After a very long delay I’ve finally gotten around to working on better cabinets for the Lorantz woofers that will unleash their full potential. Having adequate enclosures so I could be lazy and use the speakers as is no doubt contributed to the delay, but also some non audio related stuff got in the way as well, as happens.

boards assembled to check but not glued yet

I ended up using a wider design, 60cm wide, 75cm high and 40cm deep. Using the PVC port extenders described in a previous post I calculate I can tune to about 33Hz, or if I remove them it will be at about 37Hz.. this gives me some tuning options.

The cabinet will use 25mm pine plywood for the front baffle and 18mm for the other sides and bracing.

With 3 internal braces, plus the estimated volume of the driver and BR port, I get a volume of 131.3 litres. This should give me the bass extension to make use of the 30Hz rated range of the driver (well down to 33 Hz), at the expense of throwing away power. As I’m using these in a domestic situation they are never going to need the 400W they are rated at, the 150W these cabinets can give should be more than enough with 99dB sensitivity, especially since I’m driving them with an approximately 110W Tripath amplifier.

I had the plywood cut at Allboard Distributors who have done a good job.. one minor error on MY part was I wrote down a slightly incorrect dimension for one of the internal braces, but luckily this should be easily fixed by adding a bit of offcut to close the gap, as by dumb luck my error was out by 18mm.

Although I’m a computer person I couldn’t be bothered learning CAD just to spec out some wood so ended up doing it the old fashioned analogue way:

Next stage.. clamping and glueing, and adding in the holes for the driver screws and binding posts, and the stuffing, after reading up the ESP pages on the matter in more detail.