It's an old Audax PA driver ,nominally 10" .
Very common in its days , now rather pricy and sought after.
Worse my hearing becomes the more I like it 🙂. It became so bad lately that I started to enjoy old Naim haha
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The interesting feature of the speaker is that " the tweeter " does not extend the BW really and both die around 10Khz . Tweeter just fills some valley in the upper midrange. Most peculiar design people love to hate
That's one of the major issues I have with a wideband driver, getting the bass to be seamless. I've found that woofers with an extended bandwidth will match better than purpose built subwoofers that only cover a few octaves. Another thing I've discovered is that the character of the bass is better when played on large drivers. For example a 4" driver can go down to 70hz but the bass is much better when played on a 12" woofer with the same lower frequency limit. To realize bass drum it seems to require larger drivers even if the smaller ones are reproducing the bass well. Last point, adding a woofer assist is a great way to reduce distortion in the wideband driver. This allows one to party like it's 1999.
You need to time and phase align the woofer like you do in a good crossover in general, that is mandatory to have a good sound. And a wideband woofer is often indeed better than a dedicated subwoofer, even with relative steep filters like i use now (LR4 with dsp and eq). And keep them in seperate enclosures definitly helps a lot also.
A single driver speaker often has more distortion than a multiway, and mostly in the bass. A waw crossed arround 200-300Hz keeps the fullrange sound intact but releaves the FR driver from the stress (and distortion) of playing bass with mostly a very small cone and/or little xmax. That makes it in the whole spectrum with way less distortion, even higher as the driver has to work less against it's bounderies. So the whole setup can play louder and fill bigger spaces.
I also have singe driver speakers, but mostly use them in nearfield situations like on my desk. Once i sit more than a few meters away a multiway (even only a waw) becomes better for critical listening when done right.
A single driver speaker often has more distortion than a multiway, and mostly in the bass. A waw crossed arround 200-300Hz keeps the fullrange sound intact but releaves the FR driver from the stress (and distortion) of playing bass with mostly a very small cone and/or little xmax. That makes it in the whole spectrum with way less distortion, even higher as the driver has to work less against it's bounderies. So the whole setup can play louder and fill bigger spaces.
I also have singe driver speakers, but mostly use them in nearfield situations like on my desk. Once i sit more than a few meters away a multiway (even only a waw) becomes better for critical listening when done right.
Yes, you want a midBass not a subwoofer. The woofer needs to reach fairly high. Our most recent WAWs had woofers that reached 5k, 10k, and 1700 Hz.
dave
The “Bottlehead” approach (not the first to do it, but prominent), they illustrated with a sealed FE166 and a sub with plate amp below. FR should reach 100-125 Hz or so.
dave
dave
That is what I did, Dave, and to make the sound a bit fuller in the midbass, you can place the "satellites" near the wall. My speakers can play without a sub this way, down to approx. 65 Hz, but the sub add a nice foundation, for bass heavy music.
100dB efficiency solves a lot of problems.
My friend listened to my "advice" and bought Reference 3A grand Vena. Of course I wanted to hear them hence the "advice" The "magic " fulrange" was run fullrange and pair of series connected woofers (16Ohm) ran parallel and was rolled off with big air coil , first order.
Damn midrange was running out of steam so quickly in a sizeable room as to be completely unusable. We moved it to a smaller room and could not get any music out of contraption . I took it to my home and gave up after a few days.
My friend listened to my "advice" and bought Reference 3A grand Vena. Of course I wanted to hear them hence the "advice" The "magic " fulrange" was run fullrange and pair of series connected woofers (16Ohm) ran parallel and was rolled off with big air coil , first order.
Damn midrange was running out of steam so quickly in a sizeable room as to be completely unusable. We moved it to a smaller room and could not get any music out of contraption . I took it to my home and gave up after a few days.
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These are CHP50p.
The tweeters are disconnected, I just used a box . In a smalish room, they are doing fine. Sub is cut around 100 hz or so.
I like this modular approach. The biggest downside IMO is the need for complex and costly filtering through dsp. This is multiple complexity added when coming from just a single driver. There is PLLXO though, but this has to been developed.
A simple solution to filter the tops could be a 1.5 way series setup. The tops would run fullrange, but the 1.5 way reduces excursion to 1/4 below XO from what I gathered here.
All of the designs Dave links to in that post have conventional passive speaker level filter options. Line level or active (however the latter is implemented) are not required.
I'm going way out on a limb here and going against the prevailing winds, but the speakers Dave showed can work fine with passive crossovers. The resonances are minimized by the enclosures and a crossover would be relatively far away from the Fs anyway.
I was thinking, this is a good discussion on two-way loudspeakers, can we get back to what a single fullrange can do?
Tapered/stepped transmission lines and notch/EQ:
I agree wholeheartedly. My first really successful "EQ of a full-range" was to tame the 5khz peak of Hifi-bird/Isred/Michael's Audio "drum paper" 5.5-inch -- I had meant to listen to a track or two of Bach Goldberg (Celine Frisch harpsichord) but stood listening for 70 minutes to all 30 variations, every note/hand-movement/musical-gesture.My experience is that only a minority of FR drivers cannot be improved by some sort of EQ on the top, but I think it's a relatively small price to pay.
A while ago before I took up speaker-diy during Covid, I had come across your...
OK to make things more concrete, here's an example of a very common "labyrinth" cab to which may be added (drawn in yellow) TLonken partition boards, inserted through the driver hole then flipped & rotated into position to create a 1.2m-line. Posted earlier here https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...-options-recommendations.388862/#post-7086344
My first diy design HeilEve 7L 1m-line TLonken or is it just a TL? Cardboard version was easy, but the real thing had to be glued and clamped one-board-at-a-time inside the cab, then shifted into...
My first diy design HeilEve 7L 1m-line TLonken or is it just a TL? Cardboard version was easy, but the real thing had to be glued and clamped one-board-at-a-time inside the cab, then shifted into...
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