5 way horn speaker system project - tapped, bass, mids and tweeter passive active

I have been on the WAF Najda thread a while and took the plunge.

The board arrived.

Got the other bits, Mouser +5v and 12-0-12v SMPS.
Cheap LCD display, buttons, some ribbon connectors etc.

Here's the board.
Lashed up on a breadboard to start with.

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From the front:) and schematic

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The control panel when connected to PC and the config panel.



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In situ
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A few corrections on the tapped horn

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Four Celestion 1530 woofers in a line array per channel will work great 45-300 hz (or anywhere in-between) and keep up with a midbass horn and your tapped horn subs. I imagine some 100-150 dollars Eminence drivers will too. Tune the boxes with big vents to 40 Hz and align them as close as you can to the midhorn driver. Setup right it will scare the crap out of you in realism and tone/bass power - I use the JBL 2225 (replaced the Celestion) because they are a little better and I found somebody sitting on 10 of them NOS - the newer 2226 is over priced for this and probably wouldn't be as good or no better
 
I get down to 90Hz no problem in my exponential mid bass horn with the Kappa A - just a Hornresp modelled.

Delta seems to be kappa with a smaller magnet. There are so many directions to go. Delicate Seas 10" magnesium drivers! Raw Beyma 21" open baffle line array!

I do understand why a box for lower midbass is desirable. These small backchambers with small excursion speakers do detail, but do not push air like a regular speaker.

POOH, I was considering celestion, but then thought about my Vintage 30's and how the quality has gone down in recent years. V30 is not what they used to be and I fear it may be true for the rest of their line-up. V30 was their flagship among guitarists. It's like if the company was bought and now they don't care anymore.

I am not surprised that you liked the JBL better.
 
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Hmm 4 each side = lots a expense in drivers... even Kappa 15A's...
Any experience of CITRONIC CB215?

Do you think 2 each side would do? I don't want to boom the house down here:) Just reinforce what I already have for bit of extra pump:)

Best way to wire up? I could get a 4ohm amp to drive two 8ohm drivers in parallel or wire 2 four ohm drivers in series? Or go for 2 16ohmers in parallel?

I have no experience of these sort of boom boxes:)
You say vented. What would a sealed box do?
Will have to have a speaker plans read.

Amp wise - plate amps looks interesting but most seem to have U
upper roll off continuously variable between 40Hz and 120Hz, which I don't want...


Four Celestion 1530 woofers in a line array per channel will work great 45-300 hz (or anywhere in-between) and keep up with a midbass horn and your tapped horn subs. I imagine some 100-150 dollars Eminence drivers will too. Tune the boxes with big vents to 40 Hz and align them as close as you can to the midhorn driver. Setup right it will scare the crap out of you in realism and tone/bass power - I use the JBL 2225 (replaced the Celestion) because they are a little better and I found somebody sitting on 10 of them NOS - the newer 2226 is over priced for this and probably wouldn't be as good or no better
 
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High efficiency pro sound woofers don't go much lower then 60-70 hz in even in a line array up against a wall or in a corner if they are in a sealed box. Tuned to 10 Hz or so below where you'll high pass them with big vents will do the trick

Rewind - The Celestion pressed frame cheapo woofers are really good for the money. They actually can be used to 1K without a problem. I like them better then some Altec and Gauss 15's used as a direct radiator

http://celestion.com/product/97/tf1530/
 
Hmm, don't want flabby, want tight and fast and pumping but not particularly low... already have deep with tapped horns.
?? More litres or sealed?


Vented is supposed to be not as tight as sealed, and Eminence do not recommend sealed for Kappa 15A as seen in its data sheet. Could be that a large volume like that is just what you need. But not sealed with that driver.
 
High efficiency pro sound woofers don't go much lower then 60-70 hz in even in a line array up against a wall or in a corner if they are in a sealed box. Tuned to 10 Hz or so below where you'll high pass them with big vents will do the trick

Rewind - The Celestion pressed frame cheapo woofers are really good for the money. They actually can be used to 1K without a problem. I like them better then some Altec and Gauss 15's used as a direct radiator

LF Pressed Chassis / Ferrite - TF1530 - Celestion - Guitar, Bass & Pro Audio Speakers

Yeah, I am realizing this after looking around a little. I have read desciptions on sealed vs vented cabinets, that sealed is tight and controlled whereas vented pushes a lot of air. Maybe this is what we want. Question is how flabby vented integrates with fast horns.

They don't have to be very efficient though. The best 12" midbass I have for the moment, a cheap GAS WC1220.2 4ohm 12" car speaker, has around 90 db sensitivity. It goes lower than my PA ATC 12" drivers and a 12" wide/fullrange Philips AD 1200. The GAS has really nice midbass tone, but sounds plastic in the mids.

Perhaps not a sealed PA woofer but a sealed car midwoofer will do the trick. They can be found dirt cheap also. I read that car subs are tuned very differently than hifi subs. But the GAS 12" is not a pure car sub but a mid bass, with slightly more bass than a usual PA 12".
 
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With a system like his you need to move a lot of air with low distortion and no compression. Horns below and horns above make it difficult to do this with lower sensitivity heavy drivers. The range we are speaking of is the power region and where the bass really is. Most music will have much more bass in this region then below or above and with the fundamentals and the harmonics being reproduced with horns when you put in the heavy woofers the bass becomes disconnect and less coherent then if you use another horn or a bunch of light cone big magnet low distortion bass drivers. To do it right they should be high passed and driven with a powerful amplifier. Sealed drivers like this need to be vented in my experience - if you don't you'll end up with a big hump around 80 hz that will sound fake not defined fast and tuneful.
 
I am close to be finished with his 15A horn, and I see a strong resemblance to my shortened Goto S150 horn, that is currently housing a Fane 10M. The Goto horn was made for Goto compression drivers, but it sounded weird at 1.75 meters depth, so I cut it.

Problem is that I am having trouble getting passed ~180Hz with the Fane 8M and the Fane 10M with confidence. That is why I started building Speedysteve's horn, and I hope his horn will sound better.

But if his horn is so similar to my current horn I wonder if it is suitable to be crossed below the range 150Hz-2kHz.

By suitable I mean its range where it is hornloaded will be a few Hz above Speedysteves current crossover point, that I think is at 90Hz (having difficult expressing myself here as a novice).
Maybe he is experiencing what I am also, a lack of hornloadieness at around 90-200Hz. I think one need a Cogent sized horn to achieve that. I hope I am wrong and that Speedysteve's design works.

Question is if an array can fill in what is missing and fix it, and how should this array look like. Vented or sealed, 15" or 12", PA, car or hifi speakers, high or low efficiency? Or is an array just pointless and we should all get bigger midbass horns?

My current 38 litre sealed sub housing an Eminence LAB 12 cannot, because it doesn't like to play above 90Hz.
 
In my case and because of my room the advantage of installing the reflex line array is I can get the bass and midbass coils aligned for coherent bass where my corner bass horn path is long and is delayed. 120-150 Hz is an excellent place to crossover if the midbass horn does not meet your goal. If you can align and fit the bass horn in your room then that's the way to go but have to say eight 15's is very low compromise :)
 
Hehe, you are probably right there. 4x15" on each side sounds like a very low compromise.

It doesn't bother me much right now that my sub is not hornloaded up to 90Hz, so it will probably not matter if the array is not hornloaded either. The array would be crossed fairly low at around 200Hz. Mixing horns and non-horn drivers above 200Hz, on the other hand, I have difficulty believing in. I would not dare to write that in the Beyond the Ariel thread though. :p

Have you tried FIR on the bass and mid bass? It is supposed to sound very crisp and fixes some issues.
 
Yeah thanks.
I can have tall and narrow - tall as the ceiling so volume is perhaps not the issue.

In the meantime I am going to play around with Najda DSP SPL levels to see if I can increase the critical 'float my rock boat' frequencies and boost them or rather cut the others and amp up the rest.

Then I can have a DSP Rock setup which is easily flicked to. Thanks to Ritchie (Hayward) of the Wam for that idea.

Vented is supposed to be not as tight as sealed, and Eminence do not recommend sealed for Kappa 15A as seen in its data sheet. Could be that a large volume like that is just what you need. But not sealed with that driver.
 
What if FIR? Regarding 'beyond arial" yes their ego is much more advanced then their experiance with horns. "shoot the messenger" :eek:

FIR is supposed to be a very advanced digital room correction/EQ/phase correction. Apparently it can correct phase shifts that occurs in crossovers but also acoustically inside horns.
Very useful for bass and midbass, less so for upper midrange and tweeters.

It is too advanced for me right now. First I need to build a good bass/midbass solution. But it is popular among the few horn enthusiasts in Sweden.