Criterion was good at random placement:
Thedrivers are actually quite decent. Just too many of them.
dave
Thedrivers are actually quite decent. Just too many of them.
dave
Unfortunately, John did not return to share his design philosophy regarding his diy speakers in this recent thread:
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...-advice-on-whole-project.400042/#post-7370338
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...-advice-on-whole-project.400042/#post-7370338
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That. We quit selling Polk shortly after the introduction of the side-by-side midbasses.
dave
I was given a pair of late model Polk towers, I forgot the # , large towers with active side mounted subs. I prefered my stand mounts w/subs better. Room size wasn't a limiting factor btw.
I owned a pair of Polk 7s back in college. I always wished I could afford the 10Bs, but I settled on the 7s. What I really wanted was a pair of Dahlquist DQ10s. I blew one of the drivers on the 7s playing The Cars quite a bit too loudly. They replaced it for free. I ended up having to sell the entire system to cover my tuition of my last term.
I remember my first speaker build in 1980.
It was for a mobile disco so needed 2 off cabinets with 2 off Fane 12-50WRMS drivers in each.
Just built the boxes and put the drivers in them without any thought for design.
Worked very well, the speakers were very loud and sounded great.
Boze did something similar for random sound reflections all around the room...
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I had old Phillips speakers, very well built real wood, with four tweeters, each in every corner. I did not bother listening, just converted them to subwoofers. No way to remember the model.
That sounds alot like my first speakers attempt except I used two very beefy 12" Kaption woofers meant for a 4x PA stack.
No clue what parameters were. I think the boxes were the only thing I did a good job with but barely.
Laminated pine boards, mismatched mf and hf, inadequate porting, and whats a crossover?
The porting system was more like slotted vents thats it. They vented air with absolutely no control over it.
I was given monster PAs done diy style and well, those were the spark.
Some of these are just fantastic haha. Hey... as long at it looks "vintage" people will go for it!
I had no crossover either.
The speakers werent even full range just worked to 3KHz.
I remember bolting in one of the speakers.
Screwdriver on front of screw and spanner on nut.
Slipped and screwdriver went right through the cone !
Managed to pull little flap back flush and glued it. Worked well for 5 years before I sold the disco on.
I had started with a 4 by 12 inch cabinet. Got it built then found it wouldnt fit in the car !
So had to cut it down the middle and add the extra sides.
Sometimes you wonder what kind of substances were being consumed while creating some of these hot messes. My only understanding is there was no understanding and it was purely experimental in hopes of an accidental discovery.
I thought the polk 10b sounded really good at the time, compared to the competition in the same price range.
Indeed and don't recall which one and a total flop to my ears, but at least one was done based on a large orchestra's live stage various recording mic locations.
Me too. I kept using them back at the time something must of been right to like them. Later some Canadian Studio Labs got involved and bumped them.
Unknown to me back then my dads co-worker was something like I became later. Anyway my dad used to buy used gear when his work mate upgraded stuff. I learned this much later. I kinda would like to try the SL now. Mine were a big oldie model before they started making the small skinny columns. Something like the imaged except the woofers were white and offset, and they had one mid one tweet and one port. I know there in at least some pictures at my moms.
Btw check out all those hf on these Studio Lab's.
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For several decades, thanks to experts, speaker builders have made use of a lot of rules and guidelines that lead to great-sounding, multiway systems, without much guesswork. However, if subjective impression is the standard, rather than careful measurements, you can break almost all those rules and get something that sounds decent at least. That was the case in the wild west of early acoustic engineering.
Very true, and I was almost ready to say something similar.
Those early designers were obviously trying to affect the radiation pattern of their speakers, to influence how they energized the room. I'm sure they tried a lot of variations until they got something that sounded good to them, in their room. But they lacked the tools, both measurement tools and computational simulation tools, to fully characterize the sound field. They were doing the best they could.
Someday in the future, DIY people will look back at what we are doing today... some will say "what fools they were, they knew so little"... while others will say "yeah, but they were doing the best they could with what they had"...