MacSpeakerz: Loudspeaker Design Software for Macintosh

DESIGN YOUR OWN SPEAKERZ

How many times have you thought that you could do a better job of designing a speaker than the speaker company? Twenty-five years ago I bought some speaker components, crossovers, and speaker box plans (about the size of UREI 833's) from JBL. I cut the wood and glued the boxes together. Then I started experimenting to see if I could make them sound better. I whipped out all of the audio-design books and my K&E slide rule and started calculating. I made the boxes out of thicker wood, changed the port size, changed the crossover components, changed the damping material, changed my mind. It was a mess. I still have the speaker system. I have been carrying it around thinking that I would get to it again real soon now. I have even had the woofers reconed twice because smog ate the surrounds.

Bingo! A Physicist named John Murphy wrote a program called MacSpeakerz that will solve all of your speaker-system design problems. I stumbled upon a demo copy of the program on America Online. I downloaded it and started messing around. I was hooked. I called them up and bought the real version.

MacSpeakerz is a CAD program that allows you to design a very-high-performance speaker system with optimized frequency-response characteristics The program contains the mathematical models for both vented and closed speakers of either rectangular or trapezoidal shape, crossover components, and a database of over 670 loudspeaker drivers.

I am not the only person who thinks this is a great design tool. MacSpeakerz is used by Apple Computer, Yamaha, Kenwood, Acoustic Research, Fostex, Nakamichi, 20th Century Fox, and Maryland Sound-and the list goes on.

By the time you read this there will be a PC version called WinSpeakerz. I think this program is so good that I am going to do a full review of it in a future issue.

-Roger Nichols

Reprinted with permission from EQ magazine, April 1994.