No Room Corners

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I'm looking for a full range project and I think my living room will dictate what kind of enclosure I need to build. I want to hear your thoughts on the matter.

The room is 12'x17' with 8' ceilings and a listening distance around 10' to 12'. 8' or 9' separation between speakers is feasible the problem is the corners. To the right is a small (4'x4') hallway and to the left is the stair. I can't move the speakers to the other end since I'd have no place to put the couch.

The amp is a TubeLab SSE so maybe 4 or 5 watts of power and an 8 ohm impedance. It's okay if the woodworking is fairly complex but it doesn't need to be.

I was looking at something like the louts^2 or the Coniston^2 perhaps with both drives facing forward.

What would you recommend for for this room?
 

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Won't the side driver on the right be kind of wasted firing into the small hallway?

I hope you'll forgive my ignorance but I'm not sure what the side drivers are accomplishing.

All those years of undergrad physics I took are great for things like quantum mechanics but not really helpful with acoustics like this.
 

GM

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Joined 2003
I hate these layouts! A high degree of directivity is required for best performance, but there's not enough room depth to support any useful horn size, so a large coincident two way driver ($$$) is required with a foam or similar baffle extension combined with BLH floor loading being a small 'FR' driver ~equivalent.

GM
 
Horns would be wonderful and my wife would kill me. A medium size tower with a nice wood veneer she would tolerate.

Mentioning the coincident driver made me second guess my approach. Am I going the right direction with full range drivers? I built the amp and the B1 preamp with the idea that everything would be minimal and simple, no crossovers, no bi-amping, minimal components. I knew that some music might not sound as good but I could always try adding a sub later if I thought it would help. A lotus^2 could be build for under $300 and seemed like a good balance of cost, sound quality and directionality.
 
Agreed, though 'best' can cost more than the best coincident units and still not give as wide a usable BW and/or dynamic headroom. Factor in that the vast majority of music before the early '90s was mastered using large coincident or multiple driver (some horn loaded) systems in relatively small, well damped rooms and these would seem to be the de facto choice for reproducing them, though additional decorative wall and/or floor damping may be required for the multiple driver systems.

But this is the digital age where sound can be manipulated until nothing is what it seems to be and in most cases this technology is used to see how much they can cheapen a product and fool a customer into believing it's better in every way than it once was. Here, the 'FR' driver acts as a sort of D/A noise filter over a limited BW, specifically the one where our hearing acuity is highest, so which to choose depends on the type of music, average SPL, how lush Vs how dynamic one wants and SAF (if applicable).

GM
 
the first 2 enclosures that come to mind for this location would be a Metronome or the Microtower with angled top-firing driver - both have passed my personal WAF test (on viewing photos, that is) - it just happened that we tried the MTs in her room first, and they've resided there now for about a year.
 
Since most of these designs take only one sheet of plywood I'm seriously considering building a couple of boxes to see how they perform. I ordered four CHR70's before I saw the post suggesting the metronome. That is one design I've always had an interest in but are there numbers for a CHR70 bipolar metronome?
 
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