New cabinets for existing speakers?

[PoorboyMike]

I have a pair of Infinity Alpha 50's, a 37c center channel and 2 Alpha 20's for surrounds. I bought these on closeout last year (before I discovered diy) and the front 3 are black and the surrounds are beach. I think these sound pretty decent for what I paid for them but I don't really care for the looks. So to keep me busy during the long winter, I'm considering making my own cabinets for these and putting some real wood veneer on them. I'm sure most would consider this a waste of time, but MDF is cheap and doing this would give me the look I want (plus practice doing cabinets and veneer work).

My question is, is there anything I could do that would improve the sound of these in the new cabinets? I'm mainly going for looks here, but any advise I could get to improve the sound would be a bonus.

[westrock]

Good to set kids straight at a young age....its veneer :W

There is no problem putting them in something different. If you screw up, you can still put them back.

It looks like the front baffles might be detachable from the main speaker cabinet. You may have to preserve that, because the drivers probably mount to that faceplate, and would probably hard and or ugly to use by themselves. And getting that faceplate and trim rings on a seperate cabinet may be a undertaking.

But that would allow you to rebuild the main cabinet which you could probably make more studier. Maybe glue two 1/2" MDF panels together, so you would get the general thickness of 1", but also the ply panel would resist even more movement than a single 1" panel.

[PoorboyMike]

Good to set kids straight at a young age....its veneer :W

That's funny, because I had it spelled right and changed it because I thought it was wrong. lol.... I hate spelling. :M :


The front trim pieces are something I am a little concerned with. I don't want to use them on the new cabinets if I don't have to. I haven't looked real close at it because I didn't decide for sure I wanted to do this until tonight. And I'm at work doing a whole lot of nothing. I'll check it out a little closer tomorrow when I wake up.
:Z

[westrock]

I'm at work too...12 hour shifts are fun!

Sometimes manufacturers use some wierd designes on those trim rings. I took apart a pair of B&W DM302's and while the woofer was somewhat usable by itself the tweeter was shaped to where it could only be used with the faceplate.

[stidrvr]

As a fellow Infinity Owner (Beta Series). I was surprised to see that infinity's site is rather impressive. You can actually buy and see all the components to their speakers right from their website. They even list the crossover component values.

http://manuals.harman.com/INF/HOM/Technical%20Sheet/alpha50(HCA)%20ts.pdf

[PoorboyMike]

As a fellow Infinity Owner (Beta Series). I was surprised to see that infinity's site is rather impressive. You can actually buy and see all the components to their speakers right from their website. They even list the crossover component values.

http://manuals.harman.com/INF/HOM/Te...(HCA)%20ts.pdf

Wow, that's pretty cool. I hadn't seen that before.

They also have very good customer service. My son ran one of his toys into the tweeter on one of the 50's and tore it right in half. I called them to find out how much a new tweeter costs and explained to them what happened. They sent another one out the next day free of charge.

[PoorboyMike]

I'm at work too...12 hour shifts are fun!

Sometimes manufacturers use some wierd designes on those trim rings. I took apart a pair of B&W DM302's and while the woofer was somewhat usable by itself the tweeter was shaped to where it could only be used with the faceplate.

12 hour shifts are great as long as nobody is on vacation. I'll have a solid 84 hours in this week. I have all next week off though, so spending the extra OT shouldn't be a problem. :B

I checked out the trim rings on the 50's today and you are right. They are both curved on the outside edges, so reusing them would be tricky. If I do this, it might be easier to just mill up some custom rings out of MDF.