I’ll start off this post by saying that my wife and I had a 5.1-channel satellite and subwoofer setup for quite a long time at home. After a few years I decided to upgrade to a stereo setup with decent left and right drivers. You heard right: upgrade to stereo. Our dominant use-case at home is listening to music rather than watching television and movies and satellite systems absolutely suck for music. If you purchased one of these systems with the puny 1 to 2 inch drivers I am so sorry that you have to listen to such inferior quality audio. I took the bookshelf speakers which I was using for my digital-organ and put them in our living area along with the existing subwoofer to create a 2.1 channel setup. Guess what: it was even better with television as well.

After about 6 months, I really wanted to play organ again without needing to use headphones so I started searching for some decent speakers which I could replace the bookshelf speakers with. After plenty of googling around and showing the specs to some of my work colleagues, I decided to DIY and get a Jaycar JV60 Speaker Kit (the cabinets are also available from Jaycar). The kit is a three-way design utilising 2 Vifa P17WJ speakers and a Vifa D25AG tweeter. The supplied crossover is designed such that one woofer provides only sub-200 Hz frequencies and the other provides sub 3 kHz frequencies i.e. there is an overlap in the bass frequency response. The manual states “This has been done to achieve a strong and extended bass…”

Personally, I don’t understand why the tweeter is in the middle of the cabinet rather than the top. I figure that the typical use-case for these speakers would be floor standing in a living space featuring an epic couch. Our couch is by no-means epic, and is actually quite low. Even so, when I am sitting on the couch, my ears are above the height of the tweeters. I would have expected that the most directional speakers would have been placed either on axis or slightly above rather than below the height of even the head of a child sitting on a couch.

Building the Speakers

I thought this was going to be a trivial exercise that would take an hour or so – but it took me quite a bit longer. This is likely because I’ve forgotten how to use a screwdriver. Long ago are the days where I was apprenticing for Peter D Jewkes pipe organ builders… my hands still have blisters.

Cabinets

Mounting the Crossover

First step in the manual is mounting the crossover on the back of the speaker. You are meant to pre-drill holes for the screws to mount it inside on the back wall of the cabinet – but good luck doing this unless you have a miniature drill that you can fit inside the cabinet. I managed to get the supplied wood-screws straight into the back panel with a bit of force. The kit was missing the nylon spacers which were meant to separate the crossover from the back wall, but fortunately I had some spares in the garage.

Issues with the Speakers

Dead Tweeter

After building the speakers, I set about testing them out. Test one was loud electronic music – worked beautifully. Bass was clear and the break as mid frequencies lead into the tweeters was fantastic. Second test was some Bach organ chorales, this test did not go so well. I kept hearing some distortions in the audio; at first I wondered if it was the recording or encoding artefacts but then I noticed it was only coming from one speaker. So I fired up Adobe Audition, created a sine sweep and sure enough one of the tweeters was just totally distorting in the 2-5 kHz region. I got the speaker replaced and all was fine.

Damaged Grill

When I got the speakers, one grill had damaged connectors which attach to the pins on the speaker cabinets (see the pictures). The plastic connections look like somebody had just hacked at them with a hammer and forced the grill on – even though it wasn’t even close to being aligned to the pins. I managed to fix these up by inserting a screwdriver into the connectors for a while to restore their original shape… but I was still pretty annoyed that they were so broken when I got the cabinets.

Summary

These speakers are amazing… once they are built and working. I doubt that I would be able to get a better sounding pair of speakers for less than 2 to 3 times the price I paid for these. However, if you decide to build this kit: insist on checking that all of the components are present and that there are no defects in the cabinets/grills. Make sure you do heaps of listening once you’ve built them to ensure the speakers are all working and there are no unpleasant distortions or leaks in the box.

What I really love about these speakers is how the mid woofer covers such a large frequency response and how well that response leads into the tweeter region. The drivers themselves are clearly of an epic quality: the tweeter is not harsh at all and both the woofers and the tweeter don’t appear to have any horrible peaks in the frequency response. Even soft organ reeds with frequency content which covers the whole audible spectrum sound really natural.