WD25A - STD- finally built!

[naimart]

At last I've finished my 'home made' cabinets for the WD25a kit and after I eventually managed to piece them together, patch them up and fit all the bits they actually seem to work!

Anyway, just wanted to say thanks to WD and Arena for the quality of the kit and a great design. It's early days and I haven't even fully tightened the driver bolts - but I'm very impressed with the sound, especially considering the slight tweaks I made to the cabinet

Cheers

[Greg.]

They look good. Did you just follow the plans in the magazine for the cabinets? What materials did you use and have you actually applied any finish yet or is that natural bare wood?

Best wishes,

Greg

[naimart]

Thanks Greg,


I bought the basic kit and followed the instructions (mostly!) - they are included on a CD. There are a couple measurements I had to work out but only because I wanted to include the rebates in the side walls, it made fitting the internal braces much easier.

I originally wanted to use 18mm birch ply through out but I couldn't get hold of a veneered sample, so used 19mm white oak veneered MDF for the baffle, sides, top/bottom and birch ply for the back and internal braces. Not sure why but I wanted to make the baffle thicker, so I added a 12mm ply piece.

For the moment what you see is the finished cabinet, after I sanded down the speaker I wanted to keep it as close as possible to the original finish, it's a bit unusual but I used limed wax. Used about 3 coats with fine sanding between each. I found this covered up some minor blemishes very nicely

My only worry is that the changes I have made (thicker front baffle and 8mm gap between the woofer and tweeter) may be compromising the sound - looks like I may have to build another set of cabinets to find out

Thanks again for the comment!

[petercom]

They look very nice, well done! There are three aspects which might change the sound.

1. The use of birch ply for the back panel may add some panel resonance in this area; tap it and see! One of our 'tweaks' in the magazine is to add a pad of bitumin damping to cover about two-thirds of the panel. Our Soniqs PDC is ideal for this.

2. Using a thicker front baffle may 'close in' the rear of the driver. This will cause a tunnel effect around the rear of the driver cone and add some coloration to the midband. I haven't tried it so I don't know whether this is audible or not - it is possible on a 25cm hole that it may not have much effect, though it does on drivers of 18cm or smaller.

3. The extra added front baffle thickness may affect how the aperiodic port works by adding extra depth to the port.

The answer to 2. and 3. is to cut use 18mm as the front baffle and then strengthen this (if you must) with 12mm behind, then cut larger holes in the 12mm panel than you need to open it out behind the drive unit and port.

Of course it is too late to do this on your cabinet, so take a rasp and bevel the inner edges of the holes as much as you can. (No need at the cabinet sides of the bass unit hole obviously, and you may need to leave flanges around the screw holes).

[naimart]

Peter,

Thanks for your comments.

Luckily I had read the 'update' artical in Hi-Fi World before final construction and ordered and used Soniqs PDC on the rear panel. When adding the extra 12mm ply to the baffle I had cut an oversized area for the aperiodic port.

[naimart]

Peter,

Thanks for your comments.

Luckily I had read the 'update' article in Hi-Fi World before final construction and ordered and used Soniqs PDC on the rear panel. When adding the extra 12mm ply to the baffle I had cut an over-sized area for the aperiodic port, so should be OK. The second point "a thicker front baffle may 'close in' the rear of the driver" , looks like something I need to adjust if I can.

Anyway the sound I'm hearing from them at the moment is great, the bass notes are clearly more separated than anything I have heard before, vocals are big and bold but very clear, the treble is not veiled, maybe not as consistent as my Sextets but not bad! An enjoyable experience, now all I need is more time to listen - if the kids will let me!

Thanks again

P.S. Sorry about the previous 'short' post - can you tell this is my first post on a Forum?

[Cobblers]

Glad to see another happy WD25a user.

Funky white cabinets!