The open baffle bandwagon passed by my house...

[tom1356]

...so I decided to climb on.
My original intention was to build an open baffle line array, but knowing nothing about them I decided to start with some cheap experiments.
I took a pair of three way speakers I had laying around that were pretty good ($1,000 in 1985) but had that mid 1980's exaggerated bass with an increase in volume and I dissected them.
I had already started to tame them by tweaking the crossovers, wiring, and cabinets with promising results.
These speakers are quite rare (not valuable, just rare) and although I had a lot of factory info on them I still have no idea what the TS measurements are.
I decided to wing it.
I built separate baffles for the mids and really liked what I heard.
Then I built baffles for the 12" woofers.
I really wasn't ready for a life changing experience but that is what happened. (Overly dramatic? Yeah maybe so.)
The bass now pressurized the room like I have never heard from an audio system before.
It will make you nauseous with some selections. This isn't good. I needed to fix this.
Looking at the woofer crossover it was divided at 40 Hz. One voice coil was playing from 0-40Hz and the other was playing from 40-350 Hz. I took out the deepest crossover point and ran both coils from 0-350Hz. Way better! Now we’re onto something.
A pressurized room without the nausea.
I have a long way to go with these but at the moment I am using a single 300b SE amp to drive each of the three ways and no EQ at all.
Maybe I got lucky with my driver choice but the sound is way better than it should be and these have convinced me that I will not be building a box speaker in the near or distant future.
The whole purpose of this post is to encourage people to experiment with dipoles/open baffles and the drivers they have laying around. It just might surprise you, it did me.

Good luck!