Building a Custom 3D Printed Speaker Enclosure

Introduction

Center channel speakers are very important for home theater setups. While working on a home theater setup with my father for our family, I decided to design and build my own center speaker with a custom 3D printed enclosure. This project allowed me to create a speaker perfectly tailored to my space and aesthetic preferences while learning about speaker design and enclosure acoustics.

Speaker Driver Selection

The foundation of any speaker is the drivers. For a center channel, I had a small 3-inch speaker lying around so I decided to make use of it. It lacks a little power, but it should still do the job.

Enclosure Design

The enclosure design was the most interesting part of the build. I didn’t really know anything about speaker enclosure construction before this and I learned a lot! I read this article and it really showed me the basics: https://sound-au.com/articles/enclosures.htm

Although I didn’t really do any true math to design it, I learned about the basic concepts like what a bass reflex port is. But overall it was very interesting.

CAD Modeling Process

I used Onshape to create the enclosure and here’s the link to the rep with the stl files: https://github.com/bolanxu/Custom-3D-Printed-Speaker

And here’s a screenshot of the onshape design:

Results

The finished speaker actually sounded quite good which suprised me. Here are some photos of the final build: