Help me understand why powered bass bins with xovers, is not the ultimate end to floorstanding speakers. It allows a person to build as many 2 way tops with any multitude of drivers, and swap out the tops to have different floor standing speakers on tap. A great driver sound characteristics learning tool. What am I missing?
All good points. And that’s how they do it in pro audio. For ultimate scalability just add as much volume displacement as you need for the SPL required at the listening distance expected.
From outdoor busking on a street to the sell-out crowds of the biggest popstars.
I think in Home audio
Here are the downsides.
Aesthetics-
Matching the bass bin size/dimensions to your “tops”- you can still overengineer or under engineer it.
Your mid and Tweeter will always need to be balanced with your woofers .
Suppose I build base bins with Dual 12” or dual 21” inch woofers. Is that enough? Is it too much? And if it’s too much did I really need YYY litres of (sub)wooferin?
There is a Jeff Bagby design for exactly this arrangement. It's called the Kairos and has both an upper 2-way module and a separate bass module.
https://meniscusaudio.com/product/kairos-woofer-module-kit/
a) they'd be large (I'm assuming given what I envision of a bass bin)
b) they may very well have a low WAF
c) if the crossover is passive you'll have re-jig for each top
d) it's a lot of building cabinets
e) probably going to be expensive
f) you'll need measurement equipment, because audio memory is short
But if none of those are, or at least most aren't, a detriment go for it. And keep us informed. 😁
b) they may very well have a low WAF
c) if the crossover is passive you'll have re-jig for each top
d) it's a lot of building cabinets
e) probably going to be expensive
f) you'll need measurement equipment, because audio memory is short
But if none of those are, or at least most aren't, a detriment go for it. And keep us informed. 😁
Lets give some good reasons to build all in one speaker:
- Space- you can use the space behind the mid-range and tweeter for the woofer, allowing for a larger internal volume and therefore higher efficiency.
- Discontinuity between the cabinets can cause diffraction, messing up the frequency response and creating temporal ghosting.
- Single tower speaker allows for multiple drivers covering the mid-bass, reducing or eliminating floor/ceiling bounce discontinuities. Of course, you could have the mid-bass at the floor level via Allison effect, but this would be a different design.
One more "ultimate" topic...just so sad....missing a lot the "ultimate ultimate ..." as in homo sapiens sapiens.
Thank you very much everyone. This is exactly what I was missing. Mainly I forgot they are not Subs I would be blending. Meaning the placement relative to the floor or mid-range driver above it would change tuning. I did forget about this completely. I was thinking along the lines of adding a couple of true subwoofers to bookshelf speakers. It is a different ball game. Thanks again
What you are describing is how I designed my system
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/new-active-3-way-hypex-and-sb.352767/#post-6161813
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/new-active-satori-textreme.366347/#post-6493543
I would not describe my system as "ultimate"... it is very good and I like it a lot, but "ultimate" is a big word...
There are many advantages to this kind of system architecture with 2 boxes per side. Disadvantages? Aesthetics, the added size and floor space, the need to build and finish 4 cabinets instead of just 2.
The distance between the woofer cabinet and the upper cabinet should be no more than 1/4 wavelength spacing at the crossover frequency... so for 200 Hz that would be about 17 inches.
If you can make it fit in a given room, it can work really well.
j.
I noticed all of the nice 2 way speaker kits from Madisound, Meniscus, etc ... Would allow a person to enjoy/hear RAAL, Satori, Scan, Accuton, etc ...
No matching of the bass bins. Make them black. Use a pair of 8" woofers. Narrower baffle. If you switch to a wider top speaker, add add side wings to the woofer for BSC..... In a perfect world 🤣
No matching of the bass bins. Make them black. Use a pair of 8" woofers. Narrower baffle. If you switch to a wider top speaker, add add side wings to the woofer for BSC..... In a perfect world 🤣
You're correct. "Ultimate" referred only to the design allowing for ease of hearing different drivers in proven 2 way designs, on bass bins. Ultimate modular maybe?
I have my open baffle dipole woofers (two 15" per side one after another) equed and powered with plate amps pretty much set. All i am building are bookshelf speakers from 150Hz up.
Depends on how you set them up. Are they optimized to be subs or woofers. I use a 12" bottom box that I have had 4 different tops on over time and plan to use them again I have crossed them over at 300Hz -800Hz depending on what the top was at the time. I have the driver close to the top of the cabinet and set the driver spacing with the upper baffle. I have done active and passive crossovers depending on the top. Last iteration I used them in a bi-amp set-up under Heil drivers. I have also had 3 way and a 4 way "head" so there no reason to do 2 way only.
Rob 🙂
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Spot on!
here’s my bass bins, loaded with twin 12” woofers. 2.83V sensitivity 93dB
Anechoic
F3 42Hz
F6 33Hz
F10 26Hz
in a living room it’s just slamming! (that’s an technical engineering term)
and that’s just one speaker playing!!
So now the problem is which midrange or tweeter do I want or need? Purifi ultra low distortion midrange or B&W high sensitivity very low distortion midrange?
And maybe my 35cm wide cabinets are too much. Maybe a pair of Purifi 8” woofers would be enough; in slim 24cm cabinets.
But most of the time the black Purifi 2 way is enough.
My favourite woofer is sleeping in the background.
It’s about rooms and meetings expectations.
Yes visuals shouldn’t matter but the science says they do!
No decisions are necessary! Just line your closet with shelves full of 2-way top cabinets. Swap them out periodically as you desire. This is what I'm talking about. Why live with a pair of speakers? When you can live with 10 pairs LOL
If you read the linked article you will see that although the examples are for the Continuum and Kairos, Jeff intended it be a universal bass bin/module. Or to be more precise, what he calls in the article "The (sorta) Universal Crossover".