Guitar Isolation Cabinet

Project Category:
Guitar and Bass Speakers

Project Level:
Intermediate

Project Time:
8-20 Hours

Project Cost:
$100 – $500

Project Description:
The project entailed building a stand-alone guitar isolation cabinet for a professional touring musician who utilizes a Mesa Triple Rectifier

Design Goals:
Build a solid enclosure with very good internal acoustic air space as well as high sound absorption to prevent stage bleed.

Driver Selection:
Part # 290-4801

Enclosure Assembly:
5/8″ Baltic Birch plywood. Entire enclosure is held together with beach-wood biscuits,staples, and glue. This method while taking longer actually ensures a stronger bond and zero chance of vibration and resonant frequencies from fasteners coming loose.

The only fasteners that were used were 10-32 T-Nuts and grade 8 SHCS’s to hold the driver in place. Truss head screws were used to mount the Penn-Elcom handles and jack dish into place with foam gasket around the flanges.

The inside of both chambers of the isolation box contain Owens Corning 1″ 703 wrapped in black burlap fabric. This was aesthetically pleasing, but also prevented sound transfer between the inside cavity of the box and the outside.

Conclusion:
While this project was very time consuming, it yielded a product far superior than any big name guitar speaker that could be purchased. We utilized the finest materials, construction methods, and Eminence Drivers for a high quality product. This design is very unique in that no one has developed a horizontal platform isolation cabinet with integrated speaker and microphone chamber. Most isolation cabinets are vertical and look goofy with an amp head hanging off both sides. The other beautiful detail about this project was the driver we selected: Eminence EM12. This driver had a 200W RMS rating on it which fell in line with the output power of the Mesa head. This allowed Seth to push his amplifier gain to max and get the tube sound he was after without destroying the speaker or getting kicked off stage.

About the Designer:
SRL Loudspeakers (founded 2017)

We were founded on guitar iso-cabinets and quickly moved into designing and building sound reinforcement cabinets for DJ’s and mobile musicians. While lead times aren’t our selling point, our quality and tonal characteristics speak for themselves.

Project Parts List: