Zaph Seas L18 / Seas 27TBFC/G

mnats · Sep 18, 2009

Built a pair of these recently:

I foolishly thought I was saving money by not having a pair of prefabricated cabinets sent to the other side of the world but in the end probably spent another several hundred and hours of labor to build the cabinets myself. Oh well, that's what DIY is all about...

Anyway, it's been a long time since I've had that feeling of the speakers just disappearing or being temporarily fooled while in another room that live music is playing nearby. They sound great and were a nice break from breathing all those solder fumes while trading it for lungs full of MDF dust!

mitsos · Sep 18, 2009

That's really nice man! Been dreaming of diy'ing a set of speakers, but haven't found the courage to do woodwork. Having enough trouble with metalwork as it is... The whole veneer thing seems like something not for my clumsy hands... couple q's: Did you purchase the baffle with the drivers? What kind of power are you running into them? What did you do for a crossover?

kato · Sep 18, 2009

Beautiful cabinets! They look professionally made.

I'm planning to build the version based on the Seas L15 woofer and 27TFFC tweeter when I find some time over xmas break. Very inspiring!

kato · Sep 18, 2009

mitsos said:
What did you do for a crossover?

Mitsos, the crossover is posted on the zaphaudio site:

Biasrocks · Sep 18, 2009

Nice job!

I'm wondering, does he have any designs that would be appropriate for mixing?

Mark

mnats · Sep 18, 2009

I have seen somewhere that Zaph mentioned a modified crossover design for this speaker that he has done specifically for near-field monitoring but I don't think he has posted it. For me, they sound fine as-is. I'm running a 100W per channel "hi-fi" integrated amp - I figure any distortion in the amp is totally swamped by the speakers even though the Seas are very low distortion designs.

If you don't have the courage to do the woodwork and have trouble with metalwork just buy the cabinets already made. I had to build another crosscut sled for my table saw and ended up having to fabricate the two metal rails to fit the 1/2 inch slots in my table saw - everything is a mix of metric and imperial here...the metal stock was in metric so it had to be cut and machined down to the imperial measure.

Even 3/4 inch MDF is not available here at the local hardware so the cabinets are made of 16mm MDF with a nominally 3mm plywood "veneer" (actually ended up being closer to 2.5mm). As for the look of them well they are good from afar but far from good! I can see all the imperfections in the mitered plywood corners and the stupid mistake I made with the roundover router bit to the baffle.

I was in a hurry to hear them finished but now that I'm satisfied with the result I'll probably make a new pair of baffles.