Hey kid! Wanna build a loudspeaker? The first one’s free

In 2000, Penn State University instituted a First Year Seminar (FYS) requirement for every entering undergraduate student. This paper describes a hands‐on FYS on audio engineering that has each freshman, in a class of 20, construct and test a two‐way loudspeaker system during eight 2‐hour meetings. Time and resource constraints dictated that the speaker system must be assembled using only hand tools and characterized using only an oscillator and digital multimeters. Due to limitations on the funds made available for each FYS by the College of Engineering, the total cost of entire system could not exceed $65/side. Each student is provided with a woofer, tweeter, crossover components, and enclosure parts to build one speaker system. The students are offered the option of purchasing a second set of parts for $65 so that they can complete the course with a stereo pair. Ninety percent of the students exercise the stereo option. This presentation will describe the speaker system, using an enclosure made primarily from PVC plumbing parts, and the four laboratory exercises that the students perform and write up that are designed to introduce basic engineering concepts including graphing, electrical impedance, resonance, transfer functions, mechanical and gas stiffness, and nondestructive parameter measurement.