Waveguide shootout

[paulspencer]

Hi guys, thought some of you might be interested in a little get together we had this weekend. Four Aussies got together on a sunny saturday, measured some compression driver + waveguide combos, set up active crossovers and listened to about 7 different versions with some dynamic torture tracks that will quickly show up any amount of harshness.

What was the goal? Really just to measure and listen (not hard). Very worthwhile. As with many of these kinds of events, we now have more of these in mind to take things further ...

We tried two different oblate spheroids, a few econowave type waveguides (18 sound XT and a JBL lookalike) and a few popular compression drivers - Faital pro, B&C and Selenium.

Measurement setup:



We measured them and Andi put together some directivity plots like this:



You can see the summary here:
Red Spade Audio: Waveguide shootout

Or some of the comments in the original thread:
Stereo Net Australia

We plan to do some more, this is just the beginning!

At the end of the day we also compared a dome tweeter. There was an obvious difference but the group picked the compression drivers. It was an enjoyable day, especially when someone else is taking care of the techy side of things!