Small, wall mounted open baffle?

[GuyPanico]

I dont think i've ever seen a wall mounted open baffle. I can understand why though. Close proximity to the wall is not ideal for a dipole speaker. However with my size living room, even a floor standing OB speaker will need to be close to the wall.

So here was my idea. I would use a pair of B3N's in a 1.5way setup to help with baffle step. I was going to mount both drivers on a piece of 1/2" thick, 12" round, polycarbonate. Distance to the wall will only be 10-12".

How beneficial would some sound diffusing or absorbing material be if placed behind the baffle? I was pondering the idea of making a piece to place behind the baffle that had the surface like that of ripples when you drop a pebble in water. I think this would do a great job of diffusing the rear wave. Perhaps made out of stryofoam or wood.

Please give a newbie some guidance

[preiter]

My opinion would be to forget about a dipole speaker. Dipoles need more space than that.

If you can make a hole in the wall you could try infinite baffle.

[Kensai]

With this kind of spacing, you might want to try something omni if your looking for something that isn't traditional sound.

Another option would be a BiB. Go into the fullrange driver page and there's a huge thread there. The codified results so far are on Godzilla's page . These want to be pushed right up against the wall and give a very similar to OB sound in the bass and mids. And, if you need to get even more shallow, instead of building them where the driver is on a skiny face, you can build them wide an shallow with the driver mounted to one side.

Kensai

[Svante]

Hmm, I think it might work, depending on how you mount it on the wall. I think that using it for surround speakers would be the best. The baffle should then be mounted perpendicular to the wall. To mount the baffle in parallel with the wall would give rather unpredictable results, IMO.

...but I have not tried either of them, so this is an educated guess, at best.

[nunayafb]

I had thought of something similar to this although I was considering placing a cone or a pyramid behind any open back drivers to reflect the sound waves laterally as opposed to back onto the cone. In addition I was contemplating 2-4" rigid fiberglass on the baffle back and the wall with a couple of inches of space between them, and then experiment with some polyfill type stuffing as necessary(air gap)
From what I have read the main sonic benefit to OB/Dipole is that the rear wave is spread out and allowed to decay before reflecting back and impacting the cone. This is why you are being told they need distance from the rear wall, if the baffle is too close then you are aproaching a boxed enclosure in terms of magnitude of reflection. To place an OB near a wall requires something equivalent to "baffle to wall separation" and I think that redirecting that rear wave into some efficient damping would do that at least fairly well and definitely better than an enclosed box would do.

I hope you experiment with this and share your results with us, OB will become so much more popular if they can be stuffed against a wall.

[Kensai]

Maybe instead of a straight perpendicular mount, a hinge mount. It has been recomended, for surround use, anyway, that the edge of the baffle be pointed at the listening position. Hinges would allow you to do that regardless of the necessary mount position versus listening posion and would also allow you to tweak to your heart's content.

Kensai