what is FF225K's real xmax?

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Hi HM -

for a 186 liter 2.5M BLH, 0.3mm would allow about 1/5 watt input to reach 0.3mm around 55Hz.

Eminence revised their ALpha 6 which had winding height ~equal to gap height and now calls it "3.5mm" using some distortion figure. I think they did the same with 12LT which is now called "12LTA"

some drivers have a pretty good fringe field - I think Altec 421 is one.

does 225K go out out control fast when past 0.3mm?

does too much stroke in a fullrange or wideband invite audible modulation distortion?

Best
Freddy

Simulation of 225K vs 206E wall + floor boudary

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/3720/186lblhff225kpv6.gif
 
In sonic terms they don't appear to loose it too badly at all -I was listening to a pair in Will's Jericho horns a few weeks back, and they sounded very nice indeed. They work well in pipe-horns too, as do the 165s, although I suspect the technical performance wouldn't look so hot, so YMMV as ever. Luckily, the distortion is going to be in the LF, where our hearing isn't great. From that, I suspect the distortion rise is pretty gradual. As Nelson commented elsewhere, probably best not to feed them the Jurassic Park soundtrack, but so long as you don't go crazy, they're a nice listen.
 
I use a pair loaded with Rethm The Second cabinets (Odd horn/acoustic labyrinth hybrid) and they can generate enough output for my small room, getting beyond xmax and do just fine there. People get way too hung up on specs, the arrangement of similar gap and voicecoil height looks bad on paper, but sure sounds good here.

It's a very smooth and clean sounding driver, I think they struck a good balance between bandwidth and linearity. hell of a motor on it.
 
badman said:
I use a pair loaded with Rethm The Second cabinets (Odd horn/acoustic labyrinth hybrid) and they can generate enough output for my small room, getting beyond xmax and do just fine there.

I continue to recall a pair of this Rethem enclosure heard at VSAC2003 with highly modified Lowther driver, as the most "unspeaker like" magneto-dynamic device I've ever experienced. Brilliant design.





People get way too hung up on specs,
no effen kidding :hot: If you were to somehow compare "measurements" of a Stradivarius or Bosendorfer to a high school band instrument, would that make a performance by Perlman or Chick Corea on either of the latter suck?


the arrangement of similar gap and voicecoil height looks bad on paper, but sure sounds good here.


It's a very smooth and clean sounding driver, I think they struck a good balance between bandwidth and linearity. hell of a motor on it.
 
I just recently built a horn and installed an FF225K in it. I am in the process of aquiring the necessary equipment to be able to measure its response. The horn is tuned to ~ 35Hz, and is about 2.65m long. The Sd/St ratio is 4:1. I see that this driver (Going by eye) has no problem with 2-3mm of excursion. The speaker is very smooth sounding and has surprising good and low bass. All I can say until I do the measurements is that if I compare it to my FE208E Sigmas in the BK20, the bass is lower and it is louder when driven at the same wattage.

I kind of asked this question on the Fullrange driver website. If the SPL of the bass is really based on volume/velocity, couldn't a driver especially when horn-loaded make up for its xmax in the strength of the motor? Strong transient response resulting in higher compression/amplitude of a smaller volume?
 
That's what compression drivers are for awhite. If you want them to go low..... they're gonna be big and COST.

The FF225k has a great response curve compared to other high-efficiency fullrangers- relatively smooth without the brutal top octave breakups and whatnot, better to use a tweeter (or a supertweeter) than have to deal with those shennanigans. The bass response is also fairly good compared to 'rising response' style drivers (which are generally quoted as more efficient, but have less actual output)

Short version- this driver isn't meant to flop around, but this style of driver can be overdriven without horrible sonic penalties (anyone remember how unfounded people's concerns about the .5mm xmax of the Audax PR17OMO were? Lots of high efficiency and pro midrange drivers have limited Xmax, but don't misbehave the way you might expect when overdriven.
 
I think application of horn-laoding can make up to a point - especially vs direct radiator

looking at sims, some horn can interchange 6" and 8" drivers with little response change - but the smaller driver will have more excursion overall

how much excursion is permissible with fullrange say on a passage with flute and sustained electric bass notes before modulation and gargle become too much?

FF225 sim with ST,Sm ,CC fixed varying path length and bulk
http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/1109/ff225k1pi15m25m35mvs7.gif

FF225 max ouput at 0.3mm, 1mm, 2mm & 3mm strokes
http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/9404/ff225kvaryxmaxfy9.gif
 
That'd be completely dependant on the driver (in answer to a rehtorical question I know), but I suspect in many cases a fair way, especially given that our hearing acuity is rapidly dropping off below ~100Hz.

It's interesting in a way -Horst makes a good point in that it's best not to breach linear excursion, but there are quite a few drivers lurking around which seem to have been designed deliberately knowing they're going to be over-driven. Either that or they are extremely conservative in their figures, with distortion only begining to rise very slowly above Xmax (while it will rise faster in other units). I suspect this last is what occurs with the FF series as I've run 165s in the past, usually with ~3mm peak-to-peak excursion, and little or no more audible distortion than other FR drivers , with notionally double or 3 times the Xmax, being driven to roughly the same mechanical excursion.
 
I'm not sure I'd go so far as 10% (I've nothing to suggest that you're wrong though), but I'm certainly with you 100% that LF distortion is fairly benign until it gets really bad.

Re the ripples in a pipe-horn, agreed that we don't always hear them, although possibly for different reasons. In their case, it's partly psycho-acoustic masking -human hearing is amplitude based, so with our falling acuity below 100Hz we'll just key off the peaks, as GM points out, and fill in the rest. Also, the response isn't that bad anyway -the simulations are only 1/2 space FR plots & when you get them in 1/4 space or 1/8 space, where the room is forming more of the speaker system, things improve markedly. It's like any other horn -a full-sized mouth can be reduced if you use the reflection boundary conditions of the room to increase the size of the virtual mouth, and if the software used to model it doesn't account for this, you get exactly what you'd expect to see from an under-sized horn-mouth: a supersonic shockwave caused by the acoustic-impedence mismatch at the terminus being reflected back along the horn-path, and modulating the driver response.

Cheers
Scott
 
Well Scott, I agree about 100 Hz, 10% distortion. But as far down as 50 Hz and under, I wonder if speaker producers want to show the distortion figures. When I was playing bass guitar, the amplifiers I had, was displaying far more distortion than any home equipment.
Granted that it is different when recreating the music, but it's sometimes ridiculous when manufacturers display 0.0001% distortion, 20-50 000Hz.

Cheers!
 
Oh yes. :devilr: Lower the better, especially if you can get over 100db out of them (easy), assuming, of course, you've got a room that can actually support such low freqencies. Useful if you like pipe-organ music, films, soundtracks, or progressive rock where there's often an LF freak-show cunningly mixed in by the engineers, mostly for grins. Alan Parson's quad mix of DSOTM is a good example. As Nelson Pass pointed out with his El Pipe-O TL sub project, funny things happen if your system is flat to about 15Hz or so. If your taste is more toward folk and acoustic jazz of course, then it would seem a trifle pointless.

The real reason of course is that we can do it, and have a great deal of fun in doing so. Therefore, it's essential. :D

If that's too extreme, a 30Hz version is even easier, and more compact of course.
 
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