ok one more time tad 1602

[kartsmart]

I was thinking about using the tad 1602 drivers for lower mid and using a single or 2 18" drivers for the low bass. does this sound like a good idea or not ? if so what would be a good driver to match the 1602's. what about cross over points ? will be using a atactive crossovers switch able 6-12-18 db and the crown dc300 amps any ideas out there

[kartsmart]

hummmm must be a bad idea / still stuck on the old ways and showing my age. no coments no ideas what do I do now ?

[Greggo]

Kartsmart,

I have not heard the TAD woofers and I am no expert on crossover design but I will gladly throw my two cents into your thread since you seem anxious to at least here something. Here are my observations:

1) You don't specify what else you are thinking of doing up into the high mids and beyond so it is hard to understand what you are trying to get from your 1602's, but they have such a great rep that if I owned them, I would use them to cover the fundamental of the voice range and cross them just before beeming or crossover sensitivities are an issue. My own take on this is that 300Hz points tend to split a lot of vocal fundamentals and I would rather have a driver cover from 90-900 Hz and then cross to a high mid than run 300-3000 Hz and then cross to a tweeter. My reasoning is that there seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence to suggest that 1.5-2.5 KHz is the zone where we can here most of the crossover junk in the system and it gets easier to design something smooth and musical as you get farther out of that zone in any direction. The problem with going higher is comb filtering between drivers so I like the idea of going lower and looking for some kind of near point source arrangement beyond that.

2) If you run your 1602's down to 90 Hz, then I don't think driver timbre matching is that big of an issue though I would probably not go with radically different materials like aluminum or magnesium cones. I think a great option would be the 18 inch JBLs in a ported enclosure with some eq to tune them down to low 30's or high 20's, I would still do stereo, so I would recommend buying two drivers and building two cabinets. I would post on the Pi forum for some help in getting the most out of these drivers.

3) I would cross the 1602's around 800 or 900 Hz to a TAD or BMS (depending on budget) compression driver in a round wooden Tractrix or Le'Cleach (sp?) horn that has a 15-18 inch mouth that you can build flush with a baffle that also holds the TAD 1602's, this would give a nice balanced look to the mains and also provide a more balanced delivery of sound pressure between all the drivers if you believe some of the Zingali (sp?) theories on horns for home hifi use. Their designer, and I can't remember his name or where I read this, thought that considtent mouth areas between cone bass/mid drivers and round horns help keep things a bit smoother. Also, Edgar and others have commented on vertical alignment for best imaging, so in a perfect world I would use two 1602's per main speaker, one above and one below a nice round wood horn that is about 40 inches off the floor to the center of the horn.

4) I would start here and then play with slopes and points, starting at 90 and slowly working down untill you like the hand off between the 18" JBLs and the TAD mid-woofers, and then working from maybe 1.2 Khz on down between the horn and the TADs, hoping that you can get close to 900 Hz and have both drivers still sound easy and musical even with tough source material being cranked through them.

If I end up going with a big project for big sound and end up with a living room at least 16 x 20 or bigger, this is probably what I will build myself in one form or another.

Good luck, I hope you get more help from others and crossover slopes and the 1602's in particular.

[kartsmart]

I cleaned out my closet and came up with some stuff from a old project years ago and this is what i have to start with, 2 tad 1602's, 2 jbl 2420 comp. drivers, 2 jbl 2345 horns. 3 crown 2 way ative crossovers and 1 crown dc 300 watt amp, 2 crown dc 150's through out the old lady and wanting to get back to some speaker projects.

[kartsmart]

by the way the living room is 14x22x9 foot ceilings and 2 good corners that is 11 foot apart

[Greggo]

Kartsmart,

JBL 2420 would work fine in a round wooden tractrix horn (often called a "salad bowl") though you may be inclined to add a supertweeter at some point as that driver really starts to roll off around 15k from what I have read. IMHO a round wooden horn just does the best job of keeping things as smooth and even as possible in a home environment. Look at Edgarhorn or Sierra Brooks and a couple of others for ideas or to just buy a horn from them that will mate well with your JBL compression driver.

I would look at this project for inspiration on the subwoofer, is the almighty subwoofer and it looks like a good one. There is another project on this forum that was posted in the last few weeks where this sub design served as the starting point for a tower speaker that has the JBLs firing out the side and a smaller MTM group of drivers on the front baffle.

I can't think of any reason why these drivers could not be combined into a great speaker system. Hopefully someone more knowledgable than myself will chime in here with some ideas for you.

[enochRoot]

i have been looking into the tads to build a system with recently too. i even emailed the tad engineers about frequency reponse graphs (as i could not find any for the low frequency drivers), but have not heard back yet. they were helpful before that though (with other questions), but have been quiet on this request

i was looking more at the 1601b for my implementation. anyhow...the reason i am posting is to say that the 1602s have the lowest Fs of any tad driver (21hz). they say on the website that they were design specifically for people interested in "rich lows". i don't get why you would cross a driver like that over at 90hz. just curious? seems like it would be good to play all of the bottom octaves (save crazy-low bass). with room gain, i would think you could hear just about all there is down there. just my thoughts i realize you have these drivers on-hand, but if you were thinking of crossing over to subs, the 1601b would be better.

[kartsmart]

this is some good stuff coming in ! maybe I'm wrong but I see the 1602's show to roll off in the low bass area and seem very flat from 100hz to to beond 5-600 hz, I would like to see a much flater responce in the bass area like the The Almighty Sub-woofer, could the be done by eq. the 1602's and keep it in safe limits of cone excursion. would it be asking to much of one driver to cover that many octave's 20hz to 5-600 hz's. been writing on this forum asking about rear horn loading the 1602,s for bass reinforcement but with little response is this a area ,should I still be looking, or better with a sub? the 1602's seem to be suited for horn loading with its low Q

[catapult]

TAD seemed to favor ported enclosures for their 15" studio monitors. I can't really see why you'd need the extra complexity of a bass horn in your relatively small room. With good box/port tuning and boundary/room gain, you should be able to get flat response down into the low 20's without any EQ. Tune it for a gradual rolloff below 100Hz and let the room lift the response to flat. I'm not sure the Almighty sub is a good example because the JBL's Fs is an octave higher than the TAD's and its Q is much higher as well.

[enochRoot]

this is one design i worked up for the 1603. i am on a mac, so i need to rely on java-based box design programs is this the type of rolloff you speak of? also, what do "Ql" and "peak" stand for on here?