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- Опубликовано: 16 июл 2024
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I’m gonna love the series!
Very interesting aspect, the open baffle. I can’t wait to hear them.
Just a heads up... you don't always have to go with a wider front baffle. You can also add a lip to the back of the top and sides of the front baffle. As long as the total width of the baffle and depth of the lip pieces equal what you need to cancel any rear waves, then you're golden. :-)
The width of the baffle should be a 1/4 wavelength of the desired f3 down point. (see free air resonance, QTC of .707)
Kirby, My friend found the best sounding open baffle speakers in the world. The 1962 Zenith 49cz852 12" drivers are quite literally amazing and have the most natural, detailed sound with pinpoint imaging. I paired them with a 3" tweeter with a 1uf cap and the results are stunning. They pop up on eBay every now and then. I love them so much I own 5 of them, four of which are in matched pairs.
Bon appétit! Obviously, the "lacking bass" side of things was to be expected... to my knowledge, the only way to get decent bass out a open baffle speaker would be to go for a 15" driver or so! I'm surprised that they are lacking in mid-range thought! It might be the GIANT breakup between 2500hz - 7000hz that these Dayton exibits over shadowing the overall flat mid-range... I am eagerly awaiting the sound test for those and I also think your idea of doing a ported box and compare is BRILLIANT!!!
Also, I'm pretty sure you could get astonishingly better result if you use a BSC and a Notch Filter to bring the bass at the same level as the rest and tone down the shouty mid-highs... I have been considering these in a 2 1/2 way with a PM180 as the 1/2 and a Fountek CD1.0 as the tweeter crossed around 500hz and 5000hz... Your test might be what decides me!!!
Thank again for a great video Kirby!!!
Higher Qts is somewhat necessary for a good open baffle setup, as well as having a wider baffle area and baffle step compensation circuit. The DIY Audio Projects website has component calculators and a wide array of knowledge on how to build a corrected OB system. Also, OB projects tend to favor having a separate midbass woofer with high mechanical stiffness (Eminence Alpha 15A, for example) to handle lower frequencies, mounted to either a very large (4'x8'x1") sheet of MDF or placed in an "H" baffle (more compact way to create a larger separation between the front and rear acoustic waves).
Great video. Love the simplicity
Great! It's good to have the right tools.
The Qts of that speaker is .33 For OB it needs to be much higher, perhaps something between .6 and 1.2
The main points of OB are NOT to hear the back waves, it's to free the driver from the pressure on its cone (added mass of air in the box) and to eliminate the distortion that any box adds to the sound!!! Also, the phase shift (group delay) is smaller. It acts as a 1st order "enclosure" for a more transient-perfect sound.
Higher Qts is equal to resonant low frequencies.
You should have just increased the baffle size or more efficiently in terms of size - just add "wings" to them. :)
Open baffles give you the sound of the driver itself instead of listening to a box...
The purpose of Infinite baffle is to not hear the back wave. Open baffle adds the rear facing sound because it's more natural, like a musical instrument.
I already once designed an open baffle subwoofer with two low cost 8" drivers working in compound in a "U"-shaped 9"x9"x9" dipole "enclosure". It worked fine but had a strong resonance (due to the length between front and back of driver) in the lower mids as expected which had to be suppressed and had a low sensitivity in the bass section.
A popular belief is that an open baffle needs a driver with a high Qts. The German magazine Hobby HiFi proved this to be uneccessary a few years ago by comparing the frequency responses in open baffles of different drivers with high and low Qts. They found no significant difference. What you do need is a long throw driver, especially for open baffle (resp. dipole) subwoofers. They published a few designs for open baffle speakers from fullrange to 3-way.
The PS180 is suitable for an open baffle. I actually wrote some info which you partly confirmed in this video in the comments of your build video which I copied here:
>The data sheet of Dayton's PS180 in the German magazine Hobby HiFi 1/2012 looks promising: very low mechanical loss (0.31 kg/s), high sensitivity (98 dB from 1 watt @ 1 kHz), decent linear excursion of +/-4 millimeters and very low distorsion (K2 and K3 each less than 0.1% between 250 and 2000 Hz, K5 even less than 0.03% above 170 Hz). What an exciting and also challenging project! My guess would be that the lower cut-off frequency with a baffle of that size will be between 300 and 400 Hz. I'd recommend to add an open baffle subwoofer with at least two 12" drivers. Maybe in an "U"- or "W"-shaped dipole (also called RiPole by its inventor Axel Ridtahler). Your open baffles will need a big room with at least 1.5 yards distance to every wall. To design a passive correction network (I'm not sure if this is the correct English word for the fullrange equivalent of a crossover network) to get a decent sound quality will be a lot of work. This might be the perfect project to try a digital crossover such as the miniDSP which could make the design process much easier.<
How did you tune your previous projects? You could use ARTA (free demo) and a miniDSP UMIK-1 ($75) calibrated mic for measurement and BoxSim (free full version) for crossover design.
A very neat build i saw somewhat recently had three 12" woofers, one mid drive, and separately one ribbon
I believe you chose the wrong speaker. You need a qts of .6 or higher for dipole speakers. The Dayton doesn't suit your goal @ .3. Audio Nirvana makes good models for this. Your baffle is fine. To truly explore the concept you should match these with an dipole subwoofer.
that first thing that i thought about in the previous video, qts less .5 it is for ported boxes
That makes total sense. For some reason I wasn't thinking of an open baffle setup like a (very big) ported enclosure, which seems obvious now. Thank you for your input! Another thing to note, I took these into my listening room to measure them and they sounded WAY better than in my living room, so i'm thinking their positioning in the room impacted the sound as well. Can't wait to try these with proper drivers. Thanks for watching!
@@KirbyMeetsAudio check out some other tubers doing this.
, This is the fun of experimenting with speaker design. You can always change your design. Having fun while working and experimenting is the key.
Learning is always fun.
A basic consideration - Your getting a figure 8 effect, where, what's coming off the front. cancels what's coming off the back, visa-versa. Had you used 2 pcs., rectangles, in an H configuration, for the stands, it would have lessened this effect, somewhat +-, instead of a huge baffle. Quality OB that plays to moderate volumes is a tall order. Great channel!
So theres one thing I'm kinda surprised you missed. Even though its an infinite baffle, you want the positive and negative waves from hitting each other to take as long as possible. You could use either a bigger front piece, or actually put sides and top/bottom on it. Keep the back off. This philosophy is why many speaker makers like andrew jones puts the ports on the back now. The two different waves take longer to fight with another. Similar deal with infinite. This front piece is just too small.
Car speakers are the same way. Dynamat, sound deadening isn't the big deal of getting great sounding doors. Its getting a proper seal from positive/negative waves that can make a huge difference. Even if its not fully sealed, it'll take long enough for the two waves to meet.
Gotta have a dedicated bass element when going open baffle. An H-frame 12" woofer open baffle sub on each side would make good stands for what you already have there and provide a solid low end. Cross the 12's over at 80hz low pass 12db.
I think you made 2 errors :
First, OB needs speakers with very high Qts. This is not the case with this one.
Second : although this driver has a very wide frequency response, it's not flat at all and is heavily unbalanced. Combined this with a small baffle and bingo, you get what you heard.
I suggest you try the same speakers in a nice tapered transmission line with a bit of filtering of the highs. You might be amazed.
Love the project.
Great Job Kirby !
Thank You Very Much !!
Very Interesting and am Looking Forward to the Upcoming Vids.
As Some Have Stated, I Think The Speaker is The Culprit. Not The Design Itself.
I Don't Have Any Experience With the Open Design, as Far As listening Goes, But I Would Guess, That a Speaker With Good Bass Response Would Do Fine In this Application, Especially if if it Was Placed Near a Wall, or Other Hard Surface Where the Back Could Reflect. I Think a SubWoofer Would Probably Be Overkill, Unless You Had And Additional Mid-Range Incorporated In the Design.
and can you make speakers with passive radiators i wanna see how you tackle that, i really like your designs your channel is where i come for inspiration and i use them to keep my boss happy :P
Well.. they look great! :D
Hi Kirby! I am going to build OB's. I bought Eminence speakers because they have a total quality factor of at least 0.7 For frequencies below 150Hz I will be using a technique called: "slot loaded open baffle". And size matters: I will use 2 12" subwoofers in "slot loading", a 12" bass speaker and a 10" midrange per channel.
Kirby, I think it's a great idea to use the same components and only adjust/variate the enclosure to see the impact of the box on the sound. It would be great to compare these side by side: open enclosure, closed enclosure and maybe a horn box as well?
I don't know much about the complicated part of open baffle speakers, but I played around with whatever I had laying around and my very small 0.75in thick baffle seemed to produce a decent amount of bass, but there's a major lack in mids, which might be because of the small baffle or because of the drivers.
Gonna try again with some 40s woofers and a bigger baffle.
You should consider doing a T-line sub woofer build. They have always peaked my interest and I have always wanted to build one and would love to get your input on them.
nice simple project well done
Reflector Audio. Google this company from Latvia. The sound it produce are phenomenal. Glad I had a chance to listen it once.
BTW your design looks great.
Hey man, there is a paper that you should read, just search "mjk open baffle" it's for a two way speaker but you can apply the concept to yours. I'm currently building the exact ones but with an active crossover/eq to fix any issues I have with a mini dsp
Appreciate your video and just coming ft curiosity, if bass and mid range are not going to be easily managed, how about open baffle as tweeter? I am a newbie btw.
As you found out, a single driver just cannot handle the lack of bass that an OB causes. In general an OB should be a 3 or 4 way speaker. Often even augmented with a subwoofer breaking up the bandwidths into 5 different bandwidths. This assists with dealing with the bass losses as well as something called a dipole peak. Don't worry about dipole peak for now.
As for the driver type, usually a driver with high Q is used to deal with the loss off bass. Also something with a lot of xmax to help with the gobs of displacement required to produce bass.
BTW, OB speakers aren't used to get rear radiation as well as front radiation. It's to cancel out energy to the sides that would otherwise reflect off sideways. This is a dipole radiation also known as figure 8 radiation. The bass cancellation is intended in the design to achieve the dipole radiation, but it's not a good thing that the bass is lost. It has to be compensated for with eq and multiple drivers. This is why lots of xmax is required because you quickly use it up trying to get the bass back.
If you want to learn from an expert (as I am not an OB expert, I prefer closed boxes) you should read some of Siegfried Linkwitz's work on his website here: www.linkwitzlab.com/ Another expert is music and design. I forget the gentlemen's name, but he is an OB expert: www.musicanddesign.com/products.html
For your project you may want to consider a parallel LR circuit to cut the highs down. Something like 3mH and 10ohms in parallel. Or using eq if your have a computer for a source. This will chew up excursion quickly but may make the sound a little more tolerable. Good luck.
Ryan
Thank you for all the info, Ryan! It's pretty amazing how complicated such a simple design can be. I'm a big fan of your channel!
Hey thanks that means a lot coming from you.
I made some OBs once. Sounded ok-ish, but nothing impressive. From what I've read you need to have really big drivers (in diameter), since they basically have to work with the room and push a lot of air. So for me there's really no point in spending money and taking up space with them. I'll just have some fullrange or 2-ways and a sub anytime.
Bogdan Serban Agreed. I don't understand why people want to make these. At all. If you want mediocre sound just grab whatever you can find from your local thrift store.
Kirby! dood. in the spirit of trying out stuff, how about a comparison build of an enclosure wood you normally use with an upgrade to old growth wood. There may be something to instruments being made with this wood. How about speakers?
The only enclosuers I have made was a pair of transmition lines and a pair of dispersed ports, both had a very 'open' sound, so I am no expert.
I do remember reading that open baffles need to be quite big as the bass is proprtional the the baffle size, and as 100Hz has a wave length of 3.4mtrs, that a big baffle! as a compromise you could try open backed?
To get a good bass response, you will either want a bigger baffle to prevent the pressure from "spilling," or you can use a larger driver in order to move enough air to override the spillage effect.
You should anyways check out some of Linkwitz's tips and designs for infinite baffle speakers. I can't think of anyone in this world who can possibly have more experience and knowledge with this than him, plus he's Norwegian 😁😛
you ever do sound demo videos of your builds? I cant seem to find them
If you ever want to talk about speaker design, I'd love to chat! I have lots of knowledge and experience in loudspeaker design and the likes. I love your videos and I would love to help out in any way I can!
so from what frequencies does those speaker lose it? would had love to see how linear those speakers are and how they are not.
I can chime in from a guitarist's stand point. Most small combo amplifiers use a semi open or open back design, especially older, quality amplifiers. They originally werent designed for bass response. They sounded middy and had plenty of high end. (We also used "low quality" paper speakers, and still do for natural overdrive and break up, so bass wasn't the intent.) Even today, high end amplifiers like marshall still use open back amplifiers and speaker cabinets bass response is not the intent. The bassy detuned musicians use (4) twelve inch speakers in a cabinet at a moderate to low volume to get deep bass for recording. Maybe that helps.
I have seen one pair of open baffle speakers in a high end hi-fi shop. (I don't know the brand), but they were 3 way, and the woofer was 15 inch. I think that's how you'd get the bass response.
I think a heavy base would help the lower frequencies. You could do a really cool concrete base with these.
For Open Baffle to work properly, you need to understand a few things in order to make them work effectively.
First and foremost, the baffle has to be big enough that the lowest frequency the driver(s) will produce are either kept completely separate from the back to the front of the baffle or in phase with it. Ideally, you would want it to be in phase so as to augment the front (main listening side). Therefore, the shortest distance from the edge of the driver to the edge of the baffle should be about 1/4 wavelength of the bass f3. 1/4, so that when the back wave, which is 180 from the front, wraps around and back down to the front edge of the driver, it has now traveled the 1/2 wave distance so that it is now IN PHASE with the front wave. No need for doing calcs, Google is your friend and can do it for you, or at least get you pointed in the right direction.
Second, OB needs a driver that can move air. That means either a good size cone or a very healthy XMax. Herein lies the reference to a higher QTs, as they are generally more loose with the damping factor. So if you have a stiff driver (get your minds out of the gutter!), you won't get much in the way of deep response, unless the driver is physically huge.
Third, room placement makes all the difference in the world when using OB speakers. You actually need the standing / reflected waves in order for the smaller ones to work anywhere near respectably. Before you write them off, try placing them about 2' to 3' off the corner walls, angled somewhat in toward the listening area. Experiment from that base point, closer or farther to the corners /sides/back wall(s).
Fourth, just by eyeball, the baffles seem a tad small. If room placement cannot garner decent or improved sound, try adding some extra border around the top and sides. don't worry about the bottom because the floor is part of that system. Grab one more board and put it around the sides and top (don't worry about the bottom as the floor is part of that system) with an angle toward the back, say from 22-1/2 to 45 degrees. This will help increase the time delay of the rear wave because it has to actually travel backward and the "curl" over around the edge, which would slightly weaken the back wave in addition to delaying it (phase shift).
Other comments have given you good pointers and links, but give the room placement a try before starting any mods.
*** Yes, I know this is an older video and you've already made your changes, but I just wanted you to know there could have been hope for the originals.
In all my years as an audiophile i found that my Fostex FE206En sounds quite amazing in open bafel config. All you need is a good amp a good dac a clean source and to add a subwoofer to handle the base and you have something that's far better then any thing else for the same money. I think it's just a mater of finding the speaker that sounds good to you and you never go back to closed enclosures again. And you can simply add a tweeter later on if you feel like it.
Mine sound great in a 2.1 set up, as it fills in all of the low end.
What is the oil mixture you use to finish a lot of your projects? I think part of it was linseed oil? The label was out of focus in the video I am thinking of.
l like birch, it makes great firewood along with douglas fir.
you should get drivers that need a big box so that your open baffle speakers use the room as a box so if you dont have enough air pressure to fill up the room it wont sound good or you could make a box with one side open it will perform better than your current setup but it wouldnt be a huge improvement you can also make a surround system like get 5-6 same speakers that would compensate the lack of airpressure in the room the only problem with your current setup is that the room you play it in is tooo big! thats all
Your driver needs to have a Qts value of around 0.7 or above to have good bass handling in open baffle design. These drivers would be amazing for a ported or large sealed enclosure. Send them to me if you don't want them! ;) Probably just the wrong driver choice to try open baffles.
Got here to say that. I heard even higher Qts as the treshold, 1.1, if any of the bass is to be heard
You are spot on. It typically should be .7 or higher. One of the best things to do, is to model it in winISD (free). Then model a closed system and make the box as big as possible. You will start to notice that the box stops affecting your low end frequency response. It is at that point, you can see how low your speaker will go.
I'd argue that your materials choice and stand are wrong. You want a cabinet to be acoustically dead: as little vibration should travel through the medium as possible. Why so many think birch is a great choice when it's used in instruments for its ability to carry a tune is beyond me as they resonate like crazy when it's used. Second, by having the single little stand on the side you're not really grounding the speaker well. Enabling it to resonate more. Wasting a lot of the energy the driver should be putting out into the air. Open baffle speakers should be rigid, yet, isolating. Think of an optimum open baffle design in terms of a trumpet being made of concrete as opposed to brass and you get the idea. That's why there's so little bass: the low frequency vibration is going into the baffle instead of the air given how resonant it is. Chip board is used to great effect by Wharfedale as it's even better at cancelling out frequencies than even MDF and you can compound and paint it to whatever color you want. (I'm partial to hammer tone navy blue myself ;)
As said by others, you need a high Qts. also, the lower you want to go the larger the baffle has to be. Otherwose just use a seperate bass cabinet for 300Hz or lower. I have yet to discover a full-range unit that can actually do bass and highs without needing assistance.
time ago, i build a open baffle speaker, with a little full range speakers, but... the same, i lost a lot of bass, when i ask a friend he tell me that drive, (my drive) wa made for another kind of enclosure, (first error) reading, a lot, i found that an open baffle speaker it is for interior, the back-bass response it is make by the enviroment the room what you use, the drive that you use and the music, looks great but not work in every music, with random curve =( , have a great day ,great channel ;)
If you put a triangle on the top then put them in the corner of a room I bet they sound great
Personally I would have used a Dayton Audio 8" Designer Series Mid Range woofer for better bass and vocals maybe.
Dualcone fullrange ???
I heard something like QTS 0.7 and up is for open baffle
You chose the most difficult louspeaker : full range and open baffle.
it's all about Qts 0.6 -0.7 other drivers not suits
bigger buffle more bass... heavier front "panel" is also plus for more bass
but it all wont work with small drivers, at least 8"+ or multiple of 6"+ drivers
To small baffles. Make them much taller and wider for these drivers, and choose drivers with high QTS.
Sent an e-mail a while back, just need help with my first build. Willing to pay pal you for your time. :P
start with a solid block, cut the back at an angle agreeable to you (usually no more than the speaker pokes out the back) so the bottom has mass...this will "anchor" the sound giving you that bass you're looking for...still not perfect, but def better. cant do a solid block? design more mass into the speaker
ry some decent car door speakers as they are designed to operate with low to no back pressure typical drivers need cabinet pressure or they will bottom out to easy
Please make a high end speaker build video!!!
with this configuration i think you must add a subwoofer.. ;)
Hey Kirby, could you help me build a cheap Bluetooth speaker ? I already have some power banks and some speakers. Please
Great video! I like the "build-video + talk-video" format! One thing really, speakers are not drivers and vice versa. Speakers are the complete "thing", wooden enclosure, driver, x-over, binding posts, etc. Drivers are just the thing that moves the air. Hope that explanation helps clarify things.
add a big driver like 12 inch sub to the setup and see your open baffle design making everyone bust a move or two
I would add weight by putting glue on the back of the woofer cones it will lower your operational frequency
I like it
open baffle can sound good if the baffle is LARGE... like 8 meters large. not that much worth the trouble imo.
Just take those drivers out. and replace them with vintage drivers from an old console record player unit aim for speaker units from the 40s 50s or 60s my personal favorite are Philips Norelco speakers out of console units from the 50s or 60s for open baffle units.
You're right about the Philips drivers. I made open baffles as a fun project last week. Took two 10 watt full range drivers from a crap spunding plastc speakers and placed them in 30 x 60 centimeter chip wood plates. I was surprised!! They sound so much better. Gonna make new baffles in a few weeks time and fool around woth different amps. .
Hi Kirby. First of all, congrats for the very good job in all your builds! The problem is always if the speaker is built and fit for open baffles, which is not the case of these you have tried. Try these ones "Tang Band W8-1808 8" Neodymium Full Range Driver". They are suited for open baffle applications and are for sell in Parts Express. I truly believe you'll be satisfied then. The only final remark is that you must check the wood plate. You may need to design it differently (bigger). Try it out and then tell us what is your experience. Thanks and good luck!
Download Basta! it will be your friend with designing any speakers.
Huh little late...
You are amazing builder but you must do some research in acoustic and electronic fields. If i ma not wrong Fs of these drivers is above 50Hz, 56 or something Hz? It means that they won't play any much lower than that point. Don't know the other characteristics perhaps they could sound good in TL or TQWT design. I vote for TL design if they fit by other characteristics.
You must check on their Freq. curve. The segment which is the most flat is the segment where they will play the best.
There is another concept suitable for let's say 2 way speaker. Name is FAST. Full range is on OB and woofer is on the OB too, but very low placed. Behind it there is 'box' without back (or bottom) side... Please read the old Lampizator site namely the Endorphine 17 speaker. You don't have to use old Saba's greencone drivers but there is good concept for the lower range and bass drivers and fairly good way of crossover's design and built.
Disregard any hater of Lampizator site, at least this part i am writing of.
Cheers
Open baffle are not efficient not even close so some equalisation is needed. Hearing rear sound, well has been said should not hear. But in your room you will with reflection, no choice it's basic physics. Option's infinite baffle or take to the hills with Julie Andrews. The wood I agree should be dead. Get them off the floor on stand or hang from ceiling some how as you don't want the panel moving. If all speakers they claim to be accurate, then in theory would all sound the same. Hi-fi is about the best interpretation of the original signal not photo copy it can't do it. If you want original phone Mick Jagger to bring the band around his number is
What about a plexi back ?
Man open baffle speakers are challenging to the professionals, that’s why most companies don’t do it. Check out Underwood HiFi website and look at their speakers. It may help I’m not sure.
Kirby, check out the GR Research forum on audiocircle.com. He designs some very nice DIY open baffle speakers and subs. Great group of people who will share their knowledge on the subject.
Kirby, you did not exactly understood how OB works. :D
Why not add a tweeter on top?
How about showing us what they sound like
First rule of ob speakers:choose a driver with a Qts as high as possible.Second rule of ob speakers:stick to the first rule.
When you are unfamiliar with a design, it probably makes sense to choose a tried and true one for your first effort. Just randomly slapping a driver on a standard cabinet would probably not result in anything great either, unless you get lucky.
Nice try Kirby - but I'm afraid I just don't buy the open baffle concept, there is always going to be too much interference, bad sound dispersion and room effects to make a quality sound stage.
Like the drivers though, been tempted by a pair of those for my cast concrete transmission line experiment
lurkio77 you should listen to a proper ob design. The sound stage is phenomenal. I tested mine with an IASCA disk. With proper position and the back wall reflection it sounds like you're in a live club while the speakers disappear. Just listen to a pair of Martin Logan's for the open airiness effect of o.b.'s
I'm sure if you had a large enough room or totally unreflective back wall then the reflections wouldn't cause cancellations/ phase problems at 1/4, 1/2, and full wavelengths but otherwise I can't see how an OB design can be reproducing sound properly
My suspicion is the OB lovers have taught themselves to love the effect of these reflections and I'm not ruling out that they could be pleasurable to listen to, but they can't be accurate sound reproduction
why don't you share the sound of those speakers?
I'm complete novice. Have no idea.....Until i thought if i drop a modern 6x9 (car speaker) in a retro speaker it will sound amazing......Nope sounded dreadful. Learning the hard way ££
your build kit are very expensive can you make a low budget speaker kit?
Those driver have a pretty bad frequency response. They are really choppy from 3kHz Up and start to roll off below 100Hz. Never trust "frequency range" only response graphs.
Definitely check out www.commonsenseaudio.com/
Also, David Dicks will answer any questions you have if you call him. I’ve actually been hoping you’d do a build with them.
I've seen tons of comments on your videos about the (apparent) lack of a baffle step compensation. Seriously. If you want to make a speaker sounds full and not lacking in the low mids and bass (as these are), you NEED to include that in your crossover design - no way around it. It's the laws of acoustical physics. Learn them before you go to making and selling speakers. Also, get yourself a quality reference mic to measure your speakers so you can fine-tune the crossover. What sims model up isn't always exactly what comes out in real life.
Kcducttaper1 This is a full range single driver... There is no application for a crossover here. You need to cut Kirby some slack. He's catering to the newbies. He's building a foundation to teach off of. There is a lot to learn from this build. Though it may not be evident until later builds as the lessons of the failures here may come in future builds (Ex: enclosure design in relation to bass performance). Kirby is not an expert & has never claimed to be. I have made a living (20+ years) designing, selling & installing high end audio systems and I find I can still learn a thing or two. Audio, or more accurately, sound reproduction, is such a perfect science on paper. But it is ultimately muddied by listener preferences, an individual's ability to hear (all frequencies), room acoustics... and we haven't even discussed equipment.
I shouldn't have called it a 'crossover'. You're right, there is no 'crossover' in a full range speaker, but there still needs to be a BSC network if you don't want them to sound hollow. All of your pro audio speakers will have a BSC built into their circuitry. I did a bit in the pro audio area for a few years as well, but designing and building your own speakers is a whole different ball game. My gripe is, he seems to have a complete lack of understanding regarding what baffle step loss is and how to account for it. As far as I can tell, he's literally taking 2x $25 drivers (Dayton Audio PS95-8), sticking them in a wooden box, and selling them for $250 (Cube Speakers). Unless he's alluded to the inclusion of a BSC in there somewhere, those drivers do sound hollow. I know; I built a small set with those drivers just for giggles once. Ain't no way I'd spend that kind of money on those speakers without a BSC. Those cube drivers also have a goofy little notch in the response curve around 1900Hz. For $250, I would expect a small network to tame that down a little bit too.
Kirby does this for a living. He's catering to his wallet. Not trying to be rude, but that's just what it is.
Kcducttaper1 I agree a BSC circuit would help on a lot of these full range builds. That or active dsp/eq. Both get the job done the same.
As many others mentioned earlier, Qts value about 0.6-0.75 are ideal for open baffles. I built a pair about 4 years ago, used 2 VISATON B200 full-range drivers per side. While testing it sounded very airy and stuff but there was absolutely no bass, virtually no highs. Using a passive crossover I added a VISATON TIW 250XS 10" woofer per side. The result: a thin, muddy, insecure bass-ish sound that was everywhere in the room (as I stood at a corner of the room the distortion was unbearable). Then I reworked the whole idea and kept the full range drivers arranged in diagonal direction on an open baffle column twice the size of the first I made, and built a 40 liter ported box for the woofers. The result was accurate and deep bass with a same open-ish airy and light midrange, and at the end the highs came also. I found there's no software that can design a dipole speaker for you, so I guess it's a real trial and error thing.
measure their response curve using req wizard, and then compensate using a minidsp....that would be a killer video sequence for you to make....
Pleeease don't make only sound test of your speakers, do bass tests too! ;)
ask Danny ;)
The tools are more expensive than the speakers, when you put everything together you can afford top notch speakers.
This is not the point of DIY speakers. Even though the result does matter of course, it is mainly about the process of creation. If you build your own speakers, you enjoy building and having some challenges. That's why you probably already own or have no problem with investing in some tools.
Wrong drivers, high Qt 'S drivers work best.
For price point and sound quality, check out the Wild Burro drivers. They are great.
www.wildburroaudio.com
Don't listen to any of the rocket scientist here on the other nonsense. It's just your driver choice. I have some vintage drivers (Zenith 49cz852) that you can throw in the bed with no baffles that will make you weep with joy. I also have a set of very small vintage drivers (Coral Holey Baskets, Sony 8 ohm version) that will do bass just fine. They're like 3.5inches I think. I toss them in a cardboard box with the back open, but use the box tops like wings. Small boxes too. Like no more then 12" x 8". The Bass is fine. I liked them so much that I bought another pair. I took them down a couple of weeks ago, because I got some new Cerwin Vega VS-150's for a song, along with a new high powered SS amp, and a DAC/Pre combo. But they're going back up soon in some configuration.
To be fair. I was using them on tube amps. Mainly my HH Scott 200. And they were all designed at the same time, and work well together. The low damping works well with these speakers people say. But I also have modern ones too, that were designed for modern amps. And plenty of people use these, and are happy. In all types of setups. So if you're planning on using a more modern SS amp. You can. I highly recommend tubes for open baffles though. As both are all about the midrange.
As for the bass. You're not getting it, because of the Qts. of the driver. That's it. Period. You can get more with the perfect design, but bigger isn't always better. And you'll never get bass slam with open baffle. It's a natural bass. Think stand up jazz bass at best. But it sounds like it should. Not fake. No real instrument makes bass slam. That's all done with electronics, recording techniques, and boxes.
How you use the baffles for other drivers. They should sound better on their side BTW. They seem to like wider. And don't forget you can use wings to get the same effect as the baffle. And you can even vary the length of those for better cancelation.
sound test ?
Measure them and after that EQ them. That´s what I do and it works every time.
too much auto focus adjustment.
There is no such thing as a speaker system without an enclosure, Speaker one o one. I design and build speakers and can give you some help. It is not a speaker without a backend