Agree. They are using a thicker wire gauge with lower production costs because of reliability and tolerances.
However, this is not quite right. You must look at the voice coil height as well and calculate the amount of overhang. They all have giant, bloated, woofer-y coils, 16-18mm tall, so there's no question of them exiting the gap so quickly.
Understandably, OP likes bass. But how well do the different models perform at 800Hz (or 1600Hz for that matter, where the filter hasn't strongly kicked in yet! ), while bass thumps or warbles are moving the cone ±5mm?
Adding a mid-range mitigates one problem, but adds others. Stacking the mid and tweeter vertically should be an improvement, per adason's post, but it's still not going to be a "point source".
Satori: 50L compliance, likely a big plus for SQ as the spring load won't add much distortion. The next best would probably be the ceramic SB, at a guess.
The Titan has a heavy 20g cone, but that has to be balanced against the VAS, which is very tight. The lighter cones will generally store less energy, which is a mixed bag. You don't want mid-range frequencies to resonate. The air is very inefficient at absorbing vibrations from such a small surface area, while soft polymers in the cone materials tend to distort. Hence, the old rules of thumb that the snappiest, clearest tones generally come from old-school, large, lightweight cones and soft suspension, not counting the motor technology itself.
But if the cone is a bit heavier, and the suspension is soft, the bass resonance is extended lower. So it's a balancing act.
There's a lot more to it. With some of them the impedance stays quite low at high frequencies. Apart from the older Seas, they all look like they're using shorting rings to linearize the motors. This makes the drivers more "plug and play" with active filters. Whereas the CA18 for example, would probably benefit a lot from using an inductor-based low-pass filter above 300Hz or something like that. And then EQ the overall output to whatever you want with active filters. I would actually guess that the upside potential of doing that is actually higher for the older motors, whereas with the newer motors the sound you get out-of-the-box is more baked-in. (There are deep-dives on this and related topics in threads on current driving of speakers.)
There are various examples of something that will work in this example, as you can buy 3x 500uF NPE caps and place them in parallel. I happen to have some 1300uF NPE caps as well as some 330uF polarized caps that a series-parallel arrangement can be wired to get close as well.
However, the electrolytic types in this case sound poorer than poly caps and have too much insertion loss. I have tried both of the above.
Then I found the 400V 1100uF Unlytics (poly) from Electronic Concepts on ebay for roughly $50 each. These are about 3" diameter x 9" long. This should work a lot better.
Wolf,
Well let me know how that all turns out with the caps.
You're still running one woofer per channel right?
Well let me know how that all turns out with the caps.
You're still running one woofer per channel right?
That actually models out very well. I might just run with this.
The epique 5.5 models out well too but at the cost of sensitivity.
In my opinion, a well designed port is more difficult than a crossover. That’s because I’m an electrical engineer and do not have a background in fluid dynamics. Everything about a port matters - size, shape, material, location of the opening in the box, shape and size of the flair, etc.. Major manufacturers come up with some interesting port designs to overcome resonances and noise.
I’m sure there are mech e’s laughing at me for sweating the easy stuff, but the more I delve into the complexities of ports, the more attractive passive radiators become. If going active, power is cheap. Double the woofers and seal it up ;-)
My side business is motorsports aerodynamics. The port is the least of my worries. The electronics I also understand.
Its all the speaker specs I don't currently have a huge knowledge bank on. I need to do some studying.