The Short & Sweets

By Izzy Waldie

By Izzy Waldie

These are called the Short and Sweets because they are short (:o) and I went into the project with the goal of making the song “Short and Sweet” (by Brittany Howard ‘reimagined’ by Bon Iver) sound awesome on them. These are meant to be easy listening speakers for my small apartment, with the listening axis at the perfect level for sitting in a bean bag.

The 8 inch woofer provides impressive low end for the cabinet size, and the planar tweeter provides an insanely crispy high end.

The design is pretty straight forward, just a 2-way speaker with a vent on the bottom (hence the cute little feet), crossover is at 2kHz. I originally intended to use a 2 inch port tube, but testing revealed that leaving the port hole with no tube yielded the best response. One fun thing I tried was adding wedges on the inside of the cabinet to make the sidewalls non-parallel from each other. These wedges are the height and width of the side walls, and are 1.5″ inches thick at the bottom and taper to nothing at the top (this seemed an easier solution to a trapezoid shaped interior without having to do wacky joints). These wedges are glued and screwed to the inside of the sidewalls, doubling as bracing for the enclosure (and adding to the weight for a total of 52 lbs)

Specs:

• +/- 3dB 30-20kHz (with slight smile curve)
• 8″ woofer
• Planar tweeter

Drivers:

• Daytion Audio Reference Series 8″ Woofer
• GRS PT2522C-4 3-1/2″ Planar Tweeter

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