My main goal of building new speakers was to replace my old Pioneer set that I bought in high school with something that looked a whole lot better. My old ones were pushing 15 years and really weren't anything special to begin with. Once I decided to build my own set, my first thought was to just buy the drivers, build a box, and wire everything together (who needs a crossover anyway...right?). Then I realized that if I was going to put any money at all into this project, it needed to at least sound decent. When I told my wife about the speakers she asked me what they were going to look like, and she "politely" informed me they needed to be visually pleasing if they were going to sit prominently in our living room. I thought about an all-oak look, but that has already been done countless times, not to mention that it would have been more expensive. I really cannot pinpoint when the alternating wood pattern emerged.it just came to me one day at work and I ran with it. I am a competent woodworker, so I knew I would be up to the task. Since I was a complete novice to speaker building, I spent about two solid months of my spare time researching how to put a set together that sounds at least pretty good. I had never even heard of Parts Express until I was searching for drivers on the Internet and the name came up in a Google search. What a great website; they had almost everything I needed, but where is the wood section? Aisle 15 at Lowes, that's where! I ordered and got most of my information from "Designing, Building, and Testing Your Own Speaker System" by David B. Weems (#500-021).

A secondary goal for the project was to spend as little on the electronic parts as possible. After the dust settled (and there was plenty of it), I had a set of speakers that looked good, sounded good, and was relatively inexpensive at a grand total of about $300.00.