Dear Mark,
I wonder if your speakers can work with resonant cabinet design?
Same design principle behind Kiso Acoustic
6moons audio reviews: Kiso Acoustic HB-1
and Saba reso
Greencones
I wonder if your speakers can work with resonant cabinet design?
Same design principle behind Kiso Acoustic
6moons audio reviews: Kiso Acoustic HB-1
and Saba reso
Greencones
Hi Ackcheng,
Good interesting question. Markaudio drivers work well in most any cabinet designs. There are 2 schools of thought on the issue a cabinet resonance.
A - Those who like to make cabs with resonance (sometimes known as "sympathetic resonance"). For example, Linfof in Japan builds most of his CHR and Alpair cabs with an interesting degree of resonance.
B - Those who prefer more rigid box designs to control or limit resonance. Dave (Planet 10) and Chris-B are devotees of this build method.
Difficult to say which is best. Acoustic beauty is very much a personal choice.
If you're a guy who likes a more "warm" sound, then thinner walls and less bracing might give you a pleasing result. If your keen on technical acoustic/musical accuracy, then a more stable cabinet is likely the way to go.
I often go on room environment and my current listening tastes. There's minimal room damping in my studio so I tend towards my Linfof White Birchwood Pencil 12 cabs (Alp 12 drivers). They have no bracing and emit a a most pleasing warmth. At home I use Pencil 7's (Alpair 7's) with bracing, liking the tighter sound in my small better damped living room. This is just my personal preference depending on prevailing environmental listening situations, I'm not wedded to either cabinet build philosophy.
Cheers
Mark.
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A quick elaboration regarding rigid enclosures - that goal does not necessarily require massive quantities of dense materials. In fact our own approach is generally the opposite, but with lots of structural bracing, as opposed to the musical instrument "tuning" style of the Kiso's.
As Mark says, all design / construction techniques are valid, none are without their own contribution to system gestalt (including the room), and while some characteristics may be predictable according to the design genus, no-one can guess what will work for you.
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Indeed. We have our personal taste.
A point to keep in mind though: while a cabinet that has panels designed to audibly resonate may sound nice, it is fundamentally inaccurate. A speaker is not a musical instrument, it is there to reproduce sounds which have already been made by instruments and then recorded. If the speaker adds anything of its own, that is colouration.
A point to keep in mind though: while a cabinet that has panels designed to audibly resonate may sound nice, it is fundamentally inaccurate. A speaker is not a musical instrument, it is there to reproduce sounds which have already been made by instruments and then recorded. If the speaker adds anything of its own, that is colouration.
Basically, nature don't like extremes like Kiso, but speaker designers can learn two things from that concept:
1. lower enclosure mass = less stored energy
Although intensity of enclosure colorations of Kiso's are greater then that of common speakers they fade away faster.
That's one reason why it's better to brace enclosure than increase material thickness - same rigidity but with less enclosure mass.
2. musical instrument "tuning"
As Scott said speakers are not musical instruments and any sound emission from speaker enclosure is coloration and we need to preserve the intensity as low as possible - the same as THD of amplifier should be low. But we all know that two amps with the same THD value could sound totally different because of different harmonic distribution. Equally, two speakers with the same driver and intensity of enclosure coloration could sound totally different. It's because they have different frequency distribution of coloration sound which could be seen in waterfall spectrum graph of enclosures impulse response. Basically, impulse response of enclosure should be similarly "tuned" as musical instrument but with overall intensity of emitted sound damped as much as possible. There is many ways to do that and mine is similar to Kiso's but with several differences.
1. lower enclosure mass = less stored energy
Although intensity of enclosure colorations of Kiso's are greater then that of common speakers they fade away faster.
That's one reason why it's better to brace enclosure than increase material thickness - same rigidity but with less enclosure mass.
2. musical instrument "tuning"
As Scott said speakers are not musical instruments and any sound emission from speaker enclosure is coloration and we need to preserve the intensity as low as possible - the same as THD of amplifier should be low. But we all know that two amps with the same THD value could sound totally different because of different harmonic distribution. Equally, two speakers with the same driver and intensity of enclosure coloration could sound totally different. It's because they have different frequency distribution of coloration sound which could be seen in waterfall spectrum graph of enclosures impulse response. Basically, impulse response of enclosure should be similarly "tuned" as musical instrument but with overall intensity of emitted sound damped as much as possible. There is many ways to do that and mine is similar to Kiso's but with several differences.
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