Aino gradient - a collaborative speaker project

Thank you for your interest an comments & ideas! This is a long thread with many evolution stages of AINOgradient speakers.

A long story made short about AINOs...

The basic consept is copied from 1980's Jorma Salmi design Gradient 1.x series - a very good review here The Gradient 1.3 Revisited

I studied Linkwitz and Kreskowsky homepages and got personally helped by Rudolf Finke. Minidsp and REW made all this possible for me and are key factors in multiway dipoles for dummies! The shape of bass module comes from a very popular glass by Aino Aalto, wife of architect Alvar Aalto. My daughter and grandmother are also named Aino.

Acoustically Ainos are monopole below 100Hz, cardioid 100-300Hz, dipole from up there (highest dipole null around 6kHz) In early stages I struggled with rearside radiation anomalies of cone drivers and reflections from the large magnet of Fountek Neo3.H. These were fixed by using B&G Neo8 and Neo3 planar units. Another great struggle has been indoor measurements, remember the weather here in Scandinavia!

For the last 9 months I have only made minor adjustments in minidsp settings, mainly to optimize acoustic responses of each driver and tonality of the system. I am very happy with the present performance, and so were the people at the Finnish diy-audio event - AINOgradient got the nomination for "Best Sound in the Show"

Here indoor-measurements at 1.5m distance. RTA/steady state response in-room is 16Hz -18kHz in a slightly descending (ideal) room curve. The upper end is limited because of Icepower D-class amplifier's input-impedance problem (but my aged ears don't hear that)

Link is dead, attached is the article courtesy of wayback machine
 

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