Sound quality has always been a huge deal to me, I've never been able to get by with cheap speakers on my PC, or cheap headphones. If I'm going to listen to music it HAS to sound right. My old speaker setup on my PC was aging poorly, the DIY setup of a monsoon amp and subwoofer and sharp single-way speakers just wasn't cutting it anymore. Not that it really cut it in the first place, it always annoyed me.
So I decided to do a bit of DIY work. I took apart an old set of stereo speakers, from an old but barely used Panasonic system I bought a few years ago. The original speaker boxes had water damage, but the drivers had been saved by the fact they had been facing up, and they, as well as the passive crossovers, sat above the water line. Now, looking at the drivers and tweeters I originally intended to get the specs for them and build new boxes, but in the end I decided to do something different. I built open air stands for them, and hooked them up to the Monsoon amp and subwoofer.
Open air like this is rarely considered ideal, there are a lot of variables that a traditional speaker box takes into account to give you good sound, I won't list them off though, for the fact it would make this description longer than it needs to be. In this case though, the results are FAR better than I had expected.
Put simply, these things sound FUCKING AWESOME.
I think it's largely due to the fact the dowels isolate the vibrations of the drivers and tweeters. And the Subwoofer takes care of the low frequency range, so the drivers and tweeters only handle the mid and high range. It's essentially a semi-3-way setup, and it works wonders for the clarity and response range. I mean, I wish you people could hear these things, because DAMN.