This project continues by taking a step forward, then two steps back...

First, let´s talk about the step forward, which is the damping. It´s not a secret that computer speaker boxes from the 90s are acustical nightmares. They vibrate like crazy even in low volumes and low frequencies sounds hollow and inaccurate, generally just awful. I used 1,8 mm thick STP Silverline damping mat to add some weight to the surfaces, and on top of that I added 8 mm thick STP Splen 08 for noise absorption.

In addition to deadening, my original plan for these speakers was simply just to improve the aesthetics of the boxes, and keep the original tweeters and woofers. I painted the boxes bright white and the label in silver.

I managed to rip the label of the passive unit in half, so I decided to fill the remaining holes with plastic putty. After drying a couple of days, the surface looked smooth and flat, nearly perfect. But after the paint had been settling for a week, the line between the putty and the original surface has become clearly visible...

And this is where it all goes to shit. The passive speaker unit came together very nicely but the active one gave me really hard time. Attaching the amplifier required me to take off the label that I had already glued on. Very carefully, I tried to pry it off but these labels being ~25 years old, they may have gone somewhat brittle. So, the label ripped, the paint on it chipped and also the white surface got damaged around it. Nonetheless, I still tried to put it together. It turns out that the buttons with their thin paint coat are too thick for their mouting holes. On top of that, the ribbon cable of the amplifier was ripped off. FUCKING HELL!

You can probably imagine that at this point I was extremely frustrated and agitated, and wanted to burn these speakers in the yard. But after I sat myself down and had glass of single malt, I realized that I have an opportunity to do something really cool these boxes. Even though it adds over 100 € on the original 30 € budget, I really think this project will be more creative and satisfying. To be continued... 😀

Looking forward to seeing what happens next! I think we've all had small, fun projects get out of hand and turn into expensive epics but they're the ones I remember best 🐱‍🏍

Thanks! It´s obvious at this point that this project is a slow one and isn´t even nearly finished. But there´s progress:

I added a little more dampening. There´s a little paint on the dampening of the front panels because I had to paint them again.

Due to setbacks of the previous post, I had to rethink this whole project and decided to turn both boxes into passive speakers. I filled the holes with plastic putty, trimmed them with spray putty. This isn´t as easy as it seems, it takes a LOT of patience! I took my time with the prep work and it finally paid off.

Well, it´s been a while… just a few years so I thought it´s time for an update 😁

This project started to get quite frustrating so for the sake of my sanity, I had to put it to a halt. A couple of years later (sometime around 2022) I found my motivation again. As mentioned previously, I decided to turn this speaker-set into decent 2-way passive speakers using original mounts, not only because of the broken components and labels but also because the sound quality is just shit.

So, for 2-way passive speakers we´ll need drivers for lower and higher end, and also 2-way crossover. I found some cheap no-brand 2-way crossovers, some no-brand mid-range drivers in Ebay and for tweeters I found these Visaton drivers:

But since I am a man who can´t live without problems, the mid-drivers didn´t sit perfectly into the mounts like thought.:

So, I tried some U-trim around the driver to bridge the gap and assembled the speakers:

Yeah... they looked good but didn´t sound very good, at all. Not being very savvy on audio stuff, it´s difficult to describe but let´s use words like "imbalanced", "hollow", "peaked", etc. Maybe the components weren´t very high quality and/or they compatible, or maybe these boxes just weren´t suitable for the,´m...

Disappointing. Very much so after all that work. BUT like mentioned previously, I faced this obstacle already a while ago so when I found my motivation once again, I came up with a more solid plan which at this point is close to complete. A new exciting update coming just before New Year and a video soon(ish) after that!

Holy crap, I had a set of those back when I was a kid! My parents bought them for me in 1996, and they were miles better than the cheap Labtec speakers that came with an old Sound Blaster multimedia kit my uncle bought; he had given them to us since he had a reasonably nice stereo setup hooked up to his PC and didn't need them anymore.

Mine didn't have the Syntony branding, but sounded... fine until I got the money to replace them with a set of Altec Lansing 4.1 speakers in early 2000 to complement the Sound Blaster Live I had purchased in mid-1999. So many of my memories of how DOS games sounded come from a Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 hooked up to those generic speakers, though!

MadMac_5 wrote on 2024-11-13, 17:30:

Holy crap, I had a set of those back when I was a kid! My parents bought them for me in 1996, and they were miles better than the cheap Labtec speakers that came with an old Sound Blaster multimedia kit my uncle bought; he had given them to us since he had a reasonably nice stereo setup hooked up to his PC and didn't need them anymore.

Mine didn't have the Syntony branding, but sounded... fine until I got the money to replace them with a set of Altec Lansing 4.1 speakers in early 2000 to complement the Sound Blaster Live I had purchased in mid-1999. So many of my memories of how DOS games sounded come from a Sound Blaster Pro 1.0 hooked up to those generic speakers, though!

Haha! 😁 Yeah, I´d guess this particular speaker-set model brings back 90's memories for many, MS-420S was just some wide-spread generic computer speaker model from Taiwan, IIRC, and then different brands (Syntony, Juster, Sunnyline...) just slapped their stickers on them. Back then they sounded pretty awesome compared to other generic computer speakers but now the sound-quality is just terrible, even for retro computing 😁

The drivers that will populate these boxes are 4 inch full-range drivers Dayton Audio RS100-4. And yes, these speakers will serve as retro PC speakers connected to an external amplifier and yes, I understand how someone would feel that this goes a bit overboard considering their purpose but hey, even retro games sounds a lot nicer with decent speakers. I just don´t want modern looking speakers next to my retro computer 😁 And besides, a hobby is a hobby is a hobby!

As someone who has improved a few similar PC speakers back in the day - gluing the sound deadening material to the insides of the boxes won't help nearly as much as you think it will, unless you use a thick layer of the fluffy gray speaker batting. You will often get better results by stuffing the whole enclosure with a big wad of the stuff, that or regular old pink house insulation works nearly as well. This is what you'd find in "quality " small sealed bookshelf speakers of the era (ie optimus and others). You can also experiment by closing off the bass reflex ports (just stuff insulation in) and see how that sounds, often these were more for looks then anything

bertrammatrix wrote on 2024-11-18, 16:03:

As someone who has improved a few similar PC speakers back in the day - gluing the sound deadening material to the insides of the boxes won't help nearly as much as you think it will, unless you use a thick layer of the fluffy gray speaker batting. You will often get better results by stuffing the whole enclosure with a big wad of the stuff, that or regular old pink house insulation works nearly as well. This is what you'd find in "quality " small sealed bookshelf speakers of the era (ie optimus and others). You can also experiment by closing off the bass reflex ports (just stuff insulation in) and see how that sounds, often these were more for looks then anything

Nice tips, thanks! But I have a couple of these projects under my belt too and I have to disagree on your point about the deadening material. When the enclosure vibrates as much as these flimsy 90´s speaker boxes do, then it´s definitely beneficial add some mass to the surfaces. The problem is that with smaller boxes you easily start eating the volume, so you´ll have to be mindfull on how to place the mat. But I agree about the bass reflex ports though, at least when it comes to smaller boxes like my previous projects.

However, with these particular much bigger enclosures that I´m working on now, it´s probably better to leave the port open. It´s difficult to accurately measure the volume of these boxes because of how they´re shaped, but roughly measured it´s a little over 3 liters with the added deadenings and reinforcements (not presented yet). The manufacturer recommends the following specs for the RS100-4 full-range drivers:
- For sealed enclosure: volume 0.85 (F3 143 Hz)
- For vented enclosure: volume 2,83 liters (F3 72 Hz)

Alright, let´s move forward!

As mentioned earlier, these boxes will house these lovely Dayton Audio RS100-4 full-range speakers

I had make new mounts for them so I used a couple of pieces of 16mm MDF

I wanted the mounts to look like the drivers actually belonged there so I used plastic putty to fill the extra voids.

The next post coming in a few minutes... ;D

Continuing:

Here the front pieces with primer applied

The boxes were already damped in previous phases but I added some extra matt

Front panel from behind

About to attach the driver

Next post in a few minutes, yet again...

And the last post for this update:

I attached these nice little rubber feet in the bottom of the speakers with nuts and bolts

Driver installed in the mount, front mesh still under work

Behind

Speaker ready with a polished front mesh!

And here the pair is are right at home!

Well, they´re finally ready and took only over 4 years and a few moments of apocalyptic frustration. And how do they sound? In short, just lovely! Switching to full-range drivers really paid off. The last update will come when the video is ready, it´s going to take a couple of months.

Nice to see you got these done. Yeah no doubt those full range speakers sound a lot better then what was in there originally.

What are you powering these with? A little class d amp?

bertrammatrix wrote on 2025-02-15, 01:23:

Nice to see you got these done. Yeah no doubt those full range speakers sound a lot better then what was in there originally.

What are you powering these with? A little class d amp?

Thanks! I even started replaying games that I´ve already completed, even some DOS games sounds much nicer 😁 The amplifier you see on the table is SMSL Q5 Pro

I released a video about this project: https://youtu.be/zfZRFzL2uIk