Help/advice newbie building dipole surrounds

[jake_vdb]

I have some experience building subwoofers for car/home, but no speaker building experience otherwise. When building subwoofers, I have a spreadsheet a friend gave me that will allow you to input all the thiele small parameters for your driver, your enclosure size/config, port lengths, etc. and will give you a frequency response graph, and other info.

1st question: Is there any good software (preferably cheap/free) that covers all speaker enclosure design?

I have a very small room I want to build some dipole surrounds. I want to keep it really simple. I was thinking of building a small sealed enclosure with 2 full range drivers.

2nd question: one of the drivers should be in phase and one out of phase for a dipole, correct? I know I can accomplish this by wiring them in series with one of the drivers polarity reversed. For some reason I seem to remember it being bad for the speaker to have the polarity reversed, is this correct? If so is there a better way to reverse the polarity of one driver?

3rd question: how do I determine enclosure volume? Most subwoofers have recommendations for enclosure sizes, I guess this is where software would come in to play…. Also along these lines, what would be the advantages/disadvantages of infinite baffle instead?

4th question: do the speakers need to be in separate sealed compartments? What about for bipole?

5th question: I’ve seen a couple of other dipoles/kits and they use 120 degree angle, is this ideal/standard? Do people use any other angles? If so what are the differences.

I am looking at using Audax HP080G0 Drivers:

http://www.audax.fr/standard/hp080g0.html

Any general advice or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks!
Jake

[jake_vdb]

I'm looking for a good DPDT switch for switching the second speaker in series from dipole to bipole, any suggestions?

[Timn8ter]

1. There's WinISD and Speaker Workshop that can help get you started.

2. Reversing polarity is common practice in many two way systems and I've never heard of one burning up because of it. Besides, they reverse polarity on Star Trek all the time and it seems to work for them.

3. Enclosure volume is typically set for the low frequency of the driver. The software I've suggested can help with that.

4. Two full-rangers in a cabinet don't have to be in separate spaces.

5. The angle has to do with your goals for the design and the drivers themselves. There's no one answer. Vance Dickason designed some for his Loudspeaker Cookbook that you may want to look at. I've got some more unusual examples on my website.

[jake_vdb]

thanks for the reply, it's very helpful.

-Jake