(Active?) travel speakers

[BeemerZ1]

I want to build a pair of portable speakers.
They'll be mostly used as party-speakers on vacations.

They don't have to be audiophile speakers, as they will be used mostly to play rock and a bit of pop and other simple music.
The important thing is that they should be fun listening to, and play louder than a pair of small computer speakers...
Also they should be reasonably light and small.

I've heard that the Hi-Vi B3S and Aurasound NS3-193 are good full range speakers.
For amplification I was thinking about the T-amp. Is it possible to bridge it, so that I can put one in each speaker? Or maybe use two drivers in each speaker?

Any good ideas?

[joecarrow]

Neither of these speakers is very sensitive, and you're really not going to get a lot of juice out of the T-amp. One speaker I've had my eye on is the Galaxy full range driver:

http://www.partsexpress.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?&DID=7&Partnumber=290-020

Most decent computer speakers these days have a subwoofer, and I hate to say it but you'll probably want one of those too. I have the NS3 (it has more Xmax than the B3S) in a ported box, and if you run it full range the excursion gets out of control very quickly. The Galaxy driver is a full 10-15 db more efficient than the Aurasound or Hi-Vi drivers, but it also lacks bass.

If you can somehow do a subwoofer with an active crossover to some sort of reasonably sensitive "full range" drivers, this would be a good bet. If you could build something a touch larger, I'd even tell you to consider a 10" or 12" coaxial pro-sound speaker. I've heard systems based on these, and you do get the feeling that 90% of the music is there even though the cutoff is in the neighborhood of 50-60hz.

Oh yeah- and you can't do any parallel/bridge type stuff with the T-amp(s). It's just not designed for it. However, it should be able to handle a 4 ohm load with no trouble- but don't think you're going to get more than 10 watts out of it by any sort of tricks.