for today's video i build what seems to be a universally loved high-end diy speaker kit by
a company called css audio and let me tell you gaming on these speakers genuinely blew my mind
that gunshot i felt that in my chest wow that hurt but before we get to the
butt-clenchingly visceral gaming experience these offer we need to build them first
lots of paper cool first we have this let's have a look at it
and then look at that bad boy oh that is that is quite heavy oh that looks like the
kind of thing you use to trigger earthquakes some nice die-cast aluminium action now i'm
just gonna interrupt myself pretending to know what i'm talking about here
to tell you a bit more about the speaker kit i'm unboxing this kit is called the one tdx
and if you buy it with the baltic birch cabinet kit like i have here it costs just over a thousand
dollars before attacks which is a decent chunk of change for a speaker kit but according to the
internet they are well worth the money and that hype around them is one of the main reasons i
actually reached out to css audio and asked them to send over a kit for a video which they very
graciously did so now that we know what kind of beefcake diy speaker kit we're working with
here let's jump past the rest of the unboxing and watch me squirm trying to do some basic carpentry
now the first step is to glue up the baltic birch cabinets which i'm gonna do one at a time
because for some reason clamps cost a million dollars each
the sides of the speaker now according to the instructions you start with a side flat on the
table and then you just kind of build it up from there it also recommends dry fitting
first which may sound uncomfortable but you don't want to go stuffing wood in the wrong
place and then getting your glue everywhere i'll start with this side for whatever reason
hey it's starting to look like a speaker a pretty big one at that and before i glued up the wood
i just dusted the seams to make sure we got a nice tight bond oh i actually forgot to mention
the reason that i went with baltic birch over mdf for the cabinet material was because baltic
birch is easier to finish you don't need to put veneer or whatever on it you can just treat the
cabinet itself but that does mean while gluing up i want to protect the wood from any glue spilling
onto it making it harder to finish later on so i am going to tape up the edges with masking tape
so now we've got a little bit of protection so let's get to gluing and i'm just gonna put some
glue this kind of glue like that oh so much poos coming out now so we want to kind of it's kind of
where it's going to stick oh now there's so much of stress so then this goes in like that i did
something wrong and it was at this point that i realized despite the dry fitting i still managed
to screw it up oh no luckily my incompetence was pretty easily rectified oh i think we're okay
we're gonna do that we're just gonna pretend like i didn't initially glue it up incorrectly luckily
aside from that moment of terror gluing up the rest of the cabinet was relatively straightforward
but now we need to clamp it now taking out a mortgage on the clamps was definitely worth it
because i used the pressure from the clamps to force all of the panels into a final snug fit
that's looking really good and while that's standing there building up strength i'm going
to start preparing the panels for its twin brother and after so successfully cobbling
together the first speaker cabinet i was now a carpentry master i was basically
harrison ford which meant building the second cabinet was trivial for someone of my skill
hey would you look at that i built my own boxes and they actually look really neat aside from
a couple of little scuff marks that we'll deal with in sanding while finishing them
i actually think they turned out really well it's very exciting
which means we can move on to building the crossover
now it's time to solder the crossover together which is the bit in the speaker
which dictates which frequencies go to what driver and the speaker it's very important
interestingly css audio does offer two crossovers for all of their speakers
there's this stock kind of like loser crossover and then you can also pay 400 extra dollars
to get like an uber epeed and crossover now when it comes to the hifi community uh the
whole capacitor quality thing is quite a hot debate there are two camps the one side is like
any reasonable quality capacitor is fine the only thing that matters is the values of the capacitor
and then there's the other side of the argument which would probably disown their children if
they found out their brain wasn't wired together with like honey beeswax dueling caps or whatever
either way i think it's great that css audio offers you both options now this
is a really cool part about this kit it comes with a 3d printed crossover board with little
slots in it for all of the different components and then there's a wiring diagram on the back
which should make soldering up the crossover pretty idiot proof so let's jump to it
now as is tradition on this channel i am going to be censoring my soldering work because even
if i was the world's best solderer some of you would still find a reason to complain about it
would you look at that i finished the second crossover which was way
easier to do than the first one and i'm actually pretty happy with the results
so with that we need to go finish the speaker cabinet which anna has said she wants to do
before anna starts finishing the cabinet i just wanted to drill some bigger holes on the back of
the cabinet for a sexy different binding posts i wanted to use that didn't come with the kit
damn look at how good they look anna did such a good job finishing them they've got this really
nice golden sheen to them which means now all that's left to do is assemble these suckers
oh that looks nice all them different materials and textures
now here comes the really fun bits screwing right next to a soft dome tweeter just
one slip and whoop there goes your tweeter
now it has been three weekends of work to finish these speakers it was quite a lot
of effort but it was a very rewarding process and i think they turned out
super well anna did a great job finishing them and yeah i think they look great and they also sound
amazing playing battlefield 5 on this speaker setup in this room was a crazy gaming experience
it feels like i'm playing so i'm saving private ryan here what
it's quite difficult to explain what really good sound offers you but i think the best
way to describe them is that they're like gaming with a really good pair of headphones
but they have a couple of distinct advantages to headphones the first one is headphones are
right by your ears and no matter how good they are at creating a sense of space in the sound
everything still kind of just sounds like it's around your head whereas these speakers create
a much bigger sense of space in their sound and they put the acoustics of the game environment
in your room you can really hear the air if that makes sense it sounds really dumb but th the way
it renders like distant gunfire as well it sounds like you can hear for miles and actually when i
first set up these speakers i was quite worried that positional audio was gonna be an issue while
gaming because they're just two speakers in the front of the room surely everything was just gonna
sound like it's in front of you but these speakers encircle you with sound i don't know how but
they're somehow able to communicate to your brain that there are things above and behind you and
they have honestly some of the best positional audio while gaming i've heard ever pretty much
i could hear the tank drive over me like how is it doing that how are they creating sound that
far around and then the second big advantage to these speakers over a good pair of headphones
is their bass these speakers kick hard deep and fast it is really something to behold
and these speakers move a lot of air in the room so there's a real physicality
to all of the explosions in the gunfire like when somebody gets on a browning
50 cal which is like a big machine gun on a tank it you can feel every round
in your chest as it's firing off and it's because of these two advantages the very
physical and crazy realistic sound and the way that the speakers encircle you with the
air in the game it just leads to such immersion it feels like you're in the game environment
but now that i'm done frothing at the mouth over the gaming experience with these speakers
it's not all zeus tickles and baby smiles these speakers have some real practical disadvantages
now the first one is that they're passive speakers which means they need external amplification
and a digital to analog converter and those things cost more money and they take up space
the amp that i used for this setup was and i'm gonna throw my back out here give me a second
okay i think i'm gonna kind of rest it on my knee like that now i use this insanely heavy
amplifier to power this setup uh it's called a primo unico i think is its name and funnily
enough it is actually a 21 year old amplifier that i bought used it was apparently handmade
in italy back in 2001 which is amazing it's got 80 watts of class a b power and it worked really well
with these speakers it doesn't have a digital to analog converter in it though so i used a topping
d7s for that which is another 400 now i did also try the speakers with a little smsl 8018 which is
a small amp dac combo that you can buy off of amazon for about a hundred and fifty dollars
and well it definitely didn't sound bad with the little ad-18 which also has 80 watts of class d
power which that's a whole different story but um it didn't sound bad with that amp it's just that
the the whole sense of space that i was talking about was a bit diminished maybe from like a 10
to an eight and the bass authority wasn't quite there in the same way and it wasn't quite as
as girthy and it didn't kick as hard with that little amp now having mentioned all of
the extra stuff you need the next disadvantage is definitely price you can pay thousands of
dollars for a pair of headphones but you can also get a very good pair of headphones for way
less money now the third disadvantage is that uh because they're not headphones you you can't do
voip so if you like shouting at people on the internet you you can't do that with speakers
and then the third caveat's a pretty big one speakers are quite room and placement sensitive
so if you have like a weirdly shaped room and you don't set up the speakers very well they
may not give you that same uncanny sense of game error environment and if the room's pretty big
they may not punch as hard or they may have too much bass if you have them too close to a wall and
there's a whole bunch of stuff like that unlike headphones where if you put them on they just
always sound the way that the headphones sound so that's definitely something to bear in mind so
there are definitely some caveats to this speaker setup but it did offer a genuinely spectacular
gaming setup and i think the main takeaway from this video for me is that audio is definitely
one of the most underrated aspects when it comes to an immersive gaming experience and yeah maybe
maybe your next upgrade should be something audio related to really step up your audio game so yeah
thank you very much for watching thank you very much css audio for sending over these amazing
speaker kits i really enjoyed building them and yeah subscribe to the channel if you liked it
watch another video the suggestion will pop up in a second and until the next video bye you