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A Great Set of Bass Bins
If you are in a band, and you want concert quality sounding bass and a kick drum sound that is nothing less than excellent, a set of these subs will work for you. You can make them yourself, and save about 1/2 of what a set would cost to buy. These bins are made to be used in sets of 4 (2 per side). If you have a club, or a theater, or some kind of venue where you need an excellent looking/sounding set of built in cabinets for the house, these are what you are looking for.
I made a set (with my friend Squid) a few years back. I think it took us 3 evenings to finish them up, and we went on to use them for years at many types of jobs. They work well even in large arenas. We found that they matched or beat anything that anyone else had. They look great and they sound unbelievably good. Bass players love these, and drummers love their sound, because they really pump out the kick. They will give you the classic "hit in the chest" dead thud type of kick drum/bass that everybody wants.
The cabinets are made from 3/4" plywood. Birch plywood is preferred, but I have made these from ordinary Spruce plywood and they have sounded/worked just as good. The fronts are shown here so they are removable. This is a bonus if you have to bring them to your jobs at every gig. The front flare sections would be held on with 4 clips, or rotational catches, which I will find a sketch of, and include here, soon. Here's a view of one from overhead (with the top off).
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The part of the cabinet that houses the speaker must be made 100% airtight. The hole that the speaker wires pass thru must be also sealed so it is airtight. I haven't shown them in the above drawing (to make it easier to understand), but we added reinforcements that look like this at the top and bottom of the section that houses the speaker -
We used silicone on the inside at every seam/joint to ensure that we had an airtight enclosure.
I don't know much about who designed these and how old the design is. Their construction is very much like the La Scala bins made/designed by Klipsch sometime before 1950. They look almost identical to the La Scala design, except they are only as tall as they need to be to fit a 15" driver, and they are fitted with a removable flare front. They are also very similar to something once made by Traynor (now Yorkvillle), which Traynor called an Extender cabinet, and I should mention that Martin made something similar except the speaker chamber is a little different, and these have removable flare fronts. I don't know if Martin is still around, but they were a UK company that produced some really excellent PA equipment. Anyone that has studied audio equipment will tell you that Klipsch is also very well known for early designs that were quite awesome sounding.
Look at the top drawing and focus on where the speaker is, and what path the sound must take to exit the cabinet. You can see that the sound is very much constricted as it leaves the speaker and the sound follows a long path that gets wider and wider as the sound passes through.
We used 15" Black Widow drivers in ours, and the sound was pretty incredible. I believe that at the time we made these, we were first using only an 800 watt amp to power four of them, and the sound was much larger than the 800 watts we were using.
Here's what these cabinets look like from the rear, with the back off.
The corner joints are rabbeted for better strength. The 4" pieces are notched upper and lower to allow clearance for the speaker mount flange. There are a set of skids added to the underside of the cabinet. All of the outside corners are rounded over with a 1/4" to 3/8" radius bit on a router.
The back is removed to load and access the speaker. You can also locate a jack plate on the back. I think we had these crossed over at 250Hz, meaning that anything below 250Hz was fed to these, anything over 250Hz went to our mid/high cabinets.
I have another design that I will be adding here shortly. They are also a sub, but made for an 18" driver, which is front loaded. They have really good specs and they sound great.