Hi all,
A short introduction as this is my first post here. My name is Bart, 33 years old and living with my girlfriend, 4 months old kid and our dog in the Netherlands. I've been playing with audio for many years but only have made subwoofers and one pair of speakers with fullrange drivers (Mark Audio Alpair 10) so I have no experience in crossover designs, I will for sure try to in the future.
For now I would like to build my first 5.1 home theatre speakers. It needs to be high WAF and that's the challenge here. We have a living room with the TV at 5m distance from the couch. We did a big renovation last year so I already put cabling in the walls for the speakers. You can see the connectors on the walls in the attached pictures.
Subwoofer
The sub I've built into the cinewall because my girlfriend didn't want a freestanding sub. It's a Dayton Audio UM12-22, tuned to 19 hz and will be powered with a 500w Hypex DSP plate amp. It was quite a challenge but testing with a 100w amp already shaked the whole house and resonances weren't even that bad in the cinewall itself.
LCR and surrounds
At first I was going to make the C-note kit 4 times for surrounds and the C-note center as .. center. That would have been sufficient I think. However the left, right and surrounds will be wall mounted and one of them will be in a doorway. After making a dummy box with the width of the 5" driver it was painfully clear I had to go smaller. 135mm width was too much.
I needed to look into less wide options and then I found the 98 mm wide Dayton Audio PS95-8. Tuned to 90 hz in a 1,5L cabinet and crossing the sub as high as it allows might be an option. But I'm in real doubt if they will be loud enough for HT use. I've ordered 5 of them and having one in my hand I realized it's just so little cone surface and they can only take 10 watts. will they be loud enough at 5m distance for normal movies and series? What other options do I have? Is using 2 per side on top of each other an option or will that not make a huge difference? Down low I will have 6dB coupling but what about mid frequencies?
Another option I'm looking into is using the ND-91-4 with ND16FA-6 tweeter which has been done before (see link at bottom). That's a 3,5"woofer too but with lower FS, more xmax and more power handling and does well in 1,5L too. Or should I try to create a C-note with a smaller bass driver and redo the crossover?
And last but not least, does wall mounting screw things up? Do I need BSC to counteract this or can I actually use the 2pi location in my advance?
Any advice is really appreciated!
A short introduction as this is my first post here. My name is Bart, 33 years old and living with my girlfriend, 4 months old kid and our dog in the Netherlands. I've been playing with audio for many years but only have made subwoofers and one pair of speakers with fullrange drivers (Mark Audio Alpair 10) so I have no experience in crossover designs, I will for sure try to in the future.
For now I would like to build my first 5.1 home theatre speakers. It needs to be high WAF and that's the challenge here. We have a living room with the TV at 5m distance from the couch. We did a big renovation last year so I already put cabling in the walls for the speakers. You can see the connectors on the walls in the attached pictures.
Subwoofer
The sub I've built into the cinewall because my girlfriend didn't want a freestanding sub. It's a Dayton Audio UM12-22, tuned to 19 hz and will be powered with a 500w Hypex DSP plate amp. It was quite a challenge but testing with a 100w amp already shaked the whole house and resonances weren't even that bad in the cinewall itself.
LCR and surrounds
At first I was going to make the C-note kit 4 times for surrounds and the C-note center as .. center. That would have been sufficient I think. However the left, right and surrounds will be wall mounted and one of them will be in a doorway. After making a dummy box with the width of the 5" driver it was painfully clear I had to go smaller. 135mm width was too much.
I needed to look into less wide options and then I found the 98 mm wide Dayton Audio PS95-8. Tuned to 90 hz in a 1,5L cabinet and crossing the sub as high as it allows might be an option. But I'm in real doubt if they will be loud enough for HT use. I've ordered 5 of them and having one in my hand I realized it's just so little cone surface and they can only take 10 watts. will they be loud enough at 5m distance for normal movies and series? What other options do I have? Is using 2 per side on top of each other an option or will that not make a huge difference? Down low I will have 6dB coupling but what about mid frequencies?
Another option I'm looking into is using the ND-91-4 with ND16FA-6 tweeter which has been done before (see link at bottom). That's a 3,5"woofer too but with lower FS, more xmax and more power handling and does well in 1,5L too. Or should I try to create a C-note with a smaller bass driver and redo the crossover?
And last but not least, does wall mounting screw things up? Do I need BSC to counteract this or can I actually use the 2pi location in my advance?
Any advice is really appreciated!
https://www.superbestaudiofriends.org/index.php?threads/usm-2-diy-speakers-nd91-4-nd16fa-6.5460/
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hi @bartklerks and welcome to the forum!
depending on the crossover frequency (between subwoofer and LCR boxes) you probably need waaaay bigger midwoofers if they shoud keep up with the possible SPL of a 500 W driven 12" / 19mm Xmax subwoofer.
have a look at this X-max-calculator.
for example, just roughly looking at Xmax and thermal limits and considering the drivers "in wall/on floor" (2pi) in sealed enclosures:
your subwoofer is capable of:
100 dB at 20 Hz
107 dB at 30 Hz
112 dB at 40 Hz (at about 500 W)
each of your PS95 drivers in sealed enclosure is capable of:
96 dB at 150 Hz (at the thermal limit for this driver)
ND-91-4 in sealed enclosure:
100 dB at 140 Hz (at thermal limit)
RS 100-8 in sealed enclosure, could be used as fullrange and has a 1" voice coil for higher thermal power:
100 dB at 160 Hz (at thermal limit)
bass reflex will provide more SPL in lower, Xmax-limited frequency area of each speaker, thus extending possible lower frequency limit. however PS95 and RS100 are not ideal for bass reflex use.
if your speaker enclosure is very flat you can consider it 2pi, as far as i know. however you will get some wiggles in the frequency response depending on the distance of driver to wall and on the size of the baffle!
have a look at jeff bagby's baffle/boundary simulator for effects of baffle and speaker positioning.
maybe this post can be interesting to check for spectral peak energy distribution of different music tracks.
matrix soundtrack main title could be an example for movie sound.
depending on the crossover frequency (between subwoofer and LCR boxes) you probably need waaaay bigger midwoofers if they shoud keep up with the possible SPL of a 500 W driven 12" / 19mm Xmax subwoofer.
have a look at this X-max-calculator.
for example, just roughly looking at Xmax and thermal limits and considering the drivers "in wall/on floor" (2pi) in sealed enclosures:
your subwoofer is capable of:
100 dB at 20 Hz
107 dB at 30 Hz
112 dB at 40 Hz (at about 500 W)
each of your PS95 drivers in sealed enclosure is capable of:
96 dB at 150 Hz (at the thermal limit for this driver)
ND-91-4 in sealed enclosure:
100 dB at 140 Hz (at thermal limit)
RS 100-8 in sealed enclosure, could be used as fullrange and has a 1" voice coil for higher thermal power:
100 dB at 160 Hz (at thermal limit)
bass reflex will provide more SPL in lower, Xmax-limited frequency area of each speaker, thus extending possible lower frequency limit. however PS95 and RS100 are not ideal for bass reflex use.
it will mess up frequency response due to comb filtering.
if your speaker enclosure is very flat you can consider it 2pi, as far as i know. however you will get some wiggles in the frequency response depending on the distance of driver to wall and on the size of the baffle!
have a look at jeff bagby's baffle/boundary simulator for effects of baffle and speaker positioning.
maybe this post can be interesting to check for spectral peak energy distribution of different music tracks.
matrix soundtrack main title could be an example for movie sound.
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Thanks Stv for your reply!
Because my sub placement was fixed I was making sure I had enough headroom for DSP to fix room nodes a little, I'm not expecting to watch a movie at 110 dB. I'd like to, but my girlfriend and neighbours are going to kill me. The sub response will go down to 20 hz flat at 110 dB, before room gain.
It's okay for the mains and center not to achieve 110 dB but I'm not sure what they should be able to achieve at 1m to have a nice experience at 5m distance. From what I've read 75-85 dB is loud enough at listeners position for HT. Going from 1 to 5m is 20 log(5) = 14 dB, for an outdoor situation I guess. 85+14= 99dB. Does that work equal for the whole spectrum or can I expect more or less loss at higher/lower frequencies for example?
The PS95-8 would fall short, and the other two would theoretically just make it but probably power compression isn't taken into account yet. This small speaker challenge is a pain in the *** 🙂
You're right about the comb filtering, I guess that's only an option when using the drivers for lows and filling in the highs with a higher sensitivity HF driver.
Thanks for the links! That baffle/boundary/room gain simulator looks awesome. I'm definitely going to play around with that.
that's a good protection for the small drivers!
yes.
indoors you have less decrease of SPL, because the amount of reflected sound remains the same.
also, you have 5 fullrange drivers that will add around +3dB each of possible total SPL.
however, most of the sound is probably concentrated in the center channel, so I suspect you will be easily frying your poor 20-mm center driver voice coil.
keep in mind that movies can have a high crest factor. so maybe you turn up the volume during silent hibernation of a peaceful space ship but then burn the drivers when - all of a sudden - aliens attack.
on the other hand, even 10 watts can be very loud!
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