Things that go bump in the night...

[Fuling]

Hi

My interest in DIY audio stuff reached new levels when me and my GF bought a house last summer.
Before moving out of the apartment I gathered a large pile of stuff that I didn´t want to bring along to our new home, stuff like kVA-sized power transformers and such and let the guys at hififorum.nu know that anyone could come and pick it up for free.
A guy from another town came and took the lot.

A while later, while planning an OB project, the same guy let me know that he had four 15" woofers that I could have for free.
When I went to pick them up he also offered me two large EV mid horns that I couldn´t resist even though I had no clue what to do with them...

The OB project didn´t turn out very well due to limitations of the listening room so I gave up the whole OB thing and put the drivers in closed boxes instead and was fairly happy with the outcome.
I should mention that my main listening room is a garden shed measuring 3,1 x 3,8 meters...

A couple of months ago I traded some tubes against a pair of Eminence 1" drivers that would fit the EV horns (HR90 to be exact), still not knowing what to do with them.

One late evening a couple of weeks ago I suddenly felt unusually creative and decided to lend an ear to those horns and drivers just to calm my curiosity.
After spending an hour assembling and connecting them with just a simple first order crossover (read: 30uF russian PiO caps) it was time for the moment of truth: would they sound as horrible as I expected?
The answer was a big "no". Obviously nothing below 500Hz or so but what was there sounded smoother than expected and even laying on the floors these horns managed to produce a quite impressive soundstage. Interesting...

The lack of bass was quickly fixed by hooking up a pair of CSS FR125 drivers in aperiodic boxes. As I had no crossover coils at hand so I just tossed a pair of towels over the CSS´s, acting as mechanical lowpass filters...

[Fuling]

Obviously, those tiny CSS drivers were nowhere near capable of matching the sensitivity of the horns so I decided to move the horns out to the garden shed and hook them up with my 120 litres closed subwoofers.
After a deep dive in the junkbox I found parts to build a pair of simple 6/12dB 580Hz crossovers:

[Fuling]

After a little fiddling with the crossovers this setup actually started to sing:

[Iain McNeill]

...and why not???

fun times indeed

so now what?

[Iain McNeill]

Where did you get that perforated tile?

Thats some nice helmholtz absorbers.

[Fuling]

After posting these pictures at hififorum.nu some friendly people contacted me, offering various drivers and stuff that could be useful in a system like this. Before knowing it I was the owner of a pair of JBL 2202H drivers, amongst others.
My 15" subwoofers are doing quite well in the bass department but they´re a bit "slow" in the upper bass.
Something more dynamic was called for, resulting in a new project:

[Fuling]

Where did you get that perforated tile?

It´s an DIY "Diffsorber" inspired by this:
http://www.rpginc.com/products/badpanel/index.htm
I have several such panels in the garden shed.

The latest pic of the midbass horns, not much work left now:

[Fuling]

The room in question:

[Fuling]

With just a few hours of work left before the initial listening test of the midbass horn disaster struck: One of my cats decided to shred the dustcap on one of the JBL2202H drivers into pieces...
Fortunately that driver wasn´t in a very good condition even before the attack which somewhatt lessens my pain...

[Fuling]

My 40Hz bass horns in progress: