Parametric Spherical Speakers Are Not A Moon

A good speaker enclosure is not just about building a box out of plywood and covering it with carpet, although playing with 1F capacitors is pretty cool. No, for a good speaker enclosure you need the right internal volume, the right size bass port, the right speaker, and it should definitely, certainly, not be a moon.  [Rich] figured out he could do all of this with a 3D printer, resulting in the NOMOON: The NOMOON Orbital Music-Making Opensource, Openscad-generated Nihilator.

This work is a continuation of earlier work that designed parameterized speakers in the shape of Borg cubes. Now [Rich] is on to Borg scout ships,  and this version has everything you would expect for speaker design.

The NOMOON is available on the Thingiverse Customizer with variables for the internal diameter, the volume of the enclosure in liters, wall thickness, speaker hole, bass port, and wire holes. Of course a customized design is also possible with a stock OpenSCAD installation.

[Rich] has printed a few of these not moons and even with a speaker with terrible bass response, he has a pretty good-sounding setup as far as Youtube videos go. You can check that out below.

8 thoughts on “Parametric Spherical Speakers Are Not A Moon

  1. In the upper end these should have good dispersion as the sides fall off from the driver.
    Many designs have no port, they use acoustic suspension. Something keeping the speaker from being on the “equator”?
    The downside is the inside of the sphere is a one note musical instrument par excellence. 3D printing can make the inside of it irregular damping the worst resonance.

  2. Here are two things that would put this way over the top. 1. I would like to see this taken to a point where the script tells you where the audio diffraction rolls off based on the diameter of the speaker. 2. I wish the design had a double wall that could be filled with sand and then plugged. The problem with using plastic is that it is going to vibrate with the speaker. By being able to fill the shell of the enclosure with sand you could make a very good sounding speaker this way.

  3. To dampen resonance, obtain a copy of 3D data NASA has of the Moon or other solar system body then print that as a (very much scaled down) speaker enclosure. The irregular shape inside should not produce a standing wave or harmonic at any frequency. If there isn’t 3D data for an asteroid like Vesta, it should be possible to create if copies of all the images from the Dawn probe can be obtained. *googles*

    Ah, yes, we can get a 3D model of Vesta, and Itokawa. http://www.3ders.org/articles/20140724-nasa-releases-printable-3d-models-of-spacecraft.html

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