Welcome to Dara Ung DIY Speakers Page

This page attempts to provide some info about my experiences of building  Dennis Murphy's MBOW1. After a few weeks of research on DIY speakers, I decided to build the MBOW1 . Overall, it was an enjoyable experience. Woodworking was not my thing to do, so I hired John Bateman to do the cabinets for me. John did an excellent job. He lives in Baltimore and works about 15 minutes from my house so it was nice of him to hand deliver the speakers to me.  I ordered components from Madisound, GR Research, and David Ellis. So all I did was putting all of these together.

As suggested by Dennis, I used Blackhole 5 for the box interior sound treatment. This thing is tough to cut. I tried a few tools but the best one that did the job pretty well was a good large bread knife. Putting the components into the cabinets was quite tricky. The crossover circuit and the BH  must be installed through the 5-inch woofer opening. Here is how I did it.

The circuit board measures 8.5" x 4.5". Both the high pass and low pass circuits are on the same board (See picture below). I tried to put the inductors as far from each other as possible and arranged them perpendicularly to avoid possible transformer effect. When cutting the BH, I leave some space (about 0.5 inch) at the bottom of the back and side panels to leave some space for the circuit board.  To install the components, first, I installed the BH on the back, top, and only the left side, leaving the right side empty. This is important, otherwise I would not be able to install the crossover circuit. Then I installed the crossover circuit. I didn't want to use the glue to permanently install the circuit board to the cabinet, so I used dual sides fastener/sticker like Dual Lock or Welcro to keep the circuit in place. Finally I install the BH panel to the right side of the cabinet. I use 4 small spikes for each speaker.

The costs: (including shipping)

Hiquphon OW1s from Dave Ellis - $180
GR Woofers & Blackhole 5 from GR Research - $113
Components from Madisound $100
Cabinets from John Bateman $160

Total : $553

The sound

Well, at first I almost blew up the tweeters, not because I turned the volume to high, but because I made a mistake in the circuit wiring. I noticed serious distortion and when I checked the wirings I noticed that I by-passed the high-pass circuit completely!

After re-connecting the circuits properly and triple checking them, they sound much better. I'm not an experienced listener, but the speakers sound very good for their size. I listened for the basic things like details, imaging, natural human voice recording (of my wife), and instrument recordings. They sound pretty accurate to my ear. In some recordings the treble seems to be a little bright but I didn't bother changing the resistor values. The bass is excellent for the size of the speakers. I used live CDs like Eric Clapton's Unplug CD with my old Harmon Kardon CD player and an old NAD integrated amplifier  (I know these are not great stuffs but these are all I have for now).  Here are some pictures:

Big Thanks to Dennis Murphy and all of you who encouraged me to build these gems.

For comments or questions, you can contact me at dara_ung@yahoo.com