If you are buying it, then you will pay top of the line prices for everything, and you will have to add on the standard 40% to 60% to even 100% gratuity for the builder/designer/manufacturer.

If you are building it yourself, then you can afford to wait until the speakers that you have designed it for come on sale, you can wait until the electronic crossover and amplifiers come up for a good price on ebay, and you can do the whole thing without any gratuity to the manufacturer for his profit. You can do things in the design that would be totally not cost effective for the manufacturer.

But if you are building it yourself, you will actually have to study and research everything you can find on the subject, buy books, ask people, and make a full study of how to do the whole thing. You will not get this from any one source, and most of the people who know how to do this are manufacturers, and won't tell a DIYer how to make their product for much cheaper.

So you have to decide how much work you are willing to do or how much money you want to pay.

MARLBORO