When I eventually went away to college I discovered one of our lecturers had a Hi-Fi system, which was even stereo!
I would sometimes babysit for the family and took my records to play on the system. Using this at silly levels was of course out of the question, as playing heavy metal loud and keeping the kids awake wasn't part of the deal. Even so it was obvious that a system such as this was very worthwhile even at sensible levels.
I determined to have a system of my own, but the only one I could afford was very modest, so self-effacing that it hardly had any dynamic range at all. This was perhaps just as well as I lived in a bedsit with paper thin walls.
I did discover a nearby local shop which sold mostly second hand radios but following deeper inspection I uncovered that it also stocked speaker bits.
I bought a 13" by 8" EMI driver with a concentric tweeter fed by a simple crossover to replace the one I had. I found out that it was important to have an enclosure to go with this to prevent the output from the rear of the driver interfering with that from the front. A book from the library mentioned this but inferred the bigger box the better so I used all the wood I could find in my parents shed, mostly 12mm chipboard, and built a rudimentary box.
Unfortunately, the book didn't mention that it was a good idea to have some way of stopping the panels moving so these flapped uncontrollably on my enclosure and contributed a good bit of sound themselves.
My novice attempts could have stopped here had it not bee for a book I found on a trip to the library called "Loudspeakers" by Gilbert Briggs. Here at last was a worthy text book that I was able to get my teeth into.
Brian Taylor, Aspara Acoustics
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