I love my NHTs but I want to builb better ones!

[mikejz84]

Well I have decided to sell my pair of NHT Vt-2 speakers. I loved them, however I did not have room for both them and a sub, and the rear porting really did not work in my room.

Now I have to admit that I really loved them a great deal, however they did not meet my needs in two ways.

1) Poor bass for speakers with a built in sub
2) Rear porting.

I am looking for a summer project and am thinking of building my own pair of speakers. I would like them to be tower speakers with built in powered subs. Silk dome is my current preference, also a matching center.


My total budget is about $600-$700.

Any good ideas for designs out there that fit these needs?

[sreten]

Well you haven't really defined what you mean by poor bass
and why the rear porting is a problem, the position of the port
is only relevant if you want to use them near a rear wall.

Detuning the ports will improve bass quality and extension, but
give a faster, leaner bass balance. You can do this by extending
the length of the port or reducing the port area or a combination
of both.

As an experiment you could line the port with ~ 3/8" foam.
2 pieces 3 times the port diameter x the port length are needed.

Doubling the port length or halving the port area will detune
the port by 1/root2 ~0.7 giving an extra half octave of extension,
but as I said with a leaner balance.

Half an octave is musically a substantial amount.

It wouldn't be that diificult to add a subamplifier to each VT-2
speaker. Ones with switchable bass boost are an option.

Shown is an example of a maximally flat reflex and a detuned
version, the detuned version is much better at integrating with
room gain below the maximally flat cuttoff frequency.

Note that the flat alignment loses 12dB between 30 and 50Hz
whilst the detuned version only loses 5dB and has a near 6dB
per octave (white line) rolloff over a wide range.

For this driver the overdamped alignment with room gain can
sound like it has nearly an octave more bass extension than
the maximally flat version, as the flat version rolls off too
quickly to utilise any room gain present.

sreten.

[mikejz84]

Your right, I did not define what was ment for poor bass.

I guess I should have defined my goal better.

While the bass is good on the NHTs for music, I would like a pair of mains that contain intergrated subs that are can do a good job with LFE for when I use them in home theater. I would like them to be able to replace me existing subs (Cambridge PSW-1 12" sealed 200watt) to save space.