Got sent here from r/budgetaudiophiles after looking to replace my Klipsh bookshelf speakers. I love music but know very little about good speakers currently. Im looking for sources that have all the parts i need for a good bookshelf build and possibly a sub. Basically a kit or something to help me decide on parts. I am an engineer in the electrical field (granted i work on data centers) so I’m not a total noob with electronics.
Also does the enclosure material make a big difference? I see a lot of mdf and wood that look like .5-.75” thick. I have a laser cutter that can cut up to .25” wood that i would love to use if the material thickness is less important.
Towards more DIY guidance, it would help to know your budget, listening environment, goals, cabinet construction knowledge / skill, and how much you want to DIY versus knock down / flat pack designs. Some of the suggested speakers and amps in this thread are just the most generic recommendations for first timers when you may be wanting to jump to something more advanced with higher build quality and/or better fit to your space. Conversely some of the suggestions have cheaper + superior options for most listening spaces (you need a seriously large listening space to benefit from dual 18"s and a Crown amp when a nice 6-8" DIY tapped horn run from a class D amp will be less than the Crown amp alone and sound better). I hate when people get frustrated by “the chase” because they start with something merely ok-ish or not suited to their use case and space.
As far as construction techniques based on what you have mentioned, you can laminate up .25" material to make very good cabinets. An advanced speaker cab maker approach would be to use Decidamp for constrained layer dampening as a 3rd or 4th layer in such a layup. Typical good speaker cabs are at least .5" thick, with .75" on all sides and 1.00" for the front baffle being preferred in most DIY designs and what the designer specifies in the schematic and usual cut sheets.
Circling back to my comment about constrained layer dampening with Decidamp or similar, you could make ~.8" thick walls with 2 conventionally bonded .25" layers (wood glue / PL Premium / contact cement) and another .25" layer bonded on with Decidamp. The Decidamp properly applied will add a bit of total thickness. The other nice thing that a laminated + laser cut panel would lend is doing very precise double rabbet joinery of completed side panels to other panels. Note that the constraining layer in constrained layer dampening should not be glued to adjacent panels for other sides and should “float” with the Decidamp or similar holding it to the base panel (i.e. not part of a rabbet joint).
As far as material selection goes, Baltic Birch and marine cabinet grade plywoods are the gold standard for speaker cabinets followed by other hardwood cored cabinet grade plywoods. The number of plys and core type is the most important quality factor here. Construction plywood and MDF are generally in the same category with the grade of the plywood – core and voids being what puts various construction plys better or worse than MDF.