The B&W Nautilus is, depending who you ask, either infamous or an icon of modern design. Want the look but don’t have a hundred grand to spare? [Every Project All at Once] has got a Nautilus-inspired design on printables you can run off for pennies. He also provides a tutorial video (embedded below) so you can follow along with his design process and get build instructions.
The model was done in Blender, and is designed to contain a 3.5″ full-range driver by Dayton Audio — a considerable simplification from the array of woofers and tweeters in the original Nautilus. On the other hand, they cost considerably less than a car and have no production wait list. [Every Project All At Once] is apparently working on a matching woofer if that interests you, but unless he invests in a bigger printer it seems we can safely say that would require more assembly than this project.
Of course it would also be possible to copy B&W’s design directly, rather than print a loose inspiration of it as makers such as [Every Project All At Once] have done, but what’s the fun in that? It’s a much more interesting hack to take an idea and make it your own, as was done here, and then you can share the design without worrying about a luxury brand’s legal team.
Desktop 3D printing offers a wealth of possibilities for would-be speaker makers, including the possibility of rolling your own drivers.
I see an amount in dollars in the title, i skip. youtube, this plague!
Why though?
Clickbait and algorithm min-maxing. Smoothbrains click big numbers, but it’s ugly for the rest of us.
i don’t like click bait, i’m not interested by the chase in testing or replicating of the most expensive crap.
and i don’t care that it would be part of the « youtube game » , if you’re content relies on this , then it is not interesting content.
and this video proves it.
Non mais sérieusement c’est très intéressant, j’en ai tellement marre de voir des enceintes plates ainsi que des meubles tout plat meubles de salle de bain, meuble de cuisine c’est horrible à quand des courbes et des formes ainsi des couleurs variées. C’est une très très bonne idée !!
I just can’t believe how easy is stealing a design called copying nowadays… Referring not to the ‘inspired’ printable, but to this: “Of course it would also be possible to copy B&W’s design directly…”
Is creating a reproduction of a known painting stealing as well, according to you?
If you were to copy the B&W design directly just for your own use I wouldn’t call it stealing at all. Same with patents – they’re public, you’re free to use the technology, heck even copy it 1:1, as long as you’re not selling it/making money out of it. It’s completely legal.
You are close on copyright but by your own definition this is stealing because it’s not just for there use it’s in an article that is used to generate revenue that compares it to the original. As for the idea of “fair use” for patents it’s not really a thing it just that in order for you to get more that a court order to stop or destroy the items you would need to show some type of damage was caused to you by its production. What a patent does is give you legal protection of an invention be registering it with a governing body for a specific period of time after which it becomes openly available for the public ti use as they wish.
Copyright infringement is, by definition, not theft. It is a civil violation of property rights. Profiting from someone else’s materials or transfer of them is a crime however, it’s fraud, and fraud is a form of theft.
A patent grants the exclusive right to manufacture something. It is technically illegal to make the replica, it’s just not criminal, so nobody is going to call the police on you.
The patent holder however could sue you if they bother. They won’t, because the cost to litigate is more than what they’d stand to gain. If you’re using the replica of a patented device for some commercial purpose though, then they might have enough of a reason to sue.
Compare the B&W design to this, and you should see there is no way they could show in court that this design is infringing. This is very loosely inspired by their nautilus, closer to a ram’s horn. Even then, a lot of companies do in fact sue, knowing they can bully the vast majority of people through a simple cease & desist letter, because the average tinkerer has significantly less legal funds, and doesn’t have a 5-star lawyer on retainer…
Not everyone is American, European patent law relates to the right to commercially market something, and by definition, a copy or clone is not “theft”, as it does not deprive the orginal owner of the object itself. Arguably the “design” was “stolen” from nature anyway. Chill out.
Sure about that tom? A european patent “allows the owner of the patent (the patentee) to take legal action against others who use the invention without their permission in a particular jurisdiction”
Which raises the question of what “use” means here, but it clearly does not support your claim that “by definition, a copy or clone is not theft”
[says the holder of several American and European patents, but not a patent lawyer in any jurisdiction]
But if you look at the B&W, you’ll see this is very clearly nothing like it. It’s “inspired” in that has a nautilus-like curve to it, but it’s even more like a ram’s horn. This isn’t stealing…
You can’t own a design. No matter how much legal fiction you throw at this “problem”, nature will always allow people to copy what they see.
I learned patent law when I filed my own patent. Not only are other people allowed to make patented items, but failing to include the information needed for someone “skilled in the art” to reproduce your work is grounds for having your application rejected.
Patents only govern who can sell copies of the novel and new elements described in the patent, and even then it doesn’t even cover spair parts.
Great hack 👏
What was your total expense? Also, if you had a higher resolution file, would you still need to sand it with water beforepainting?
Depending on whom you ask.
As OH3MVV said it’s Nautilus line since at least thirty years , and it’s not for eyes it’s for ears .
Don’t even think you could challenge the top of the B&W line with your plastic ram horn and chinese speaker.
Audiophile nutcase spotted
It always amazes me when people try to challenge audio designs. We’ve seen multiple instances here of hardware that simply isn’t worth the price, and yet when it comes to audio someone inevitably comes to defend it. It’s aesthetics, not audio quality that defines high end speakers.
Audio quality is a lot cheaper than the speakers in question.
This isn’t intended as a statement to the quality of these speakers; that’s for the person who built them to care about.
If you want to challenge audio designs with a 3D printed similar, you’d better measure the similar and compare it against the original’s performance. You might even get close, but without measurements, it’s just subjective claims.
The word you are looking for is facsimile, but you could also say “clone”, “copy”, “imitation”, etc. all with different subtleties in meaning. Nobody is challenging anything, this is a project for fun.
Now, could they? Yes, because there are plenty of materials and treatments available.
Yes. You can make a fiberglass replica of a Mercedes SL and mount that to a Volkswagen chassis, but it will not drive like the SL.
Actually, Mercedes-Benz Citan is just a rebadged Renault Kangoo.
It’s not an SL
And? Nobody is pretending they bought the real thing with this.
yeah it seems like the more interesting article would have been an actual study of the sound you can get from cheap drivers and 3d printed cases. i wouldn’t guess whether there’s a limit there or not…honestly i kind of expect someone could do a really good job really cheaply. but there doesn’t even seem to be an attempt at that here.
say la vee
Doing good measurements is expensive. Start with an anechoic chamber and a real Nautilus (or similarly rigorous measurements of a real Nautilus – someone must have done those).
A couple of ladders and an open field is a good replacement for an anechoic chamber.
Are you trying to say “c’est la vie”?
This is the whole purpose of Hexibase’s youtube channel. The whole audio technical stuffl flies over my head.
though, i should give another try.
Absolutely correct, The Dayton driver is nice enough, but it is orders of magnitude from a bespoke B&W piece. The only crime here is hubris.
Awesome job I would like to purchase a pair from you. Simply incredible sir
They look cool, I’ll give it that. I haven’t seen the genuine speakers before, but I’m guessing that even if they aren’t worth $100k (spoiler, they can’t be to me, I’m not fabulously rich) the engineers did put some thought and design into resonance, etc. to at least make the claim they sound good, rather than pure aesthetics.
in a world where people build race cars out of second-hand clunkers specifically to see how cheaply they can make something that’s still fun to race on a closed course, you’d think there’d be some people who were into building stereo equipment specifically to see how good they could make things sound on a budget of nearly nothing. perhaps there are, and i just don’t run in audiophile circles?
There are DIY speaker makers and even books giving guidelines and examples. Building a good box and crossover is fairly easy, but high quality drivers are beyond the capabilities of most amateurs. If you’re looking to achieve +/- 1 dB on axis across the audio band, expect to spend more than $100 for each tweeter.
+/- 1 dB?
System maker is on crack…or using a private definition of ‘audio band’.
I’d start that project with many electrostatics, in a custom built room, then attempt to fill in the lows with many, many big ass drivers.
In the end, I’d still tune with ears, a tube mic and computer, music, pink noise and things hanging on walls.
Tuning would never ever end.
Everybody I knew would be over it.
Need to turn up the polygon count, the segmented sections pi cut and teselated circular sections distract from the fact it is a speaker. I would think it could be smoother right off the printer with min. post processing.
It’s gotta be stl export settings. Different program, but this looks like default Solidworks export settings.
Ditto, my first impression. They are very very cool and I am tempted to download the files and make my own set. I very likely already have some 3.5″ speakers I that would fit.
But the obvious lines really detract from it and I’m not gonna spend a ton of time on post processing.
Still, Kudos to [Every Project All at Once]!
it makes absolutely no sence to me i bet to original Sound better than my 7.1 system but i am using mix and match speakers with OFC cable i think i got suckerd into thinking OFC would be better as less resistance for the electricity to get to the speakers but i am on a shoestring budget
Oxygen free cables?
If they claimed to “lower the resistance” and were anything other than multi-strand copper (100s or 1,000s strands) then I think you were definitely had. There are places making copper wire, ostensibly for “welding” but that’s about as low cost and low resistance as you are going to get.
Do not get sucked into copper quality statements, you are on a tight budget. Go with high impedance speakers and cabling to reduce noise. The cheapest systems have cut power amplification hardware and expect to only power low impedance speakers.
Considering the amount of times tests have fooled audiophiles with cheap copper wiring in comparison with high end wiring, you’re fine. You literally can’t hear the difference. It’s the sense of elitism that makes them sound better, not their actual quality.
You could go for the apple murex shell look. Perhaps play rococo era music too.
I swear I’ve seen this on had before? Yep: https://hackaday.com/2018/12/22/sanding-seashells-by-the-seashore/
Looks like it’s a different but similar design, very cool.
Like Sheryl Crow said, if it makes you happy. But despite the look, these will sound nothing like Nautilus. Cheap components in any arrangement won’t mimic quality.
The Nautilus is $100k worth of industrial design, not speaker. As good or better audio quality can be achieved for 1/100th the price or less.
You don’t get Veblen goods.
Nobody believes any of that crap is ‘worth the money’…
For any other ends than impressing other idiots (they would say ‘important people’ or ‘people with taste’).
That’s super important to some people…and we just don’t get it…like some people just don’t get math.
Then again, the fashion industry makes more money then silicon, and has for much, much longer.
People are stupid.
The key to success in life is finding a way to extract some ‘stupid people’ money.
How stupid people get so much money remains a mystery.
Hats off to the fashion industry.
Good job taking suckers money!
Audiophiles are the same…
S class buyers…
So much energy goes into it: ‘You can tell it’s last years SL, the signal lights are all wrong.’
There was a study some decades ago, going to job interviews in a new 7 class BMW and expensive clothes got people substantially higher offers.
Was microtrend to rent stupid expensive German cars for interviews…
If credit is good enough, take home test drive for interview day.
That’s normally a salesweasel trick, pinks feel guilty and almost always buy the car after.
Wonder it it’s still true, or if it even was at the time…
‘Scientists’ do those kind of studies.
I digress.
What do they sounds like ?
Speakers, more or less.
That’s not a speaker, mate! that’s a headphone.
I am really impressed with your design and creativity. I learned a few things watching your video and I really appreciate you taking the time to make this. I have been looking for an excuse to sit down and learn Blender (sp?) and you just may have given me the motivation.
Well I’m currently making a Compact 2 way design based on the B&W Nautilus. Only I didn’t use a 3D printer and mine are approximately 70cm in hight. Pretty impressive…
No but seriously it’s very interesting, I’m so tired of seeing flat speakers as well as completely flat furniture bathroom furniture, kitchen furniture it’s horrible when will there be curves and shapes as well as varied colors. It’s a very very good idea!! Of course the model in the photo is absolutely not beautiful but it’s the beginnings!!
Would look better if it wasn’t a low poly model.
Really cool but
Its a small full ranger still compared to whats in store a 2k price tag seems fair but if you do all this sand 240 800 add some layer of somthing