DIY

MUSIC

THE SWEET SOUND OF

PARTICLEBOARD

Beef up the tone of open-back amps with a little thrift shop help. By David Battino

After transforming a record player and some plumbing parts into a spinning speaker (see MAKE, Volume 05, page 24), George “the Fat Man” Sanger is back with a new way to enhance your guitar sound.

His Goodwill Amp Enhancer is a DIY version of the commercially available Enhancer, which beefs up the tone of open-back amps by redirecting the “lost” sound to the front.

The nicely finished commercial versions start at $150 ( soundenhancer.com), but the Fat Man built his enhancer out of a $15 computer desk he scavenged from a thrift shop. “It took just an hour or two,” he reports, “and adds wonderful tone to my amp.”

How It Works

The Sound Enhancer site details the science involved, but in general, the Fat Man explains, an open-back amp is a design compromise.

“In theory, a perfect speaker box would be a speaker mounted in the middle of a wall of infinite size, because that would let the sound from the front reach your ear without having been partially cancelled by the inverse sound from the back,” he says. “Mom won’t let us build anything infinite anymore, not after what happened last time, so we approximate the infinite wall by putting speakers into sealed boxes, also known as infinite-baffle enclosures.

Photography by the Fat Man

132 Make: Volume 10