Cool! Can you point me to the Gen2 box technique?
Bud.. Painting over was exactly what I had in mind. Glad to hear no impact on sound.
Bud.. Painting over was exactly what I had in mind. Glad to hear no impact on sound.
We have to make one first. I think Alex is best choice here, he has done far more with boxes than I ever will. We may have to beg and threaten however, you know, good cop bad cop stuff.....
Since there seem to be a number of people interested in Gen 2 EnABL here is the method for finding pattern application positions called "The Tap Test".
There are three "sectors " to a tap.
Initial strike. This is what most people hear as a tap. We are geared to pay attention to intial arrival of any sound. You can use this portion of the tap sound to locate Raleigh waves and that is all. As you tap in a radial line there will be a sector that responds noticeably more vigorous than adjacent areas. This is very likely to be a Raleigh wave, but you cannot be certain until the rest of the driver is under control. Usually you must apply a damping material, in a fairly narrow band, on the other side of the diaphragm right under this area.
Mid tone. This is useful for finding subduction zones, usually immediately adjacent to Raleigh wave zones. This zone sounds dead compared to zones before and after, no tone to speak of. A pattern set in the middle of this zone and one just as it begins are the solution. Typically one pattern set at the point where the tone goes dead is sufficient and all that will fit. In 10 inch and larger cone drivers you may end up with more patterns here.
Decay tone. Here is where you will find most of the places to apply patterns. In listening to the decay you will have to ignore the other components from this tap. As you listen to the tap decay, while taping radially along the surface, you will notice a narrow zone where the decay seems to loose direction and then change direction as you move back and forth across it. Once you can focus on just the decay portion of the tap this will become fairly obvious. A pattern set in the middle of the directionless portion will disperse this activity completely.
The end product you are looking to achieve is a smooth change in direction of decay tone. From straight out or even slightly toward the center of the voice coil, when taping next to it, to aimed off the cone, parallel to the cone angle, out at the outer edge of the diaphragm. Dome diaphragms are a bit different but you will still find the same directional switch as you tap up the side of the dome. Same rule applies for placement and the eventual decay pattern will shift from lateral at the beginning of the dome to straight out on axis at the tip. In all cases the surface of the driver will seem to be "faster" than another untreated driver of the same part number. The tap will be dispersed very quickly with no echoes.
This same method is used to find application zones for baffles and boxes.
There are three "sectors " to a tap.
Initial strike. This is what most people hear as a tap. We are geared to pay attention to intial arrival of any sound. You can use this portion of the tap sound to locate Raleigh waves and that is all. As you tap in a radial line there will be a sector that responds noticeably more vigorous than adjacent areas. This is very likely to be a Raleigh wave, but you cannot be certain until the rest of the driver is under control. Usually you must apply a damping material, in a fairly narrow band, on the other side of the diaphragm right under this area.
Mid tone. This is useful for finding subduction zones, usually immediately adjacent to Raleigh wave zones. This zone sounds dead compared to zones before and after, no tone to speak of. A pattern set in the middle of this zone and one just as it begins are the solution. Typically one pattern set at the point where the tone goes dead is sufficient and all that will fit. In 10 inch and larger cone drivers you may end up with more patterns here.
Decay tone. Here is where you will find most of the places to apply patterns. In listening to the decay you will have to ignore the other components from this tap. As you listen to the tap decay, while taping radially along the surface, you will notice a narrow zone where the decay seems to loose direction and then change direction as you move back and forth across it. Once you can focus on just the decay portion of the tap this will become fairly obvious. A pattern set in the middle of the directionless portion will disperse this activity completely.
The end product you are looking to achieve is a smooth change in direction of decay tone. From straight out or even slightly toward the center of the voice coil, when taping next to it, to aimed off the cone, parallel to the cone angle, out at the outer edge of the diaphragm. Dome diaphragms are a bit different but you will still find the same directional switch as you tap up the side of the dome. Same rule applies for placement and the eventual decay pattern will shift from lateral at the beginning of the dome to straight out on axis at the tip. In all cases the surface of the driver will seem to be "faster" than another untreated driver of the same part number. The tap will be dispersed very quickly with no echoes.
This same method is used to find application zones for baffles and boxes.
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just imagine...
I have been away from this discussion for some time but ran across the following video and thought of you all... enjoy!
SONIC WATER on Vimeo
Frank
I have been away from this discussion for some time but ran across the following video and thought of you all... enjoy!
SONIC WATER on Vimeo
Frank
I'm starting to read up on enabl since I have a couple of JBL2220A's I would like to optimize (but cannot afford to 'waste' them), and this micro gloss, while interesting sounding, is worrisome because it appears to be water soluble when dry so will probably change mass and damping depending on humidity. Also, the descriptions of its effects sounds like it mostly damps and adds little to stiffness, and it also seems to weigh quite a bit when applied, so perhaps from these perspectives it may not be as good as something like a higher strength natural resin such as amber, at least for a high efficiency speaker that doesn't have major problems in the first place. I am wondering some of these things based in large part on a poster here that felt that painting on a single layer of micro gloss was gross overkill for his application. I might be interested in the rest of the enable application with the dots and bands, but they would go on the back of the cone - I'm not interested in visual effects.
Thanks much for any feedback.
Thanks much for any feedback.
The microgloss is an acrylic resin but it does not remain soluble - it polymerizes when dry. Meanwhile, remember that cardboard is cellulose and cellulose typically has a significant hydration layer from environmental humidity. Cotton and paper towels are also cellulose, and the reason they are so much more absorptive than your wool towels 😛 is that the cellulose is already slightly wet. So the microgloss, when cured, will have very little additional effect on the variability of the cone as humidity changes. That variability will be due to the hydration layer on the cellulose fibers in the paper.
I did a pair of JBL 2235s and the results were very satisfying. Some of the "bass" I thought was programmed disappeared. But loud transients proved that energy transfer was very noticeably improved! Description of that mod is back around post #583... For a light but even coat I used full strength material lightly applied and then brushed out continuously while blowing with a hair dryer on low. ...worked out very well for a thin, uniform coating...
Having worked with the patterns, I think the spider around the back of the 2220A cones will not leave adequate space to do a good job. I would match the cone color (if they are exposed) and put the patterns on the front.
I also thought my JBL 2235s were good BEFORE I EnABL'd them (crossed-over at 150Hz). Now I know better. Now they are both better behaved and really surprise with their guts when the musicians pound it... Less distortion and more power - what's not to like about that?
Cheers,
Frank
Be happy to work with you on getting your drivers to sound like they are no longer speakers. The blatant visual effects are not necessary, and I personally prefer stealth myself. My well behaved and lovely sounding nude baffle Lowthers must be approached to within two inches before it becomes noticeable that there is something on the driver surfaces.
You definitely do not want to apply the gloss coat material to a driver that has no patterns. Just like any other surface material, all it will do is aggravate some problems while hiding a small number of others. Used with the patterns it becomes a very effective tool, in very very thin coats, like a 10% gloss to 90% distilled water mixture and a single coating, usually in select areas. In any event you want to work on a couple of boom box speakers, or some other cheap and awful sounding speakers, before you tackle the JBL items. Unless, of course, you are a practiced and skilled craftsman in many genres, like francolargo is.
Bud
Thanks much, Bud and Frank. I think I'll need to some more research as to establishing patterns then before trying anything. Are there any do's or don'ts wrt a very high efficiency 15" speaker with a curvilinear cone here? I believe JBL actually claims that the cone is meant to flex a bit to improve HF dispersion. I'm not running it too high in frequency - it's basically out of the picture above 1Khz.
OK, SO THIS IS A JOKE, MODERATOR HAVE MERCY-----
The following is a post that Bud made on page 26 of the original Enabl thread. It reminds me of a (likely fictional) account between a missionary and a "native" somewhere, I can't remember where. The missionary said that the native must accept the church teachings or burn in hell. The native wanted to know if his ancestors were now burning in hell. The missionary said that since they didn't know about god and being saved, they were safe. So the native asked why in the heck did the missionary want to tell him something that could cause him to experience permanent suffering, if he was OK before the missionary revealed the teachings to him?
I want to treat my drivers, so I am on board, but I think there is a funny bit of correspondence between what Bud says below(many years ago) and the story above. Of course we are "tweakers" or we wouldn't be here, so lots of things to improve is not necessarily a bad thing.
BUD:
"Ok, I think it must be time for some ugly secrets to escape.
Limono has had his drivers for two days now. His private email to me showed he was under quite a bit of stress. This is directly related to the EnABL process.
No, it isn't a secret nerve damaging sorcery. It is just way more information than he was ready for. With gallons of details he has never encountered and absolute precision and a glossy, ultra clear presentation that never lets up, absolutely relentless in it's presentation of ALL OF THE INFORMATION.
This includes all of the tweaks and tricks he has applied over the years to get his system to perform in a reputable way before EnABL came along. For all of you who have performed this process, just keep getting rid of "solutions" to problems you had before. You will likely end up with far more neutral, wide band cables everywhere. You will probably end up with many fewer or at least less highly Q'ed components in your signal chain and you may occasionally wish for just a bit less information, until you get your system flat and dead neutral.
Poor guy has a full on, completely polite speaker system. One even my wife called "without distortion in the mids and high end" and "without time related errors".
Now he has to un-peak his system so that the sibilants don't overwhelm and the transients are settled back down to a more normal activity. It is going to take him a while to remember all of the things he has done to help, prior to asking for the need for help to be removed.
He has my sympathy. it is what has driven me to invent adjustable dynamic color cables and dead neutral output transformers, interstage transformers and input splitter transformers. Fully EnABL'ed speakers are also what have driven me to a four stage amplification system, with one capacitor and eight grid blocker resistors in the signal path. Everything else is just relentlessly revealed.
Seriously, you are facing perhaps 10 times the information you have ever had and greatly enhanced high frequency dynamic performance. Once your system is reconfigured to neutral you will find that every alteration and increase in information is faithfully reproduced.
I expect him to post here when he feels confident. Please pay very careful attention to all that he says, it will become your problem too.
So, take my words as fair warning and his stress as real, you can be sure his threat correlator is on high alert and that is tiring".
Bud
The following is a post that Bud made on page 26 of the original Enabl thread. It reminds me of a (likely fictional) account between a missionary and a "native" somewhere, I can't remember where. The missionary said that the native must accept the church teachings or burn in hell. The native wanted to know if his ancestors were now burning in hell. The missionary said that since they didn't know about god and being saved, they were safe. So the native asked why in the heck did the missionary want to tell him something that could cause him to experience permanent suffering, if he was OK before the missionary revealed the teachings to him?
I want to treat my drivers, so I am on board, but I think there is a funny bit of correspondence between what Bud says below(many years ago) and the story above. Of course we are "tweakers" or we wouldn't be here, so lots of things to improve is not necessarily a bad thing.
BUD:
"Ok, I think it must be time for some ugly secrets to escape.
Limono has had his drivers for two days now. His private email to me showed he was under quite a bit of stress. This is directly related to the EnABL process.
No, it isn't a secret nerve damaging sorcery. It is just way more information than he was ready for. With gallons of details he has never encountered and absolute precision and a glossy, ultra clear presentation that never lets up, absolutely relentless in it's presentation of ALL OF THE INFORMATION.
This includes all of the tweaks and tricks he has applied over the years to get his system to perform in a reputable way before EnABL came along. For all of you who have performed this process, just keep getting rid of "solutions" to problems you had before. You will likely end up with far more neutral, wide band cables everywhere. You will probably end up with many fewer or at least less highly Q'ed components in your signal chain and you may occasionally wish for just a bit less information, until you get your system flat and dead neutral.
Poor guy has a full on, completely polite speaker system. One even my wife called "without distortion in the mids and high end" and "without time related errors".
Now he has to un-peak his system so that the sibilants don't overwhelm and the transients are settled back down to a more normal activity. It is going to take him a while to remember all of the things he has done to help, prior to asking for the need for help to be removed.
He has my sympathy. it is what has driven me to invent adjustable dynamic color cables and dead neutral output transformers, interstage transformers and input splitter transformers. Fully EnABL'ed speakers are also what have driven me to a four stage amplification system, with one capacitor and eight grid blocker resistors in the signal path. Everything else is just relentlessly revealed.
Seriously, you are facing perhaps 10 times the information you have ever had and greatly enhanced high frequency dynamic performance. Once your system is reconfigured to neutral you will find that every alteration and increase in information is faithfully reproduced.
I expect him to post here when he feels confident. Please pay very careful attention to all that he says, it will become your problem too.
So, take my words as fair warning and his stress as real, you can be sure his threat correlator is on high alert and that is tiring".
Bud
And after many encounters with his own musical devils, Limono finally parted with his Lowthers. The person who obtained them has still not figured out why Wojciech ever let those drivers out of his hearing. Perhaps he will let the rest of us in on what he suffered through?
Bud
Bud
Looks like I have an apology to proffer, I just sort of wandered off from this question, of course I am older than fire so that could be an excuse....
Yes, there are a few do's and one big don't.
Do's
You definitely want to do this
Your crossover and phase matching problems will be greatly reduced because of the patterns. 1 kHz is not really the cut off, as in no crossover I am aware of actually turns the driver in question completely off. Well, perhaps the really fancy one's do. So, doing the woofer will ease your crossover point concerns, because, the "break up" that caused you to to choose this point for decline will have disappeared.
Don't
Put Gloss on ANY driver and not also place the patterns on it. Instead you can use PVA only to coat the cone, dust cap and foam surround and end up with a much better sounding driver than one that has only gloss on it. Not as good as a fully worked out EnABL process, but ton's better than stock. Does require a paper or fiber based cone and yes it will change the Theil Small properties more than a little, where EnABL will not, but it is still a very good solution.
Do spend enough time to learn how to analyze your driver for pattern placement. There are as detailed a set of instructions as I can provide, without entering your mind directly, earlier in this thread. Please learn to use them?
Bud
After reading a couple of comments posted here I feel dirty, like I've been sodomized or or something. So painting dots on a cone eliminates cone break up and changed the driver perimeters of the driver to where it is better than what it is? Time for a bath..
The treatment i do on drivers (EnABL + other tweaks on some) does reduce break up modes & oesnotseriously change T/S parameters (mass increases so Fs & sensitivity goes down a bit, but on an average river is still within the extents of normal unit-to-unit variation.
So far drivers are better after.
dave
I am not smart enough to say why my EnABL'd drivers sound better but I can tell you exactly how they changed in my setup. Take a plain Buffalo DAC and play it into your system. What you hear will be 'before'. Now, put a good shunt regulator system on the DAC power supplies. That will be 'after'. The sonic similarity to the EnABL effect is uncanny. I suspect that some would say this very effect is not an improvement because they can better hear a formerly hidden set of problems. Too bad for them!
feeling sheepish
On reading my last post, I saw that I wasn't that clear about what I thought was funny. It wasn't the irony in the native person now no longer being "blissfully ignorant" (I personally would rather be blissful, at least, whatever was involved). But what I found similar, and funny, (with all respect) was Bud pointing out that once one's speakers had found the enabl'd faith, then one may be scorched by the previously unheard flaws in their system. I guess it is poignant to me, because I don't always like how much I dwell on how my system sounds, and often have to remind myself to relax and enjoy other aspects of the music, aside from audio purity.
Also I guess I need to apologize for dredging up an old thread, even though it is new to me.
Howard
On reading my last post, I saw that I wasn't that clear about what I thought was funny. It wasn't the irony in the native person now no longer being "blissfully ignorant" (I personally would rather be blissful, at least, whatever was involved). But what I found similar, and funny, (with all respect) was Bud pointing out that once one's speakers had found the enabl'd faith, then one may be scorched by the previously unheard flaws in their system. I guess it is poignant to me, because I don't always like how much I dwell on how my system sounds, and often have to remind myself to relax and enjoy other aspects of the music, aside from audio purity.
Also I guess I need to apologize for dredging up an old thread, even though it is new to me.
Howard
working on Fostex FE126e-new type of puzzle glue
Bud said:
I got a type of puzzle glue that is a bit different looking and smelling in the bottle than Modpodge. It is called "Jigsaw Puzzle Glue" It is not milky or white, it is clear. It is thicker than white glue and is water reduce-able. I put 2 coats of 50% on the cone, and one coat of 30-40% on the dust cap of the 2008 Fostex FE126e drivers that were used fullrange in one of the speakers that I took to DIYFEST a few weeks ago. There are a couple of areas on the cone that may have gotten a little thicker coat, because there is a slight sheen on those spots. I am not sure how they sound now compared to before, maybe I should have done just one. They seem to have a ton of detail, and possibly a deeper sound stage than before, but I am not sure. They are pretty "hot" sounding, but I think that is typical for a FE126e. I may end up swapping them with another pair of FE126e that I use 400-5khz in my big 14" 3-ways. I sense that the bright midrange would be nice there.
Bud said:
I got a type of puzzle glue that is a bit different looking and smelling in the bottle than Modpodge. It is called "Jigsaw Puzzle Glue" It is not milky or white, it is clear. It is thicker than white glue and is water reduce-able. I put 2 coats of 50% on the cone, and one coat of 30-40% on the dust cap of the 2008 Fostex FE126e drivers that were used fullrange in one of the speakers that I took to DIYFEST a few weeks ago. There are a couple of areas on the cone that may have gotten a little thicker coat, because there is a slight sheen on those spots. I am not sure how they sound now compared to before, maybe I should have done just one. They seem to have a ton of detail, and possibly a deeper sound stage than before, but I am not sure. They are pretty "hot" sounding, but I think that is typical for a FE126e. I may end up swapping them with another pair of FE126e that I use 400-5khz in my big 14" 3-ways. I sense that the bright midrange would be nice there.
50% dilution (at least with way modpoge) is way to much, it can wet the cone to the point where you warp the cone.
dave
dave
phase plugs on FE126e?
Pretty sure that I have seen phase plugs on FE127e, which seems to have pretty much the same cone as the FE126e. I have thought that the center dome, or dust cap, was like a tweeter on these speakers. If you perform a circumcision on the dust cap and replace it with a plug, don't you loose a lot of highs?
Is an Enabl'd dust cap much less effective than a phase plug on the under 5" full rangers?
Has anyone seen a phase plug that was suspended above the cone by an external armature(reversible/not requiring surgery)?
Pretty sure that I have seen phase plugs on FE127e, which seems to have pretty much the same cone as the FE126e. I have thought that the center dome, or dust cap, was like a tweeter on these speakers. If you perform a circumcision on the dust cap and replace it with a plug, don't you loose a lot of highs?
Is an Enabl'd dust cap much less effective than a phase plug on the under 5" full rangers?
Has anyone seen a phase plug that was suspended above the cone by an external armature(reversible/not requiring surgery)?
OK, thanks Dave, I will be careful with that. This glue came with a spreader, like a small hard plastic squeegee to spread it on the puzzle. My sense was that I couldn't brush it on evenly if it was thicker, but I have little experience with coating cones at this point. I would not be happy with a warped cone.
My comments were aimed specifically at low frequency drivers. Dave is the full range master for PVA compounds.
My experience came from Nestorovic labs in the late 1980's and early 90's, where we coated drivers that worked up to 2.5kHz with straight PVA, mixed to a thick milk constancy. I would give the poids, if I remembered what it was, but it was extremely effective at eliminating random rumbling from being emitted into the listening environment.
You know Howard, you really ought to pop for a pair of 126's from Dave. I still have a pair of 127's from him and it took a Lowther to wean me away.
Bud
My experience came from Nestorovic labs in the late 1980's and early 90's, where we coated drivers that worked up to 2.5kHz with straight PVA, mixed to a thick milk constancy. I would give the poids, if I remembered what it was, but it was extremely effective at eliminating random rumbling from being emitted into the listening environment.
You know Howard, you really ought to pop for a pair of 126's from Dave. I still have a pair of 127's from him and it took a Lowther to wean me away.
Bud