I am embarking on making some full range speakers and there are tidbits here and there but I would really be interested in the communities best practices for designing full range speaker systems, building the crossovers and enclosures. There are some general universal truth's (are they so universal?) I will list below, but what are YOUR go to things that you do every time or have seen a lot of people use.
1. No cubes in the enclosed space! Is this universal? Has anyone had success with dampening materials or adding non parallel spacers to break up internal resonances?
2. No cheap crossover parts!
3. Horns are very directional
4. Enclosure material doesn't matter as long as your baffle is 1" thick, this seems to be the consensus that I have seen, and sides are at least 3/4.
5. Limit baffle area (yet I see tons of loudspeaker companies have baffles, for cost reasons?)
6. Don't mount speakers in the middle of the baffle
7. I see a lot of ported subwoofers its almost a standard, or passive radiators to get those very low frequencies.
8. Measure your speakers inside your built and finished enclosure to design your crossover, don't use just electrical parameters (makes sense)
I can't think of too many more, what I would consider, standards about making full range designs. Maybe you have some rules around what kind of tweeters and mids are best in terms of materials, brands or some trick to the trade to identify the garbage from the good stuff. Maybe you have built a lot of crossovers and have some tips and tricks around some estoeric things such as helping with impedance or using multiple parallel resistors vs one large one, something like that! Maybe you make all of your enclosures in a certain way, or always use felt on the outside, I have seen some interesting things!
What are your best practices?
1. No cubes in the enclosed space! Is this universal? Has anyone had success with dampening materials or adding non parallel spacers to break up internal resonances?
2. No cheap crossover parts!
3. Horns are very directional
4. Enclosure material doesn't matter as long as your baffle is 1" thick, this seems to be the consensus that I have seen, and sides are at least 3/4.
5. Limit baffle area (yet I see tons of loudspeaker companies have baffles, for cost reasons?)
6. Don't mount speakers in the middle of the baffle
7. I see a lot of ported subwoofers its almost a standard, or passive radiators to get those very low frequencies.
8. Measure your speakers inside your built and finished enclosure to design your crossover, don't use just electrical parameters (makes sense)
I can't think of too many more, what I would consider, standards about making full range designs. Maybe you have some rules around what kind of tweeters and mids are best in terms of materials, brands or some trick to the trade to identify the garbage from the good stuff. Maybe you have built a lot of crossovers and have some tips and tricks around some estoeric things such as helping with impedance or using multiple parallel resistors vs one large one, something like that! Maybe you make all of your enclosures in a certain way, or always use felt on the outside, I have seen some interesting things!
What are your best practices?
I think you might be thinking about multi way speakers here? Able to play (a) full range, obviously.
This side of the forum, more often than not, is about single drivers playing full range.
I think you might get better traffic if this thread was moved to multi-way if that's indeed what you're
thinking about. Like: woofer, mid, tweeter etc. which you state in the last part of the post.
Just get a moderator move the thread for you.
This side of the forum, more often than not, is about single drivers playing full range.
I think you might get better traffic if this thread was moved to multi-way if that's indeed what you're
thinking about. Like: woofer, mid, tweeter etc. which you state in the last part of the post.
Just get a moderator move the thread for you.
I would disagree with a large part of that list. Not completely, some of it has a basis in fact but not in understanding.
May be worth defining what you mean by “full range” As this has two meanings that I know of -
1) Using a “full range” speaker I.e. A single speaker that can cover bass, mid and treble in a single unit, often used with no or minimal passive components (Typically only to provide notch filters or shape treble or impedance curves), however bass will be limited or treble compromised (or both) depending on the size of the driver. Smaller full range drivers are often paired with subwoofer to provide a greater frequency coverage e.g. XRK971’s RS225/10f8424 woofer assisted wideband design on this forum.
2) A speaker that will provide 20hz to 20kHz with a frequency curve that is +/-3dB (or better). This can only be done with multiple driver, typically sub, mid woofer, mid range and tweeter.
I suspect it is the second option.
1) Using a “full range” speaker I.e. A single speaker that can cover bass, mid and treble in a single unit, often used with no or minimal passive components (Typically only to provide notch filters or shape treble or impedance curves), however bass will be limited or treble compromised (or both) depending on the size of the driver. Smaller full range drivers are often paired with subwoofer to provide a greater frequency coverage e.g. XRK971’s RS225/10f8424 woofer assisted wideband design on this forum.
2) A speaker that will provide 20hz to 20kHz with a frequency curve that is +/-3dB (or better). This can only be done with multiple driver, typically sub, mid woofer, mid range and tweeter.
I suspect it is the second option.
Hello Allen, did you move this? I see its now in Multi. Oh if you want to debunk some things I wrote that is fine too I just wanted to get the ball rolling!
Yes I moved it, you should have received a notification. PM me if you want anything else.
Feel free to ask questions about anything specific.
When applied to speakers rather than rooms this is irrelevant. The reason being that speakers contain damping material to absorb the cavity resonances unlike rooms making the frequency distribution of resonances unimportant.
Active crossovers are the high fidelity option and the quality of the parts isn't critical. Lower performing passive crossovers on the other hand involve large, expensive, nonlinear components where quality matters more. Unfortunately quality in an engineering sense is neither strongly aligned with price or discussed much (but does exist!). The more expensive components tend to have mystical qualities that influence the sound in vague audiophile ways outside science and engineering.
This can be a good or bad thing depending on what you want the speaker to do.
Not as a general statement. Speaker cabinets are required to perform a number of functions which leads to different parts having different requirements in terms of mass, stiffness and damping in order to perform to a high standard.
High performance can be achieved with wide, narrow and in a few cases little/no baffle. It depends on how the speaker is designed to work.
Depends on the design of the baffle but there can be solid reasons to move a high frequency driver off centre.
For cabinets with low tuning frequencies it is usually the optimum solution because the disadvantage of a reduced transient response becomes irrelevant. Less so for higher tuning frequencies and 2 ways using midwoofers.
For fine tuning yes. Working out the overall design and what off-the-shelf drivers to get is nearly always done with computer simulations.