The Galactica Project

These speakers have been a wonderful experience for me. I knew from the outset that they would be a challenge to put together properly and would be very time consuming, but I had a feeling they would be worth the effort and expense. I am not at all disappointed and believe these are absolutely the best speakers I have ever built and I will be hard pressed to build anything better! Visit Tony Gee's HumbleHomeMadeHiFi site here for his description of the project design.

There are more than 100 parts to cut for the cabinet construction. These I had cut on a Thermwood CNC to ensure accuracy. The parts are from varying thicknesses of a highly refined MDF.

The head is 28 layers of mdf each with different bore sizes to create the inner driver chambers. I pulled a steel cable through the channel as I went so the cabling would be easier when the time came. You can see the small loop of cable in the tweeter chamber.

I have a really large re-sawing band saw in the shop, but it still wasn't large enough to accommodate these head pieces so I ended up hand sawing the rear angles. This took about four hours.

The front baffles are made up of five layers, glued up and bored, then the angled facets are cut on the sliding table saw.

Interior bracing and chamber walls are substantial in these enclosures. The PHL mid woofer is in a vented chamber while the 15" Ciare is sealed.

This lower cabinet is ready for sanding and then veneer.

I was uncertain about what veneer to use for these cabinets. My wife and I both really like the Mappa Burled veneer that I used on the Soup Sandwich cabinets so I started out using that. After seeing the flitches and determining that the long seams down the side would be distracting I changed my mind and went down to visit Joe at JoeWoodworker.com. He had some really beautiful Birdseye maple flitches that were wide enough to cover these deep sides without any seaming so that was the deciding factor. The veneer work on these cabinets took nearly 36 hours of labor. The cabinets are so heavy that one person cannot move them alone, and getting them into the vacuum bag was an adventure for each piece of veneer. In an attempt to stay alive longer <G>, I have been switching over from the Urea based adhesives I use for veneering to a more human friendly cold press adhesive. I used this for all but the small facets on these cabinets with excellent results. As the veneering was so time consuming and the veneer materials are also very expensive, I have decided to offer these cabinets in a painted finish as well to try to keep the costs down.

Here are the heads after veneering. They are quite heavy, I am guessing about 70 pounds each without the drivers. This functions to firmly anchor the drivers in space and there is no vibration that I can detect.

I will offer these finished with the high gloss Ilva finish over Polyester that I used on Dan's Tannoys, but I chose to use the shop standard satin nitrocellulose lacquer, which looks great on this Birdseye.

I decided to build a four way active crossover for these so I could gain some experience in that type crossover and also so I could listen to the speakers while I worked on the passive crossovers. I chose Rod Elliot's P09 project boards and his P05 power supply for the crossover. After consulting with Tony about the crossover points I put this active together, used three Bryston 3B amps for the lower end frequencies, and a pair of my Bottlehead Paramount 300B amps for the tweeters. To connect this I used Speak-On twist lock connectors, and built the cable from an eight pair studio line I had using Canare Star Quad 4S11.

This crossover sounded really quite nice, but I was not able to get the low end drivers to work together to my liking. I also was not happy with having to deal with four amplifiers, actually five as the 300Bs are monoblocks, so getting the passive crossovers done went high up on my list of things to do! I did not choose components brands exactly as Tony had them specified, knowing that these things are always very subjective in any event, I went about choosing high end components that I felt would sound good in this application. I ended up using mostly Jantzen parts for the inductors and capacitors, and used Mills resistors. The end result is really very very nice to my ears.

Once I swapped out the active for the passive, and bridged a couple of the Brystons to mono, one for each cabinet, the speakers came to life. I stayed home from work the first day as I could simply couldn't listen to the speakers enough.

Please visit Tony Gee's HumbleHomeMadeHiFi site here for his description of the drivers used for the project.

As I listen to these speakers more I am noticing that they are particularly impressive with soundtracks. The Hans Zimmer Gladiator music just is mind boggling the way it builds and carries you away. When playing Brian Bromberg's "Wood" cd, I feel like the upright bass is in the room with me. Herbie Hancock's "Possibilities" is amazing in all its variety, and of course all my progressive friends, particularly Gentle Giant, really come to life with these speakers. I will get some measurements made hopefully soon and add them to this write up. If you want to get into the very best listening experience but don't have $40K to $70K  for a pair of speakers, these just might be the answer for you. I would put them next to anything I have heard at CES without fear.

~Frank

Galactica pair with passive crossover network and veneered satin finish $18,950.00

Galactica pair with passive crossover network and high gloss veneered finish $21,500.00