Suggestions for the Best Mid-Woofers?

[Cany89]

IIt does not discourage Japanese audiophiles and horn aficionados . As long as you can stretch your legs in the room you should be fine.

This looks PACKED! (I admire Japanese people for that. What a commitment!)

Ps.
I visited Portugal two years ago and it must have been my best tourist experience so far. I'm only sorry I added my fat a..s to a waves of visiting crowds in Lisbon and Porto. Coastal towns and villages were fine and quiet since it was a past season unlike main cities.

Glad you liked it. Silver Coast is a gem. (Southern parts are well known, they are beautiful too)

 

[Cany89]

in the last few months there was a quite professional DIY audio magazine in Germany - HobbyHiFi from Bernd Timmermanns - with a couple of high sensivity speakers builds, he called the whole story "PA meets HiFI"

he claims that in listening tests there was no 1.4 horn driver horn combination good enough in the treble region
his recommendation with low cutoff about 1.5 kHz is the CDX1-1747 with the H1-9040P horn from Celestion

of course he left out the newer B&C 1.4 inch coaxial designs like this one

https://www.bcspeakers.com/en/products/coaxial_hf/1.4/8/DCX354

for him on the other hand there is no way to go under 1500 Hz with a 1 inch driver

hope it helps, Stefano

He might be right, but it depends on the horn. The horn I first thought was Marcel's beautiful A40G2 with a matched throat for 1 inch Lavoce DF10.171K, I saw many real measurements, and they were almost just perfect for analog xover. Here are the measurements from the ATH website:



Then I changed my design and considered Xhorn, so I opted for a 1.4-inch compression driver, Faital HF1440 - so the problem is high-end. Well, it's not perfect, but it's more than good enough. Here is the frequency and directivity, from xhorn's website:



I can fix it with DSP easily.

I think narrowing above 10 kHz is not a bad thing; no need to excite the room.

I'm on the edge with both options, 1.4-inch going up to 20 kHz, and 1-inch going as low as 1.2 kHz. I'm no expert, so I can only buy and measure. Ofc, I want the lowest THD with the most natural sound and minimal DSP...

P.S.:
One of my best high sensivity builds was this here:

This looks awesome!

here i am fiddling around with an additional tweeter, even though i used one of the best available 1 inch driver horn combinations for a reasonable price
18sound NSD 1095N driver + XT1086 horn

This 1-inch driver sure looks interesting! I saw some measurements of ND1095N, but NSD looks better than that.

Here is the directivity of ND1095N on Xhorn (33) for reference.

my problem was the quite high directivity index in the treble region, the small tractrix wood horn with only 110 mm horn mouth diameter is much less beaming than the much larger horn mouth of the XT1086 horn with the elliptical 250mm x 200mm mouth size

Maybe change the horn inside the cabinet and make it a 2-way? I don't count on myself to match the directivity of more than 2 drivers. That's why I don't even think about doing 3-way (unless the 3rd driver is a sub bass...)

to check how a horn behaves with beamwidth and directivity on the frequency axis you may want to check out this one

https://celestion-horn.netlify.app/

here the example what the CDX1-1747 will do with the elliptical horn parameters of the XT1086 and the small circular wood horn



i have CLIO Pocket measurements - never seen a better transient response behaviour than the 18sound NSD1095N driver with the small wood horn above 2200 Hz

I'll check this, and if I choose 1-inch, maybe NSD1095N is the right driver. What do you think about its sound? What are your subjective comments?


Thanks for all the information and your time.

 

[Arez]

That’s an interesting trade of! I would go for a small sealed - and boost the low end with DSP if it stays above 90 dB’ish, and goes down to 45 Hz without problem. I really like the quality of good sealed bass/low-mids.

Depends on where you cross over, there is always a tradeoff.
https://hificompass.com/en/speakers/measurements/sbacoustics/sb-acoustics-sb34nrxl75-8

 

[SBA_SLOB_GUY]

Hello again @Cany89 ,

this was some years ago the next iteration of the high sensivity speakers in the living room



with two 2X4HD miniDSP's and the Marantz AV receiver as 6 channel amp, probably the cleanest build i have ever made

Sonido SCW400 as subs, Sonido SFR200A custom build with no whizzer cone for the low-mids / mids and the NSD1095N with the 4.5 inch circular wood horn as the tweeter

have more fun with your project, Stefano

 

[limono]

Get those https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/TDH3--tom-danley-tdh-3-3-way-passive-loudspeaker

 

[Cany89]

It looks great! Those Sonido woofers are interesting. I checked them after you wrote about them in a few posts.

 

[Cany89]

I started to question why would I need a horn from 2-3 meter distance in a small living room. It’s all below 90-95 dB - even the most demanding peaks. Or am I wrong?

Wouldn’t a dome tweeter with a shallow waveguide would be more suitable? (when crossed between 1-1.5kHz)

 

[limono]

3 meters is a good distance. One mostly wants horn because nothing else sounds like it 🙂 Logic has little to do with it. Why not a paper tweeter unlike everybody else ?
These supposedly sound very good according to a guy I like to read. They aparently use rather inexpensive drivers ( small models ) but are coherent and drivers are well integrated which points to good crossover work .
https://www.odeon-audio.com/