Where did I go wrong with my design? (2-way horn speaker)

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Very tall, very narrow, very shallow cabinet stands out to me.

I have been working on a 3 way Onken/horn mids & highs based system for 13 years now and have made a lot of mistakes along the way.

Placing the woofer so that I had enough room for the midrange horn that never got mounted in the cabinet was perhaps the biggest, but least audible mistake I made. (Non optimum center to center distance.) I'm living with it because the alternatives are impractical.

System is active with analog crossovers of my own design and room EQ is provided by a MiniDSP SHD.

You may have given up too quickly.. (from my perspective) :D :D
 
Not enough ways, need 4 or 5 channel for horns to sing.Single passive mixed with horn is never satisfying for me.
Front loaded horns if chosen well are not hard to X/O integrate.
All imho of course.

It is a little bit paternalist and infantilizing to supress his TV because of his design error… an armada of horns will hide it.

Your bass-mid has no breathing room so reflections back through the cone are likely, and diffraction will have done its thing. Should have worked, yes...didn't, too bad. We learn from failure, we are told, but winning isn't all bad.

Why don’t try the Gedlee design instead of trolling it ?
 
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The first thing I observed was the room. hard floors, many square objects in he picture one speaker right close to corner, I sence some serious resonance peaks at seriously annoying frequencys, what is the rest of the room like? placement looks appalling.

Wonder how they would have sounded in a different room, with a thick carpet, placed away from the sides and rear wall, perhaps with a good sub behind, and additional super tweeters utop, for example
 
Thanks for all the input!

So to summarise, it seems my issues may have been caused by one or more of the following:

- Time alignment between woofer and horn

- Possibly didn’t look into using asymmetrical electrical slopes to end up with symmetrical acoustic slopes

- Unterminated horn and not flush mounting the woofer

- SEOS-12 not the best match to DE250

- A 10 incher way not sound all the way up to 1600hz regardless

- Not using B&K curve as a target curve when doing measurements

- Shallow cabinet with little breathing room (although I properly damped the inside)

- Close proximity to back and side room walls
 
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Using a short vertical waveguide for CtoC distance is generally a mistake. Whether you work down to a frequency or down to a height dimension, the crossover frequency rises. A proper elliptical does not have a flat frontage like the SEOS has.

As far as the driver being a bad match, I'd expect this to be only the waveguide. The driver can keep up with it.
 
I used to be convinced SEOS was going to be the ultimate, but there is none. Everything is a tradeoff IMO.

I would like to commend OP on actually trying their idea out and sharing his negative experience. Someone at work said "the only way you'll learn anything is by screwing it up yourself". Sometimes all the research on earth doesn't replace actual experimentation.
 
Thee is no substitution for a PROPER mid bass horn + subwoofers to match a horn midrange. Just my 2 cents as a 4 way horn + subs owner !!!

A mid-bass horn in a small room... after supressing the TV, now we have to remove the walls.
As we go down in frequency the impedence is also going down, a horn is not the only solution to improve the accoustic coupling particuliary when there is no place to put it.
IMHO a mid bass horn can be beaten by a direct radiator in the near field.
 
Are you going to continue to pursue building something different? I would encourage you to keep experimenting and try different things. Eventually you'll get to your audio nirvana. Ditch the miniDSP and DE250. Those are the bottlenecks from my experience. I would go smaller size...smaller horn and smaller drivers...The DE120 is outstanding. The JMLC horn is very nice too.
Maybe some Dayton Reference woofers, dual 8" or something...you could do passive crossover pretty easy. The pro audio woofers are very hit and miss for me...I've tried Eminence 12CX, B&C 12CXT, 15CL76. The only one I was actually impressed with was the JbL 2262H in a large wide cabinet. It could play up to 1600Hz no problem.
 
Are you going to continue to pursue building something different?

That's the plan yeah :) But wanted to get an idea of what I did wrong the last time first, since I kind of lost the motivation for some years after that, believing I got it all right theoretically :rolleyes:

What I'm looking at now is a soundbar style speaker with a woofer and a wideband driver. Should allow me to do a simple 2nd order filter low down to avoid lobing and directivity issues in the crossover region. Or maybe a coax.
 
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DE250 is fine with the SEOS.

If you had them set up as in the OP with no toe in, then there is likely to be a large part of your problem. Look at Wayne Parnham's set up guide for WG speakers.

It could also be, at least in part, that your expectations weren't in line with the actual performance. Lots of people, including myself (many versions) have built Ewaves or similar and been very happy with the results.

Ultimately though, it's hard to tell exactly why this far out, when they've been sold. It would have been much more helpful to yourself and other viewers if you'd asked at the time.
 
>>> Was it just the bass response you were unhappy with?

No, the bass was strong but the midrange sounded hollow (like inside a box) but my project was ported which contributed to the overall sound.

>>> I used to be convinced SEOS was going to be the ultimate, but there is none. Everything is a tradeoff IMO.

Agreed.

>>> DE250 is fine with the SEOS.

Agreed. It is fine, I just preferred other horns.

>>> What I'm looking at now is a soundbar style speaker with a woofer and a wideband driver.

That’s for the Fullrange driver forum. Sounds like a FAST.
 
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