Friday, January 5, 2007

ProAC 2.5 Clone Project

Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

Background

This all started back in May, 2003 when I picked up a table saw from Lowes for $100 (Delta). I also picked up a Bosch router from Amazon. After a few minor home projects of building shelves, moldings with these tools. I decided to work on a more challenging project. My interest has always been in Audio/Home Theater. So, I decide to build a tower loudspeakers.

A few searches on Google led me to this site on building a ProAc 2.5 Clone. I had a chance to listen to the ProAc 2.5 in a retail store in Manhattan. It sounded great, very neutral loudspeakers, but they were retailed at $3000 for the pair. Based on the clone site, I can do it for under $700 at the time.

In the next few articles, I'll detailed my loudspeaker project. The steps I took to build these speakers (mistakes, pitfalls, improvements). I took me a few weekends to complete building the pair of speakers. I'm estimating costing me around $750 in parts and material to complete. I'm happy with the result giving I'm pretty much a novice woodworker. I definitely learn my lesson in applying wood veneer. I'll detail my mistakes and suggestions to apply veneer onto a speaker. Finally, the loudspeakers put out amazing sound. I was surprise how much Bass can be generated from a pair of 7-inch woofers.

Here is a list of sites I use as reference to build the ProAc Clone
UPDATED (1/10/07):
3 years after I've completed the project. It's now being use as the main speakers for my newly acquired Plasma TV.


Next: Getting all the parts, materials and tools.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow... Great looking speakers dude! Can you post more pics of your work.

Anonymous said...

Nice. I built a pair around the same time and they are still my main speakers for both music and HT. I changed mine to use the SS9500 per Troels' pages as the 8513 wasn't to my liking.

Anonymous said...

Don't kid yourself.
The drive units from the 2.5 are
not of the shelf.
Bass drivers have a special coating
supplied by us, tweeter is modified
internally. By changing to different wire and components, you
will ruin the frequency reponse. By all means build a kit speaker
but don't call it Proac, cos it aint. Stewart Tyler

Anonymous said...

Don't kid yourself. Changing internal wiring is not going to ruin the frequency response. If you think it will, do a blind test and just plain measure. Clone may not sound exactly as 2.5 but it will sound just as good or better, never mind custom drivers from Scan-Speak. True it's not a 2.5 ProAc but enough with the Hi-End voodoo!.

Anonymous said...

HI,
Just got mine finished.Sound great ( to me at least... ) What should be a normal impedance reading for those clone speakers ? Mine read 10 ohms wich I find a bit strange. Should it not be between 6 and 8 ? or Have I made any mistakes in building my Xovers ? Thanks for your answers.

Damaged Tree said...

Using my cheap digital volt meter, I get an average of 6.5 ohms from the speaker terminals.

Hope this helps.

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