How I Tweaked my full range BL horn speakers

Almost 4 years after the construction of my Back Loaded Horn speakers, I decided tweaked them adding tractrix horns using compression drivers for the high frequencies.
Searching the web and asking friends who had already experimented with such drivers, I decided to implement a structure based on a tractrix horn using an 1" (inch) High Frequency compression driver.
For this purpose I chose a cheap but very good European driver the BMS 4524. Another reason why I chose the particular driver was the low cost which is around 80 euro / pair , so I can comfortably experiment without wasting a lot of money...

When I started constructing my first DIY horn loudspeakers, I had to decide what material to use for building the loudspeaker enclosures. It is well known that the materials a loudspeaker cabinet is made from can affect to the sound quality produced by the speaker.
A kind of "Coloured sound" is the result due to the resonance of the cabinet walls. This subject is often discussed among speaker manufactures, and there are lots of opinions if the material of the cabinet should contribute to the sound or not.

For my DIY horn loudspeakers I choose the FE206E driver by Fostex. Fostex recommended the use of plywood, that's why I decided to learn more about this material, and its sound insulation and damping characteristics.
Although I am not an expert in building loudspeakers I know that for building a well damped speaker cabinet there is a combination of strength, stiffness, surface stability and the sound insulation of the material.

DIY speakers project by Giannis Mihailos
Well hello.
Those speakers I made are obviously a wilson audio watt puppy design. But except the looks, all the other construction is based on some other speaker designs. The speaker units I use are the famous scanspeak d2905-9700 non ferofluid tweeter the 18w8545 k00 mid bass and for the lower octaves the peerless hds 205. The project took me about 5 years to built and I mean of course not the construction which was ready in about 4 months but the whole thing plus the tuning of the xovers. Firstly I built a passive one for all the drivers but after some listening i decided that an active one at least for the lower section was something needed to use. So the today design has a series xover for the mid hi section and an active valve (marchand) xover for the woofers.

DIY horn loudspeaker project by costas sarris

In February 2006 after I had completed the construction of my dual mono PSE 807, me and George Filippou decided to build a pair of horn speakers using a full range driver in a back loaded horn design, which could easily be driven by the 807 single ended & 811A tube amps, we had designed. We choose a design by FOSTEX with the full range unit driver FE206E which has been designed (according to the manufacturer) for use in back loaded horn type enclosures.

Although bass reflex projects have been presented by some manufacturers this driver is generally unsuitable for bass reflex enclosures because of its over dumping characteristics.