The best bass ever heard (and possibly affordable)

(yep, my bad, the four 1.6 looked like 1.7 in the dark !)

Thanks for the system description... what a big work 🙂

The +10 dB 20hz to 150 hz is impressive. Seems room gain doesn't help that much and one needs lot of boost EQ. That is also a lot of emissive surface with all that planars.
Did you feel a compression chest feeling with the DBA ? Is this pressure could move the thin planars diagphragmes ?
 
The most important feature of a well-tuned DBA is not necessary the frequency response, but the decay. You can almost say that a DBA will make your room anechoic, or very close to. My setup is pretty good down to 25 Hz or so, as this REW wavelet shows. There is no bass absorption in my room at all!

Wavelet.jpg
 
My max SPL is limited by availiable amp power, which is approximately 2x500W in 8 ohms for both arrays. The amps start clipping around 110 dB.

I measured the distortion at three levels as shown below. With more amp power, I could achieve even higher max SPL with not all that much distortion.

3Xspl.jpg


Red line is 2nd harmonic, yellow is 3rd.


Dist85.jpg


Dist95.jpg


Dist105.jpg
 
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That's really amazing! What type of subwoofer system do you have?
It's a bit odd and took a lot of experimentation to get it to work.

Firstly, I have a living room connected to the kitchen and corridor, which gives strange and unpredictable bass behavior with anomalies around 40 and 80 Hz. On the positive side, I have a large window area, I think this reduces the overall reverb on the bass (though it didn't help on its own).

I have 2 dipole speakers that can play from 35-40 Hz in this room + two servo subwoofers, but they are located in one place in the room.

Subwoofers play with dipoles up to 100Hz. There was one single place in the room in which there was a fairly even response up to 100 Hz. In all other positions, and I try all of them, in stereo and mono subs 🙂 there were deep peaks and dips. The subwoofer crossover was chosen empirically to remove the dip in the 80Hz region that the dipoles had. The main speakers were delayed by 20ms to keep the subwoofers in timing.

I add a 35 Hz crossover for the main speakers, which reduces anomalies in the 40 Hz region. I accidentally discovered that adding a crossover there affects the room modes, and searched for its slope to improve the picture on the spectrogram.

And of course, some EQ for subs, dipoles and all together. The result is a distributed monopole + dipole 2+1 system, crucial to getting a smooth response was to find the optimal place for the subwoofer, adjust the delay and look for high / low crossovers for subs and dipoles, which, by their interaction, reduced room effects.

That's how it looks. Subwoofers in the upper left corner under the ceiling on the wardrobe.

1671524848072.png
 
It's a bit odd and took a lot of experimentation to get it to work.

Firstly, I have a living room connected to the kitchen and corridor, which gives strange and unpredictable bass behavior with anomalies around 40 and 80 Hz. On the positive side, I have a large window area, I think this reduces the overall reverb on the bass (though it didn't help on its own).

I have 2 dipole speakers that can play from 35-40 Hz in this room + two servo subwoofers, but they are located in one place in the room.

Subwoofers play with dipoles up to 100Hz. There was one single place in the room in which there was a fairly even response up to 100 Hz. In all other positions, and I try all of them, in stereo and mono subs 🙂 there were deep peaks and dips. The subwoofer crossover was chosen empirically to remove the dip in the 80Hz region that the dipoles had. The main speakers were delayed by 20ms to keep the subwoofers in timing.

I add a 35 Hz crossover for the main speakers, which reduces anomalies in the 40 Hz region. I accidentally discovered that adding a crossover there affects the room modes, and searched for its slope to improve the picture on the spectrogram.

And of course, some EQ for subs, dipoles and all together. The result is a distributed monopole + dipole 2+1 system, crucial to getting a smooth response was to find the optimal place for the subwoofer, adjust the delay and look for high / low crossovers for subs and dipoles, which, by their interaction, reduced room effects.

That's how it looks. Subwoofers in the upper left corner under the ceiling on the wardrobe.

View attachment 1121311
That’s an interesting pair of dipoles you have. What are they?