3d Printed speakers

A friend of mine had access to an enormous 3D printer through work earlier this year - the Wasp 3MT with a 100cm round printing bed(!) 

He tried to print a stupidly overly ambititous design, 1 metre tall, in the vein of the 'Snowmen' 3D printed speaker set by Dutch designer, Kirk Van der Kooij:

The printer wasn't having any of it so he settled with a much smaller and simpler design using a Seas DIY speaker kit. It looked pretty neat last I saw, kind of simple but minimalist, egg pods style. 

I don't know of any interesting available 3D printable speaker designs but I'm sure there are some. You really may as well design your own though if you're comfortable with CAD. The basic principles of sealed box and vented enclosures are really easy to pick up (and you can get a good deal of help with that here - the diyaudio.com forums are also worth a visit for that sort of thing), and they're very flexible in terms of the permissible shapes for a high quality speaker.

You need a piece of software called WinISD to simulate the behaviour of drivers in your box design, then you just have to calculate the internal volume of your design (I'm sure there are dedicated tools or software functions for this, but I've just been using Shapeways' print volume calculator), and incorporate a vent, if you want to extend the bass response. WinISD will give you a rough idea how long and wide the vent needs to be, but in reality it tends to need some optimisation, so it may be wise to print the enclosure and the port separately, so if you get the port wrong the first time then you can tune it and print another one until you get it right.

WinISD has a bit of a weird process for inputting driver parameters (it needs them to be input in the correct order), there's a guide online that tells you the order that'll be easy to find on Google.

You can find the parameters (Thielle/Small parameters or TS) published in the spec sheets of almost all speaker drivers (if a driver doesn't publish it's TS parameters, don't bother with it as it's probably rubbish anyway). 

The one main thing to look out for when designing a wild 3D printed speaker shape is something called 'baffle edge diffraction'. There is a lot of discussion about this available online and some decent documentation which makes it fairly clear which shapes are good for speaker baffles, and which aren't, but you can definitely overthink that part of the design too much.

Generally speaking, if you post a design idea to the forum and there's anything fundamentally flawed about it, someone will pick up on that straight away, and that gives you a good avenue of research to go down, so just doing that a lot is a good way to learn.

You can find some of my WIP here, and download the files in Max format if that's of any interest to you. They're not in the least print ready and it's more like a mish-mash of 2D and 3D design notes and developments than anything, but some of the designs have 3D printing specifically in mind 

P.S. there is no club.