselves. Really, this is probably just about the easiest way you could ever design a Bluetooth speaker in terms of material. All we're going to need is the simple 29 inch by 29 inch piece of pine plywood right off the bat.

I was a little bit surprised to see a two hour time estimate on this car, but it makes sense given the volume of cutting that had to be done. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, this was far from an uneventful cut. Oh well, I guess it wouldn't make for a very interesting video if everything went exactly according to plan.

That box maker plug in that I talked about earlier doesn't include tabs by default. So as soon as this piece was done being cut out, it came loose, then got pulled back into the router bit and, well, it destroyed itself. So we are going to continue with the car, although this time I went back in and added a bunch of tabs to the rest of my pieces.

I got through three more before trouble managed to rear its ugly head again. This time it was an issue of me not setting the depth of the material correctly, which caused basically the exact same problem. So that didn't work out quite the way I would have liked to have worked out.

We got four out of our six works, but two of them did it. So I'm just going to reload the machine with a new piece of plywood and we're going to recover the two. Well, I am a bit sad that I wasted so much plywood. I did learn two valuable lessons about my ex car. one Always check to make sure your cut outs have tabs and to level your waste board and then double check your material thickness before each car. Hopefully, you guys at home can learn from my mistakes on this one.

So well, those cars did take a little while. We now have the six pieces that make up our speaker cabinets, and as you can see, they all walk together like this. However, there's a small issue so you can see here because of the size, the bit we were using. You don't get clean, crisp inside corners, but you actually end up with is a little bit of a radius here.

Thankfully, there's a very easy solution to that problem. I just loaded up a flat top blade and used it to carefully carve out all of those interior corners. Now all of these pieces are all cleaned up. We can finally get it assembled and see what it looks like because all of these pieces fit together so tightly.

All I had to do was add a little bit of glue and then clip them together. Now, obviously, not everybody out there has ACNC, but this is just one of many ways you could make a simple box to build a Bluetooth speaker. All you really need is a rectangular housing with the right interior volume and a few cutouts for the various parts. How you get there is kind of up to you. Before I installed the front and rear panels, I gave them each a quick coat of black paint.

And while that tried, I sanded the corners of the box to smooth out any imperfections. Originally, I wanted to leave the whole boxes just rob wood. But the plywood that I used was super cheap stuff. And even with only a light sanding, I had already burned through the veneer layer. So I gave the whole box a white paint job to cover up my mistakes and called it a day. Finally, I applied a little bit of glue and gently persuaded that front panel into position.

All right, so that's done. Leave this to dry and get started on our pro speaker. So look, obviously that first speaker is not my greatest work, but that's kind of the point, right? I wanted that cabinet to be representative of something that an entry level enthusiast might be able to make in an afternoon.

Now we're going to try and take things to the next level laid out in front of me. Here we have some walnut, which is my favorite wood, and hopefully whoever ends up winning the speaker also likes will all that. And what we're going to do with it is glue it up into some panels and use that to create some spare time. You'll notice that along with my walnut, I also have a very thin band of Oh, I don't know what it is about these speaker builds, but I can never help myself from adding a little accent strip joint glue on well, I waited for my glue to set. I started cutting the front and rear baffles out of a sheet of MDF, which is acoustically one of the best materials to build speakers out of because of its uniform density.

Technically, hardwood is actually a step down, but I doubt there are many people out there who could ever hear the difference, and I just prefer the more solid feel of well sold wood cabinets to my compromise was to make these panels out of MDF as a hybrid approach. Glue up, I ran my panels through the drum set and because I am absolutely obsessed with trying to do as many things at once as possible, I was also painting my panel. At the same time. I think I deserve some sort of multitasking reward for that.

All right, know these guys are cut. We are going to cut some bells and some data on them over on the table. Oh, my last speakers, I did a very similar beveled for those ones. It was purely a design thing, but on these speakers, it's actually going to be a little bit functional too, but that I'm getting ahead of myself. So we'll come back to this a little bit later on. Next, I cut two channels for my front and rear panels to slot into.

This was done one blade with at a time. A dado stack might have been a better choice here, but hindsight is 2020 the front panel I mounted in Dedo, but the rear panel that one I cut is a rabbit so that the rear mounted controls would be flush with the back and easy to reach. So our front and rear baffles fit really nicely into the channels we created. And now our next job is going to be transforming this cabinet sheet into a cabinet box.

So in order to do that, we're going to fold it up onto itself. So you can see I mark some lines here and here, and these are just kind of rough guides for the lighters that I'm going to have to cut on the sheet in order to turn into a box. So fortunately, this sheet is a little too big for my miter sled, so I'm going to have to do this cut on my miter saw, and I'm a little bit worried about it because these miners need to be really tight. So if there's any blade deflection in either direction, it could potentially mess up these miners.

Thankfully, this is a very high quality saw and I have a lot of faith in it, but still a bit nervous about this step. At first, the miners were going really smoothly. I mean, yeah, they were nerve wracking because there was zero room for error and tons of room for deflection.

But I was taking it slow and everything was going more or less, according to plan. Eventually, though, I had to cut this tiny little piece and it was so small that my miter saw Clamp couldn't properly hold down. So I actually ended up sticking it in place with double sided tape to keep it from moving around to cut.

And it actually worked surprisingly well, maybe a bit too well since it was really hard to remove after the cut. All that is a perfect fit. OK, so those are the three cuts that I was worried about the most. So now we have continuous grain that wrap from this board all the way up the sides. So now we just have to do a couple of easy cuts so that this lot in here like so. So

this last one in place. And look at how good that looks. With any luck, this should just slide in here like so. 00 yeah. Oh, that is a satisfying fit.

All right, let's glue this thing together. Actually, you know what? Quick behind the scenes shot. So before I ever actually do any big glue ups, I like to do dry runs first. So you can see right now I have everything all assembled, but there's no actual glue on any of these joints.

This lets me know which clamps I'm going to need and where they're going to go. And that helps to take a lot of the pressure off when I actually apply the glue. Blue chips are always kind of a race against the clock. From the second, the glue hits the wood.

You really only get like 20 minutes or so before it starts setting up on you. And as is this glue up took me twelve minutes. So you can imagine if I hadn't taken the time to set up all my clamps beforehand, I easily could have run over that 20 minute limit, and that would have been bad. But thankfully, I got it all done.

Let it dry for an hour or so and then took all the clamps back on. Oh, look at that. We got ourselves a box. All right.

Let's do a quick finish application and sanding montage, and then we will move on to the next step. Now, this finish is dry, this thing is looking so good now, if you were a long time viewer of this channel, you may be looking at this bigger cabinet and thinking, Yeah, it's nice, but it's a little bit savvy when you compare it to some of your previous work, and that is definitely a fair criticism. But we aren't done yet. We're going to differentiate this speaker with some accessories on some of my previous speaker bills. I had the benefit of really nice drivers that I could cut to use as a centerpiece of the speaker on these speakers.

I don't know. These drivers just don't excite me that much. So I've actually designed what I think is a pretty cool speaker grille.

So it's kind of retro inspired. I took some design cues from my desk, actually. You can see that the center grille here is very similar to the air intake on my PC drawer. But overall, I think it's just going to be a cool looking cover and we are going to carve that out on the X car.

All right. Let's get that out of there and see how it looks. I mean, I said, let's get it out of there and see how it looks. I can already see that looks really good when it shoots, where it looks really, really good.

Look at that. That looks terrific. Now I have another very fun step planned for this guy. Actually, you know what? I forgot one little thing.

Before we move on to the fun step, I had to cut a bevel the whole way around the face. Rip that way you can sit nicely inside of the speaker with a cool looking feel which, like I said before, will be functional because it'll let you get your fingers in there. And you know what? I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself again. At one point, I was thinking about painting this grill white. But this is walnut, and it seems like kind of a shame to paint such a nice piece of wood.

So a few days ago, I was in here in the shop and my dad was working on one of his projects, and he was bleaching some cheery for a sculpture base. So I thought, wouldn't it be cool if we tried to bleach this walnut to see if we could get it as white as we possibly can? So obviously, I've never used wood bleach before, and I had no idea what to expect here. But I follow the instructions and brushed it on.

Honestly, I was kind of expecting it to work like the opposite of a state. However, that wasn't really the case. Well, not really. Exactly what I expected. Maybe it takes a little while to work. OK. OK, it's starting to change a little bit. I walked away for like 15 minutes, and I can see that it is actually starting to get a little bit lighter.

But I think we're going to have to do a couple coats. I think you can see here that it's starting to get a bit lighter, especially around the middle, but this is still far from the look that I want it. So I applied a couple more coats of bleach.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, I use the Q-Tip to get into all those hard to reach spots. three coats in and we are looking very white for reference. This is what we started with. So yeah, that's that's in there. I'm going to do one more coat and then I'm going to leave it to dry overnight.

24 hours and four coats later, and this is now looking really white, although you do still get some of their original walnut green in there. So now we have to discuss how we are going to mount this to this. And just like in my previous video, I'm going to use the magnets. So this part of the build ended up not working out that well. So I'm going to breeze through it relatively quickly.

I see a glued an array of small magnets to the front of the speaker cabinet. Then I counter sunk a bunch of corresponding magnets into the speaker grille. And well, it's probably just easier if I showed you how it turned out.

All right. Magnets on there. Let's see how this works. And now the real test? Yeah, that's what I was worried about.

I think we're going to need two more powerful magnets. I did actually think this might be an issue, so I did order some more powerful magnets. So what? We're waiting for those to arrive.

We got a couple of things to do. Obviously, the first thing I had to do was remove the magnets that didn't work and then repair the damage left behind on the grill. That was easier said than done because I had counter sunk the magnets into it.

So I actually had to pop them all out and then run the whole thing through the drum sander until I removed enough material to cover my steaks, which of course, meant that I had to bleach that side of the real to. What can we all just take a second to appreciate how cool it looks, half bleach and half unbleached? After that, it was time to install some handle. Seeing as this is going to be a portable Bluetooth speaker, I wanted it to be easy to move around, and I felt like these leather handles also added to the retro feel of the front grille. Finally, I added some soft rubber feet, which should help to isolate the speaker from whatever surfaces placed on and in turn, improve sound quality. All right, let's start assembling the guts of this Bluetooth speaker, so the way this works is actually quite interesting and cleverly designed.

Basically, what we're going to be doing is building a stack module onto this backplate and then installing it in the speaker. I know, I know, that sounds a bit intimidating, but you'll see it's actually pretty easy to do. The first step was installing all the switches, indicators and inputs onto that backplate. Oh, and when we're on the subject, I provided a link to the kit that I used in the video description so that you guys can follow along. Oh, OK, so that's the back panel done. Now we're going to attach some standoffs to it and attach the control panel on a plot to screw.

Geez, these standoffs give you somewhere to mount the control panel, which handles all the Bluetooth connection processing and serves as an amp to power the drivers before mounting the control panel. I connected all the wires from the back. Trust me, you're definitely going to want to make these connections before assembly.

Finally, the cherry on top was the battery harness. This was three batteries that power the speaker and make the whole thing portable. Unfortunately, they had a little bit of an issue here. I got scammed on this build and I want to make sure that that doesn't happen to anybody else.

So long in the short of it is if you're buying Lithium-Ion batteries for a bill you're doing, stick with the name brands because if it's from a brand you've never heard of before. There's a very good chance that they are completely lying about all the stuff. On their batteries, so I've got these ultra fire batteries off of Amazon, but after doing a little bit more research, I found out that all of the numbers listed here on the side of this battery are basically a complete lie.

And these things are a real fire hazard. So I've ordered some proper batteries that I will install this for the final build, and we'll just use these ones for testing right now. All we have to do is very carefully blower this whole module into the spirit cabinet and just be careful that we don't pinch any wires on the way in and then screw it into place.

If I reach in here and just fish out these wires, we should be able to hook up our speakers by doing an NC weensy little bit of soldering. For we go ahead and secure these drivers in place, I want to take a second and install some Polly Phil inside the speaker cabinet. What this stuff is is. Well, it's basically the filling that you would get inside a really cheap pillow.

But in this application, we're going to stuff it inside the speaker cabinet and it's going to absorb any sound waves that are bouncing around inside the cabinet, which should have the effect of making the speaker sound a lot better. Shove it in here through and kind of unravel it a little bit. Well, that was perfect timing, basically as soon as I finish installing the speakers in the cabinet, the new magnets showed up for the grill. But before we can install these, we have to apply a coat of finish to the grill. I don't know why I was do this to myself.

Rushing this finish on was not the way to go here. All that fine detail work in the grill took forever to do with a tiny little artist's brush. So if any of you have a good recommendation for an entry level spray gun, I would love to hear them down in the comments. Well, I waited for my second and third coats to dry on the grill. I set about assembling all of the speaker components inside my entry level case.

The process here was exactly the same as before, so I'm not going to bore you guys with the details. Oh, OK, so this guy is now dry, which means we get to install it using our newer, stronger. Now one thing I was thinking about, well, this was drying is that these magnets may very well interfere with the speaker's ever so slightly. So I was doing some testing, I was playing music and I was moving the magnets around the speakers while they were playing and I couldn't hear any perceptible difference. So I think if there is an effect, it's going to be really, really small. Of course, trading off between esthetics and sound quality is always going to be a personal decision.

So if you feel like you have audio file like hearing, you might want to omit a speaker grille and magnetic mounting system from your own speaker. Built epoxy I'm using here is a two part system that sets up in about five minutes and bonds incredibly well to both metal and wood. Once the first set of magnets had cured a position, I slid a corresponding magnet onto each one.

I then gave each, made it a little dollop of epoxy and then carefully lowered the gorilla position. Doing it this way ensured that I had perfect alignment between my magnets on both surfaces. We're going to put that epoxy dry and then we're going to take these guys home. See how they said, You know what? Before we test the audio quality of these speakers, we should probably remove this tape first. Oh, I really hope these new magnets hold. Oh yeah, they do actually look at that.

Let's see how hard it is to get this thing off. Oh, OK, yeah, you can get it if you pry at it. Nice, that is really good. And then let's see how this go back. Wow, the quite the clamping force to it.

All right. Enough cleaning around. Let's turn this guy on. Turn up the volume. See just how good its sales. Oh, yes.

These things sound really nice, and the best part is these drivers aren't even fully broken in yet in terms of volume. I'm scared to take these things past 75% without my neighbors complaining, but that's to be expected when you have to 50 white drivers in each speaker for reference your typical Bluetooth speakers, like somewhere between 15 and 30 watts. So we are well over triple that.

And the fun doesn't stop there either, because each one of these speakers has its own auxiliary input. So you could easily integrate one of these speakers into a larger home theater setup. Or you could connect to a device that doesn't have Bluetooth like a record player. And of course, because each speaker has its own internal battery, you can just pick them up and take them wherever you want to go. At the end of the day, what I think we have here are two very capable Bluetooth speakers, one of which you could put together in a couple of afternoons.

And the other one? Well, that one took a bit more time, but I think the results speak for themselves. Oh, and I almost forgot. I did say I was going to give away the speaker at the start of the video, didn't I? So here's what you got to do if you want to win.

It's real simple. All you have to do is comment down below with your Instagram handle. two weeks from now, I will pick one of you at random and then I will announce it on my Instagram and I'll get in touch with you and we can figure out shipping details. And on that note, I think that is the perfect time to end this video. So thank you so much for watching if you enjoyed it. Please give it a like comment and subscribe if you aren't already.

As always, I deeply appreciate anybody who does any of the above. Big thank you to all my Patreon supporters who you can see listed beside me right now. And good luck to anybody who enters to win the speaker. That's it for me, and I will see you guys in the next video piece.

2022-01-26 12:17

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