Marchand "Bassis" and Sub Driver options.

[drubrew]

Does anyone own a Marchand "Bassis"? What are your thoughts on this unit? Are there other good devices such as this that work well with tuning Subs? I'm in the process of tackling my first sub project, so I'm doing my materials research. I have built several 2 way designs with great success and now I need to fill in the low end of these speakers. I'm also having a hard time deciding witch driver to use. There seem to be lots of great options but unlike reviews on equipment and the ability to run down to your local stereo store and listen to speakers, there is now way to tell if the driver you are about to buy is the sound you want. Luck of the draw I guess. Any way I have narrowed it down to the TC15 by TC Sounds, Bluepoint 1503, or one of the Lambda drivers. Would anyone say I would be wasting the intended design of a TD driver by Lambda, since it seems these were intended as a mid/low bass driver for horn systems, but I would only want to use the low end. What I'm looking to build is a music only sub, I have another sub already dedicated to my home theater. While I find this sub great for home theater, I don't quite like it for music application, it's a bit slow & muddy. So I'd like to build a sub with more attention to detail, accuracy with fast/punchy bass. So how has played around with these drivers and what are your thoughts? Are there any web sites set up with projects using any of these drivers?
Thanx
Dru

 

[Super]

Have you taken the Adire Audio Shiva or NHT 1259 into consideration? They're both excellent drivers, as is the Dayton Titanic. If you want it as tight and fast as you can get, maybe you could look at some of the Focal drivers as well.

 

[tsz]

I don't know about the TC15 but I use a pair of TC10 drivers and I think them are great, very clean bass and almost none mechanical noise. The drivers are very rigid, 15 kg for a 10".
I guess the TC15 is of the same quality, but you'll probably need a quite large enclosure or some sort of electronic compensation to get real deep.

I found some links for you:
http://216.150.71.139/audioinnovation/tcsounds.html
http://expert.cc.purdue.edu/~stoltzfu/sub.html
http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=244

/Tobbe

[Edited by tsz on 09-21-2001 at 05:57 AM]

 

[drubrew]

I have actually seen all but the last website listed. I have decideed to go with TC Sounds. I found a guy who is selling custom one time built TC 15" drivers. They are the fastes and finest he has seen from TC. I sort of ruled out NHT and Earthquake from info I've been gathering in the past months. They are fine drivers, but cant do what I want them to do with out gobs of Eqing. Thanks for the input.

 

[Samuel Jayaraj]

I assembled the Marchand Bassis PCB several years ago and did some initial testing with a crappy power supply. It did well. Never got further. I still have the assembled PCB. You need to know your current Speaker system Q and Fs as well as the mechanical limits of the woofer before electronically setting the new parameters.

 

[CharlieLaub]

The Marchand Basis is just an adjustable Linkwitz Transform circuit. This is very useful for flattening and extending the passband lower, e.g. to get lower bass out of your sub. You still have all the inherent issues with closed box drivers.

Best use is to put the driver in a larger than normal box and then use the Bassis to boost up the low frequencies. Make sure you have a huge power amp, e.g. hundreds of watts, for this purpose. Every 12dB boost requires a power increase of something like 16 fold.

-Charlie

 

[NEO Dan]

This thread is from 2001.
Oddly enough also have an assembled but unused BASIS PCB kit without PSU, as I was going to put it in an amp.