Please, give us name and surname of this gear!
I've found my next bass driver, FaitalPro 18XL1800, tuned @28 hz in a 180 liters! I'd like to use it in combination with a full-range, something like this Curt's beatiful project Halcyon, but with a 15-18'' LF unit and a large as it's necessary cabinet.
I agree totally, tired of looking for real good bass speakers unsuccesfull. I still remember when young I've listened a pair of 'normal' speakers using if I don't go wrong the mytic 10'' RCF L10P10, by time NYA, air vibrated and moved and I was able to FEEL music, not only to listen. Today, nothing similar, it's rare to find 8'' based loudspeakers, figure 10'' and over..
However, in conclusion, it seems to me that the more large is LF driver's diameter the more it's possibile to find the bass I'm looking for, isn't it?
Thank you very much to all for your great tributes!
You picked the nugget out of this discussion. Larger diameter means the cone moves less in and out reducing distortion compared to a small driver moving nearly 1/2 an inch.
exact. I personally dont think a 10" is nearly enough bass. same with 12"
hell, i even think 15" is awesome, but im curious about 18"
and dual 15"
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My story?
I don’t know the model of speaker, but it was a dark wood style finish, a relatively tall floor-stander with multiple mostly-vertically arrayed drivers (some silver metallic coloured drivers or baffle elements), and at least one adjustment knob on the front and I never saw any grill cloth. It was 40yrs ago, i.e. around 1982/3. The brand was Wharfedale. The speakers were pretty new and driven by an impressive black fully loaded Sansui rack, in a student dorm room and where I lived two floors up it pounded out bass like there was a pile driver working next to the building and in-room it just jolted everything around. Never since have I experienced such percussive solid bass. And I never remembered the particular model.
I know the Diamond range were launched at that time, but I have a particularly strong feeling these speakers were not Diamonds and were from their E Series, i.e. the E90.
I don’t know the model of speaker, but it was a dark wood style finish, a relatively tall floor-stander with multiple mostly-vertically arrayed drivers (some silver metallic coloured drivers or baffle elements), and at least one adjustment knob on the front and I never saw any grill cloth. It was 40yrs ago, i.e. around 1982/3. The brand was Wharfedale. The speakers were pretty new and driven by an impressive black fully loaded Sansui rack, in a student dorm room and where I lived two floors up it pounded out bass like there was a pile driver working next to the building and in-room it just jolted everything around. Never since have I experienced such percussive solid bass. And I never remembered the particular model.
I know the Diamond range were launched at that time, but I have a particularly strong feeling these speakers were not Diamonds and were from their E Series, i.e. the E90.
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I'm not at all wowed by that video. This sort of thing ie. throwing a TON of money at something just to be vulgar and grabbing your cod piece doesn't impress me, plus its an almost complete waste of resources when you can achieve better results with careful engineering and less money.
I know now mad Europeans can be with their audio systems (I'm one of them). A shear brute force approach by a club owner is usually going to be for the purpose of bragging, marketing and attracting attention. I used to build club systems in the 80s, mainly for dance music playback. That means clean, loud and non fatiguing sound. Well engineered LF horns are the first choice for tight, musical and punchy bass that goes into the low 30s - high 20s with appropriately sized and designed enclosures. This also gives very good efficiency so amps and speakers don't have to be pushed hard for reliability and distortion sake. It was also important to mostly concentrate the sound onto the dance floor area and allow people to give themselves a bit of a break from the higher SPLs by carefully distributing the music at slightly lower levels throughout the outer perimeter of the club. You cant do that with one big wall of subs.
Having a massive wall of bass doesn't solve room mode issues. It just masks them. You still will have the same standing waves if the wavelength matches the room boundary dimensions. It would be smarter to distribute multiple subs throughout the entire room so its excited equally in many locations. Having it come from one wall just increases efficiency with group gain and extends the low end rolloff point downwards. That doesn't mean better bass. It just means more, deeper bass at the same power levels, but not everywhere in the room. If you replaced that expensive setup with a large well engineered FLH array using 8 appropriate 18" drivers, it would almost certainly sound better, more impactful and musical. A properly designed FLH array will always be capable of sounding better than a barge full of lower efficiency long throw drivers in direct radiating configuration.
Now I remember many years ago in a shop a pair of Wharfedale sounding one of the best bass ever heard, it was the first time I knew that brand, there was a normal dimension pair of floorstanders put onto shelves higher than my height, I haven't idea of what model they was, I know only that basses flooded room in a sweet, deep and wrapping way, I'd want to stay there for hours, never listened something similar, there was around 1998-2000 year.
Beatiful post, would you have a project of those still available?
Thank you
The best bass I ever heard and that is free is in the middle of the desert at nigth... Just stop breathing and you can hear... pardon, feel...7.8 hz !
Btw, serious question : can you hear bass notes still corelated to the music (phase?) that are longer than the distance between the bass driver and your ears ?
Then if you accept the group delay: lower than the WL of the room length before hearing echo ?
How much a 10 ms group delay affects say a WL of 40 hz in free field outside ?
Then if you accept the group delay: lower than the WL of the room length before hearing echo ?
How much a 10 ms group delay affects say a WL of 40 hz in free field outside ?
Of course does a double bass array solve your room modes - something a simple distributed woofer system can't do. (of course your room modes ALWAYS exist but they don't get excited with a DBA)
Here is a better picture of the dancefloor:
It covers the whole wall -> no room resonances in L/R and U/D.
I don't get why they only use +-3mm when they are able to do +-25mm (you won't need a special speaker for these +-3mm) and you easily could do the same with half the speakers and a way simpler construction but hey - seems like they had some money around and wanted to spend.
Sound is no sinewave as we draw it. It's a longitudinal wave -> air particles get pushed and pulled move back and forth but don't change position.
The size of the room is no restriction for hearing sound! You get resonances and room gain but even in a car you can "hear" 20Hz.
So you don't need full wavelenght or other things to hear something. It's air pressure change comming towards you.
(Not sure if I could make this understandable - at least I tried 😊 )
So - yes.
Our ability to hear get's more "unprecise" at low frequencies (heads are not that big) but I don't know the exact numbers for group delay and their auditory threshold. But 10ms are about 3,4m distance change.
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The image I posted is a very good match to my memory, bearing in mind that was 40yrs ago. I’m 90% sure it was an E90. Not expensive compared with many but you simply can’t find them anymore. Design details, crossover details and driver spec would be hard to find too. We need to find somebody with a pair of these who’d be cooperative about some reverse engineering.
In theory under ideal circumstances you're correct, but you still have modes down the depth of the room. That means you can also have destructive interference if the wave isn't mostly absorbed at the other end.
Distributed subs will allow for better balance of bass to the rest of the full range sound. Otherwise you have the bass dictate the overall audio levels further away from the stage, which won't decay as quickly due to rhe array gain cutting the level only by 3 dB every doubling of distance rather than the usual 6 dB. IOW if you want the same SPL throughout the building, this big bass array will work, but it wont allow for independent levels as with separate distributed subs - not ideal for a dance club IMO unless you're willing to have the low end dominate the entire mix.
I believe multi-subs do work similarly to a DBA. Finding the positions can be like looking at a Rubik's cube that's messed up, and the DBA like when it's solved... but in both cases the whole package is still there.
Less stored energy mean better bass. Bass reflex speakers had higher amount stored energy, closed box have little less and OB had the least stored energy.
DBA is more like a brute force approach, I think. Multisub solutions seem the smarter one to me.
And all of these have about a magnitude less stored energy than the room modes in your living.
Recipe for best bass, get the biggest woofers with the highest BL factor and the lowest Rms you canget away with. Don’t use smaller very high Xmax woofers to get the same displacement because they all sound like air pumps instead of real bass and be sure to have tweeters that can handle the same dynamics. Want better bass, by better tweeters (no joke). Forget 5 inch, 6,5 inch drivers, they sre distortion generators below 200Hz. Once used to the sound of big woofers you will wonder how on earth you fooled yourself all these years believing small woofers could produce any realistic sounding bass.