Has anyone considered converting a cheap set of towers into a WAW?
Cheap towers:
Polk Audio T50 - $148/pair
T50 - Polk Audio
Dayton T652 - $110/pair
Dayton Audio T652 Dual 6-1/2" 2-Way Tower Speaker Pair
Replace the tweeters with a small fullrange - Vifa TC9, Fostex FF85WK, Alpair 5, etc.
Keep or replace bass units.
Unhook crossovers. Power with a Dayton DTA-2.1BT or 4-channel amp and MiniDSP for more granular adjustment.
Not perfectly ideal, but is fairly cheap and doesn't require much woodworking or finishing and would probably sound halfway decent. Thoughts?
Cheap towers:
Polk Audio T50 - $148/pair
T50 - Polk Audio
Dayton T652 - $110/pair
Dayton Audio T652 Dual 6-1/2" 2-Way Tower Speaker Pair
Replace the tweeters with a small fullrange - Vifa TC9, Fostex FF85WK, Alpair 5, etc.
Keep or replace bass units.
Unhook crossovers. Power with a Dayton DTA-2.1BT or 4-channel amp and MiniDSP for more granular adjustment.
Not perfectly ideal, but is fairly cheap and doesn't require much woodworking or finishing and would probably sound halfway decent. Thoughts?
Not a bad idea. Basically your are proposing to use the tower speakers as dedicated bass modules (the first "W" in "WAW"). You don't even need to take the tweeters out. Just put the fullrange drivers in small sealed boxes or even open baffles and put them on top of the towers. This way you can keep the towers in tact while enjoying the WAW sound (using your own external crossover and amps, of course). The frequency of the low-pass filters in the towers for the woofers should be much higher than the low-pass frequency you need for the WAW setup, so you might not even need to remove the crossover circuits in the towers.
Great idea. It would be hard to DIY something for the cost of those towers. I once took the bass modules from Newform 645s and turned them sideways, using them for bass below 200hz and as a stand for open baffle Fostex 206E. Strictly an experiment, but it worked pretty well. 645 used 2 ss 8545 in the bass/mid module.
Right now I have a set of GR Research OB7 that I built in 2010. I no longer use them and am considering using the 8 5” drivers as a bottom end for a WAW project. Not sure if it would be worth the work to use 4 in each box, maybe 2 in a TL of some kind would do the job.
Right now I have a set of GR Research OB7 that I built in 2010. I no longer use them and am considering using the 8 5” drivers as a bottom end for a WAW project. Not sure if it would be worth the work to use 4 in each box, maybe 2 in a TL of some kind would do the job.
Good suggestions! I hadn't thought of leaving them intact.
I have plenty of stuff laying around - 3" and 4" fullrange drivers, some amps, and an extra miniDSP. Thought I could get away with trying something new out without having to actually build anything. Haha.
I like the idea of using these compact towers and putting a fullrange unit on top in a closed box with the exact same finish and width, perhaps a square front. Make the front panel screwed in so you can replace with different fr drivers. Then use biamping and play around with an active crossover and eq settings, very cool to experiment with. Probably experiment with cross at 200hz or so, easy to do active, far more costly in passive! This way the fr unit can really sing without being encumbered with bass. And EQ can help with flattening the response. Interesting, tempting idea!
Polk T50 response is the purple trace:
Polk Audio T50 Speaker System Review Test Bench | Sound & Vision
F6 of 40hz. A little bit of a dip around ~140hz, but manageable and decent up to 500hz.
Polk Audio T50 Speaker System Review Test Bench | Sound & Vision
F6 of 40hz. A little bit of a dip around ~140hz, but manageable and decent up to 500hz.
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