IUPUI Music Tech Blog

In less than a week, you’ll be able to come and listen to our refurbished speaker live as our performers play through the Speaker - less set. As we continue to rehearse through our set, however, our speaker went on a little field trip to InDIYana 2018 with Keher Neote, our student electrical engineer on the project. InDIYana is a casual event of speaker enthusiasts who build and show off speakers of their own design every year in Fort Wayne. The theme of this year’s event was “Keeping Up With the Jones’s” in honor of Andrew Jones, designer of the famous Reference One speakers for Technical Audio Devices Laboratories Inc. in the 2000s. The idea is to showcase coaxial speakers at a budget price, and designers can compete with each other to see who has the best design. Keher’s goal, however, was only to explain his work on the speaker as well as show off how good it sounds even 60 years past its date of manufacture.           ...

It finally feels like everything is coming together as we set up and finalize our set for our performance next month (Monday, May 7, 2018) at Square Cat Vinyl at 8 pm. After our final tests of the speaker at Klipsch, we were able to put the speaker back together and combine it with our set. It’s actually fascinating to see it in action because the sound coming from the speakers is surprisingly clear. When performing in the middle range of frequencies, the speaker is able to produce a quality of sound that seems incredible when you think about how old it is. It really speaks for the hand-crafted quality of the speaker; since this was just one prototype, they made sure each measurement of the speaker case would enhance the overall sound of the speaker.This high quality, however, is not without its limitations. The speaker’s performance drops when playing lower and higher frequencies, to the point where we avoid them all together for fear of blowing out the speaker. While...