The Mini-Me V2
10 March 2019
This is a redesign of a pair of "garage speakers" that I built a few years ago, using some spare components I had lying around. The "Mini-Mes" were getting a lot of use as part of my youngest daughter's bedroom system (along with the "El Uglito" subwoofer that was still going strong with some new drivers from Madisound), and the rubber surrounds on the bass drivers was starting to fail, so I decided to keep the boxes, upgrade the drivers, and make new crossovers for them.
The Upgrade
The drivers I chose for the upgrade were the Faital Pro FE120 120mm bass driver (mostly because it was a 4 ohm driver that very similar mounting requirements to the drivers that they were replacing) and the Dayton Audio ND28F 28mm tweeter (for similar reasons). To come up with the best crossover for the chosen drivers, I took my usual approach of measuring them "raw" mounted in the speaker box, and then using the resulting FRD and ZMA files in XSim to design the crossover. The final crossover that I opted to use turned out to be pretty simple, resulting in an acoustic crossover point around 1.4kHz.
Results
The results sound pretty good to my ears. In fact, it's almost impossible to detect that the bass and highs are coming from separate drivers, even when standing pretty close to the finished speakers. There IS a bit of a dip around 4kHz in the combined frequency response curve, but this disappears on off-axis measurements, so I didn't both dealing with it as it would have made the resulting crossover considerably more complex.
Of course, the refurbished "Mini-Me" speakers still look a bit like garage speakers, but now they look like more refinined garage speakers and sound pretty good too.
