Does anyone here have experience in using side mounted woofers? I'm curious about how high you actually have to cross them over to get good integration, and what factors play into this.
When playing around with something like a 15" woofer, you're going to find that the front baffle gets huge. At the same time, smaller drivers don't always cut it. Putting the woofer on the side seems like a decent compromise. It also might get you a larger baffle, and thus better wavelaunch. (Depth causes less spouse aggravation than width, IME)
Obviously, the time difference will need to be compensated, and there may be other things that one will have to compensate for. I imagine lobing could get pretty weird with low order crossovers.
Anything else to keep in mind? And, again, how low does one need to cross over? I know of at least one commercial speaker that has excellent performance with a side mounted 10" woofer and a 250Hz crossover. Don't know what they've done to it, though.
When playing around with something like a 15" woofer, you're going to find that the front baffle gets huge. At the same time, smaller drivers don't always cut it. Putting the woofer on the side seems like a decent compromise. It also might get you a larger baffle, and thus better wavelaunch. (Depth causes less spouse aggravation than width, IME)
Obviously, the time difference will need to be compensated, and there may be other things that one will have to compensate for. I imagine lobing could get pretty weird with low order crossovers.
Anything else to keep in mind? And, again, how low does one need to cross over? I know of at least one commercial speaker that has excellent performance with a side mounted 10" woofer and a 250Hz crossover. Don't know what they've done to it, though.
The speakers I last built use a side mounted 12" crossed at 120 hz. No problems. It lets me keep a narrow baffle and uses the depth behind the speaker instead of placing a small speaker a few feet into the room, I place the speaker almost against the wall and still have the baffle out where you want it.
454, A friend of mine has a Casull 454. I shot ot once. It's not fun. but a very nicely made arm.
And yes, a lot of internal bracing and deadening is needed.
454, A friend of mine has a Casull 454. I shot ot once. It's not fun. but a very nicely made arm.
And yes, a lot of internal bracing and deadening is needed.
454Casull said:
They do have a larger exciteable area, and a lower resonance frequency, etc.. Nothing that can't be relieved with a well-placed vertical brace and two different materials in the panel (e.g. wood + acrylic). The Helmholtz panels employed by the BBC are built in this way, using different materials with noncoincident resonances.
SY said:
I can't even find the 3.3 on www.nhthifi.com ... do you have a reference that I can read up on? I assume they haven't published any tech docs on their use of side-mounting?
Frode said:
Ah, thanks. I'd missed that.
According to what they state here, they are using the junction between the cabinet and wall as a means to get the speaker to radiate into quarter-space instead of freespace (low frequencies rarely radiate into halfspace with normal baffle sizes). Should be quite nice for getting high SPL, and the early reflection gets to be very early, but varying the placement would change the output quite radically, wouldn't it?
For those who have posted about good results with <200Hz crossover frequencies, thank you, but my concern was whether or not I could expect good imaging while crossing at >200Hz, and what means I would need to employ to achieve said imaging.
angel said:
The advantage of a narrow baffle does improve imaging by itself, but when using a side firing woofer design, IMO, it is not recommendable to cross higher than 200Hz. Period. I would say 150Hz is still a bit high. Remember you only want the side firing woofer to reproduce the spectrum where the sound is almost unidirectional, by means deep bass.
IMO you should go for a midbass and not a midrange on the front, and try to get your XO point down to around 100Hz.
The NHT 3.3 and 2.5 used a XO of about 100Hz. But this means a relly big inductor (10-12mh) in th LP network.
I was looking at designs from Audio Physic (I'm told they use Wavecor drivers) and Morel which crossover over a little higher (still the inductor will be quite big). Does this rather large inductor create problems like stored energy and rob such a speaker of dynamics?
Due to WAF contraints I am considering building a speaker using a 5" mid-woofer mated to a pair of larger 9/10" side facing woofers (push-push).
Tweeter options:
B&G Neo 3 or Dayton PTC2
Bohlender Graebener Neo3W Planar Tweeter w/Back Cup 264-730
Dayton Audio PT2C-8 Planar Tweeter 275-085
Morel ET 448
http://www.morelhifi.com/products/pdf/Tweeters/ET/Specs sheet ET448.pdf
Wavecor TW030WA01
TW030WA01
Mid-bass options:
Vifa NE 149
Vifa NE149W-04 5-1/4" Full Range Woofer 264-1082
Morel ECW 536
http://morelhifi.com/products/pdf/Woofers/EW/Specs sheet ECW 536.pdf
Wavecor WF152
WF152BD03_04
Should the side facing driver be a woofer like the
Dayton RS270
Dayton Audio RS270-8 10" Reference Woofer 295-357
Aurum Cantus AC250
Aurum Cantus AC-250MKII 10" Carbon Fiber Sandwich Woofer 296-434
Morel CAW 936
Morel CAW 938 9" Cast Frame Woofer 297-086
or a subwoofer like the
Vifa NE 265W
Vifa NE265W-08 10" Subwoofer Speaker 264-1140
Dayton Titanic MkIII
Dayton Audio TIT280C-4 10" Titanic Mk III Subwoofer 4 Ohm 295-414
Dayton RSS265HO
Dayton Audio RSS265HO-4 10" Reference HO Subwoofer 4 Ohm 295-462
Wavecor 270
SW270WA01
I would like to drive this speaker from the front channels of an AV/HT reciever. However that means building a LP crossover in the range of 100Hz. I am not confident of this and would prefer to biamp the speaker (using the AV/HT for the top end and a dedicated subwoofer amp) but most AVR/HT recievers do not allow biamping of the front channels. Any ideas?
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Hi Ingvar,
Passive lowpass filter? which electrical and which acoustic slopes please? Did you get good phases overlap?
Sreten, I did not want to start the topic anew so searched if the questions I have had been asked before.
I was going to use the LFE output to drive dedicted active (plate amp powered) subwoofers (Wavecor 10" with Passive raditors).
For my application, the front channels need only go to 50Hz or so but the bass needs to be tight. My hope is to use front channels (stereo mode) when listening to music and include the LFE and rear channels (Surround modes) when watching movies.
BTW when using such a system for cable TV (News, Nat-Geo, Discovery, Food channel etc...) does one use stereo mode or some other mode of the HT/AV reciever (Onkyo SR/NR series or Pioner Elite series)? After all even a mono output will suffice as voice intelligibility is paramount in such applications.
Actually I was more worried about the whole system being limited in SPL due to the limits of the 5" woofer but since this post was 6-7 years old I did not bother to ask that question. Ingvar might not be following this thread anymore to reply.
I have Teledyne AR9s in my main system. Placement is critical. They have 2 side mounted woofers facing in opposite direction. When carefully placed and equalized they produce the best bass I've ever heard. A detailed explanation is avialable on the Classic Speaker Pages website. Tim Holl explains exactly how it works and how it crosses over to the 8' front mounted lower midrange. Work on side mounted woofers was pioneered by Roy Allison who left AR and started a company under his own name.
Hi,
Get to know the options settings of your AV reciever. Have the fronts set to
large and the rest set to small. All you need to do then is turn off the LFE
feed to the sub for music, all bass will go the fronts. With LFE on bass
should go to the sub and the fronts. Unprocessed stereo in will have
no centre or rear output. You could biamp the fronts by using plate
amps for the bass end and passive filters c/o for the mid / treble.
rgds, sreten.
>>> I have Teledyne AR9s in my main system.
I remember them well!
http://www.agoraquest.com/editor/upload/2kf4e5492667.jpg
I remember them well!
http://www.agoraquest.com/editor/upload/2kf4e5492667.jpg
Dual side firing woofers down at the bottom do have some nice advantages, not just the form factor. Dual opposed helps with vibration (turn off one and the box will vibrate much more). The upper limit is related to driver size as they move away from omni radiation. You can probably also run it a bit higher, factoring in speaker boundary issues and bafflestep. If you cross the woofers at say 100 Hz you might find the woofers get a smoother response than the mids due to the elimination of floor bounce. You can also sort out bafflestep if your woofers run up a bit higher, potentially bringing up the system efficiency a bit. Let's say you have bafflestep coming in around 300 Hz, you can avoid any loss by using sensitive woofers and bringing them in here. It's a bit of a jugggling contest. Personally I'd bi-amp it at least, or even make it completely active, combine a MiniDSP and multi channel amp modules in one box.
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