 When LG reached out to sponsor a video about their new generation of Xboom Bluetooth speakers, we said, Okay, LG, we'll take your money. On one condition. The Xboom PL7 has to be way better than anything we at Linus Media Group can build ourselves for the same price. This doesn't actually happen that often with sponsored videos, but LG basically said, LOL, come at me, bro. The fact that you're watching this video means that we have come at them. So stay tuned and see how we built our own Bluetooth speaker using off-the-shelf components and a little bit of can-do spirit. Oh, and also how it ended up comparing to the LG Xboom PL7. First we need to lay out some ground rules. Number one is the size. If we built a speaker the size of a microwave and called it a portable Bluetooth speaker killer, that's kind of a cheap shot. On the opposite end of the spectrum, making a smaller speaker something closer to the size of LG's Xboom PL5 or PL2 would have made our lives much more difficult and meant a guaranteed compromise on sound quality on our part. So our DIY speaker will be roughly the same size as LG's PL7. Number two is cost. We could easily spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to handcraft an artisan Bluetooth speaker. But in the real world, if you're doing something like this for yourself, you're usually trying to turn money you would have already spent into a fun project or save a buck. And Xboom PL7 retails for $179.99 at LG.com. So that gives us a pretty good budget to work with if we're targeting mid-tier bang for the buck components. You'll find everything we use listed in the video description, by the way. As for our labor cost, I asked Matthias to track his time for this project to find the true cost of the DIY method. To give ourselves a fighting chance, we settled on BC's minimum wage, which converts to $10.73 US per hour. Though to be clear, even at that rate, we do not expect to beat LG in this regard. Finally, when it comes to sound quality, we want to be on par, if not better than the Xboom. Now, we didn't crack open an Xboom like a technology omelet to see what secrets lie inside. But by reading the packaging and peering through the speaker ports, we were able to put together a pretty comparable spec sheet. Getting on to the actual speaker now. Matthias, being a bit of a design nerd, spent a couple of hours scratching down ideas and doodles, eventually settling on a retro modern Scandinavian aesthetic. It's clean and smooth with an arching silhouette. Now, we would have loved to have a beautiful brushed aluminum exterior to go along with the wood features, but unfortunately, we really couldn't justify the cost, so we altered the design slightly to allow for 3D printed features. For the drivers, we went with a pair of 2-inch 8-ohm full-range speakers and a single 1-1 1⁄8 inch tweeter. We would have preferred to have a tiny 2-inch subwoofer instead of the tweeter, but unfortunately, those were both out of stock and over budget. Having a design goal to work towards, we then set out to model the various components in Fusion 360. One of the more important parts of the design is the speaker housing, and we opted for a ported design in hopes that it would improve sound quality. Using online calculators, we found the total volume of air and how long of a port we needed to, at least theoretically, prevent sound buffeting, which landed in the neighborhood of 428 cubic centimeters and about 25 centimeters long, so that required a little bit of tweaking to the original design. After the initial housing design was completed, it was time to do some test prints to see how everything worked. It was then updated to accommodate the tweeter, 3D printed, checked for clearance issues, shrunk due to the aforementioned clearance issues, then finally 3D printed one last time and sanded with 220 grit. Next, the small air gaps where the wires feed into the drivers were filled with hardening putty, and the tops and bottoms of the housings were then epoxied together and left to cure. It's finally starting to look like a speaker. We did a similar modeling and printing process with the external part of the speaker, except that it was too large to be printed as one monolithic unit, so we split the design into three pieces that could be glued together later. They're a little rough, but we're gonna have links to all the parts in the video description if you guys want to download and play around with them. Once all the newly adhered components cured, they were sanded to 400 grit, then primed with etching primer to assist in filling in the ridges. After the paint dried, some of the larger divots were filled in before resanding to 800 grit this time, and then it was finally reprimed, painted matte black, and finished with a satin clear top coat. Meanwhile, we used our Glowforge to laser cut all of the wood pieces and then sanded them through the range of grits up to 800. Two coats of butcher block oil made the wood grain more pronounced, then once dried, we gave them three coats of satin wood varnish, and after the third coat, they were lightly resanded to 800 grit to get rid of any grain rise before spraying them with their fourth and final coat. The front and back panels were then glued to their inner counterpart that slots into the top of the external housing, and due to a slight oversight, the screw holes in the housing and on the speaker grills were drilled and tapped after everything else was finished. Now, originally, we were planning to use a well-reviewed Chinese amplifier board from Damgoo, but since it shipped two weeks late, we had to find an alternative. Matthias ended up sacrificing one of his personal cheap Bluetooth speakers to harvest the board from inside it, but then, at the last possible second, the Damgoo board arrived, and Matthias hastily installed it only a few hours before right now, a few hours ago, before filming. It's Bluetooth 5.0, it supports up to 40 watts of total speaker power, it requires no soldering to work with, and while it doesn't have a built-in battery management system or an aux cable input, at $8, I think we can forgive some of those deficiencies. Anyway, it only cost us another $6 for a Type-C charging board for our twin banks of four genuine 18650 cells, and after some last-minute paint repairs and finishing touches, the whole project is, for better or for worse, done. I'm actually really excited about this. Like, come on guys, it's not perfect, there are definitely some warts and a handful of design changes that would have been beneficial, but we've already blown our time budget on this one, and it's time to judge the result. Like many Bluetooth speakers, you pair it by holding down the button on the bottom, which is actually also the volume knob, and it automatically shows up in your Bluetooth devices list and gives a notification tone through the speaker to tell you that you're connected. Which leaves only the big question. How does it sound? I feel like, you know, I'm in my- I'm in my listening room, you know, I need my glass of wine. Oh wait, no I don't. Ugh! LTTstore.com water bottle. Hit me with some jams. This is my jam. Okay, cut it for now. I don't know what surprises me more, the deficiencies or how surprisingly adequate it is. All things considered, the bass is a little muddy. To do it again, I think there's no way we can compromise and leave out the subwoofer. Absolutely not. Although, in fairness, you know, even though this was absolutely a first attempt for us, you can really tell that the porting in the back does help enhance it. It just lacks the clarity that we would get with a proper bass focused driver. I feel like the tweeter's not contributing much either, if anything. The highs are a little harsh and the bass is a little muddy. But if I were to compare it to just like kind of a cheap Bluetooth speaker, I think we're in really good shape here. As long as we don't mind, you know, the weight and some warts. This is some excellent use of hot glue by the way. 100% 10 of 10 approved. You haven't actually listened to a PL7 yet, have you? I have not. So, Mathias has listened to his own speaker but has only evaluated it in a vacuum. I'm like, I'm really excited. I think we got a little wrecked, son. That is- it's pretty tight. Here, turn it down. Here, hold on, hold on. Okay, Mathias, in fairness to you, your highs are more articulate, but almost in a way that's like imbalanced and a little detrimental to the sound. And you can absolutely tell where the engineering went into. I mean, that's the popular sound profile, right? Is that, that like, thumpy heavy, like bass heavy sound. And it's right in the name, right? X Boom. They definitely got us. And we're not smaller, or we're not the same size even. Did you just say close enough? It's a little bigger. The LG X Boom Go PL7 is linked in the video description. Having the sound tuned using Meridian Audio Technology results in less distortion at the highest volumes for a great listening experience. If you want to see how Meridian makes their $100,000 speakers, you can click this video right here. By using the internal air pressure to move the external dual passive radiators, the X Boom PL lineup can deliver more bass and more volume. And it's also great for the sound of your speakers. Using the external dual passive radiators, the X Boom PL lineup can deliver more bass to give superior full range sound in a compact package. And it features IPX5 water resistance. Oh, we didn't even think of that for ours. And up to 24 hours of battery life. It's got LED lights that pulse to the beat of your music. We didn't think of that either. And you can control your speaker with the LG X Boom Bluetooth app. Okay. Well, hey, at least we were cheaper, sort of. The total cost of parts before shipping and taxes came to $139 US dollars, which is by no means cheap, but it's still slightly cheaper than the X Boom Go PL7, weighing in at $179.99. Although in fairness, after the battery, the single most expensive line item on our project was the time involved to make it. 62 and a half hours, apparently, by Matthias's count. So using our labor calculation of 1073 times hours, that comes out to a massive $670.63. Bringing the grand total of our DIY adventure to a staggering $809.72. How could we have shaved that down? Maybe sand it a little less? Yeah, don't be so picky. Don't use three different materials. Maybe spend more on having like a subwoofer and like spend more on your drivers and maybe a little less on your Scandinavian design. Although you know what? I personally think it looks wonderful. Even if, you know, it ended up getting its butt kicked by an off the shelf solution. Hey, it really says, you know, I care. You know, that's what it says. So in closing, if you want to spend the time to design and build a Bluetooth speaker the way you want it, while also having a DIY project that can last anywhere from a few hours to days or even weeks, then hearty Matthias recommendation. Thumbs up, two thumbs up, two thumbs up. Especially if you love playing around in CAD software. As for our original goals, well, I mean, you could make an argument that we did okay as far as size is concerned, but I really can't recommend following our design as a cost saving measure unless you just really love making things and ignore the time factor. And unless you really know what you're doing, beating the sound quality of a properly balanced and tuned solution like the PL7 isn't going to be easy. Thanks again to LG for sponsoring this video. Check it out on their site or at the link in the video description. It's always great when we can use sponsor money to go on an adventure like this, isn't it? Yep. That's that's $800 of LG's money hard at work right there. Thanks, LG. I will treasure it always.