I've been building Unity horns for my car for about six or seven years now, and finally decided to make a set for my house. I still have my Summas, but I wanted to try and make something that wouldn't dominate the room.
In this thread, I am going to try and do that.
The tricky part to accomplishing this feat is that a Unity horn should really be BIGGER than my Summas. For instance, the Summa uses a 15" waveguide that controls the directivity down to 900hz. The old Lambda Unity horns used a 16" conical horn. But this size wasn't ideal; it was basically a scaled down version of the Sound Physics Labs SPL-TD1. I believe the under sized horn was used for WAF.
My solution to the problem uses a few tricks I learned from making Unity horns fit in a car.
First off, these Synergy horns will be angled inside of the cabinet. This reduces the depth of the cabinet a great deal. Another trick is that I am going to use a MASSIVE roundover. My logic here is that the massive roundover will reduce diffraction at the mouth, and I'm hoping that will allow the horns to be pushed all the way against the back wall of the room.
Basically, these are horns that are designed to be listened to close to the wall. Of course, you could pull them out into the room, which might sound more 'spacious.'
Another element to this horn is that I want to make it easy to move around. My Summas are made of MDF and carbon fiber. They probably weigh a hundred pounds each, which makes them a challenge to move. I'm going to build my Synergy horns out of plywood, fiberglass, and foam. (Hence the title 'pretty in pink.') By going with composite construction, I'm hoping I can keep the weight well below forty pounds.
Here's a diagram of the Synergy horn. It has a horizontal coverage of 80 degrees. The vertical coverage will be somewhere in the range of 40 to 60 degrees; I'm still sorting that out. The horn profile is basically oblate spheroidal, with a monster roundover, similar to my Summas.
I'm trying to make the cabinet in such a way that it's visually 'reminiscent' of an Ikea Expedit shelf. Basically fat horizontal shelves with a vertical gap of about 12". I even considered hacking up an Ikea Expedit; the main reason that I didn't is that we need a curved face on the cabinet to reduce diffraction.
I'm really terrible at making good looking cabinets, so I am going to use the same trick that Vandersteen does. The cabinet is going to be wrapped in a black nylon sock, and I'll finish the top and the bottom. There's a pretty good possibility that the woofer will be dipole also.
I'm still working on which drivers I'll use, but it's shaping up to look like this:
tweeter: one Celestion CDX1-1425 (four octaves, 1440hz-24khz)
midrange: four Peerless 2" (two octaves, 360hz-1440hz)
woofer: Alpine Type S 10" (two octaves, 90-360hz)
In this thread, I am going to try and do that.
The tricky part to accomplishing this feat is that a Unity horn should really be BIGGER than my Summas. For instance, the Summa uses a 15" waveguide that controls the directivity down to 900hz. The old Lambda Unity horns used a 16" conical horn. But this size wasn't ideal; it was basically a scaled down version of the Sound Physics Labs SPL-TD1. I believe the under sized horn was used for WAF.
My solution to the problem uses a few tricks I learned from making Unity horns fit in a car.
First off, these Synergy horns will be angled inside of the cabinet. This reduces the depth of the cabinet a great deal. Another trick is that I am going to use a MASSIVE roundover. My logic here is that the massive roundover will reduce diffraction at the mouth, and I'm hoping that will allow the horns to be pushed all the way against the back wall of the room.
Basically, these are horns that are designed to be listened to close to the wall. Of course, you could pull them out into the room, which might sound more 'spacious.'
Another element to this horn is that I want to make it easy to move around. My Summas are made of MDF and carbon fiber. They probably weigh a hundred pounds each, which makes them a challenge to move. I'm going to build my Synergy horns out of plywood, fiberglass, and foam. (Hence the title 'pretty in pink.') By going with composite construction, I'm hoping I can keep the weight well below forty pounds.
Here's a diagram of the Synergy horn. It has a horizontal coverage of 80 degrees. The vertical coverage will be somewhere in the range of 40 to 60 degrees; I'm still sorting that out. The horn profile is basically oblate spheroidal, with a monster roundover, similar to my Summas.
I'm trying to make the cabinet in such a way that it's visually 'reminiscent' of an Ikea Expedit shelf. Basically fat horizontal shelves with a vertical gap of about 12". I even considered hacking up an Ikea Expedit; the main reason that I didn't is that we need a curved face on the cabinet to reduce diffraction.
I'm really terrible at making good looking cabinets, so I am going to use the same trick that Vandersteen does. The cabinet is going to be wrapped in a black nylon sock, and I'll finish the top and the bottom. There's a pretty good possibility that the woofer will be dipole also.
I'm still working on which drivers I'll use, but it's shaping up to look like this:
tweeter: one Celestion CDX1-1425 (four octaves, 1440hz-24khz)
midrange: four Peerless 2" (two octaves, 360hz-1440hz)
woofer: Alpine Type S 10" (two octaves, 90-360hz)
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go ahead, its surely the way
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/100392-beyond-ariel-776.html#post3064192
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/multi-way/100392-beyond-ariel-776.html#post3064192
most likely it's going to be this:
The Madisound Speaker Store
I've toyed with the idea of using a pair of Fostex FF85WK also.
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