G,
At the moment, it looks better than it sounds. To me, break in is a big part for these drivers. As for the material used, I tried to recycle as much as I could find. In this case, I had sizable wood scraps from years ago. The front baffle is made from former workbenches to former kitchen counter tops. All solid wood, but two different thicknesses. More work than you think went into gluing pieces together. There is very little scrap left behind.
Now to the performance of the driver so far. To start the break in, I am using a cheap class D amp, and an old yamaha music server. I expected this to be a good combination, yet there seems to be a sizable amount of distortion. Really, I can't tell if this has something to do with the driver or the source combination. The driver sounded so sharp and forward that I am using a device from Decware Audio. It is meant to help tame some of the issues that I described above. It is a particularly sensitive device that is adjustable. The idea is that the secondary winding of this transformer can have a load applied to it causing a reaction of taking a bit of the 'zing' from the driver it is applied to. Don't ask me more, because I will just get it all wrong. It is better to go to the Decware site, look in the master catalog, and read the description there.
In short, I was a little scared that I had made a big mistake when I first heard the driver. After 15 minutes of listening, I applied the 'Gizmo' from Decware. This helped the midrange as designed, but there was no bass and the distortion remained. Without too much of my opinion here, I simply will say that bad sound is leaving like a disease, and I plan to find a better amp to drive the speaker. Also, the speaker sounds poorly in my shop for obvious reasons concerning bass. Now the bass has come in, but has some peaks that tell me that it is time to tune the cabinet with polyfill. More later. Greg
