Building my own subwoofer

This video is about the creative project I did for my Music Technology Capstone course. For the project I built my own subwoofer loudspeaker and am shown in this video touring it and demonstrating it.

Hello, my name is Ian Takacs, I am a senior Music Technology student with the College of Visual and Performing Arts here at George Mason University. I am currently in my capstone class, and as part of that we have a creative project. That creative project is what I’m submitting for this Oscar Celebration. For my creative project, I undertook the process of researching, developing, and building my own subwoofer. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a speaker that handles low frequencies of audio, that’s its dedicated purpose. so, without further ado, here it is.

So, it is about two feet, by a little bit over one foot. That allows it to get the internal volume needed to recreate a lot of those low frequencies that I just talked about. This right here is the woofer driver, this is what actually produces the sound, it pressurizes the air using a magnetic system in the back of it which I would show you but unfortunately its all sealed up at this point. It moves the air in front of it, oscillating how a sound wave would, in turn this creates the low frequency sound waves you hear in intense music such as kick drums or a bass guitar.

Moving around to the back here, we have an amplifier. Now in order to drive that woofer driver, we need some sort of power delivery system because we can’t just make energy out of nothing. So. what we have here is called an amplifier and what it does is it drives the woofer driver up front using AC power taken from a wall or some other sort of power conditioner or power strip. That’s just the power delivery, this is what allows the device to function. In order for the driver to produce a signal, it needs a signal delivered to it. So what we have here, is two XLR ports, and that is a form of audio connection. and right here, an older standard many of you may be familiar with on your own home audio devices, this is called an RCA port. Now how they’re configured here, is we have a left, a right, over here we have a left and a right. This, these four right here is our input section. Now what that means is audio is coming into the device from these ports. Now its configured this way so what you can do is run your stereo inputs into this device, right, your left and your right audio, and then have them come out over here to other devices such as speakers that are built for high range audio, high frequency audio. Since this is only built for low frequency audio, you don’t want to be driving high frequency audio through it.

You will now hear a demonstration of the subwoofer, recorded through a Shure SM57 Microphone.

[subwoofer makes noise for the remainder of the video]