New Speaker Project - Concept, Drivers and Design

[@IBuildIt]

Good news! I'm building another neat looking pair of speakers. These ones are open baffle 2-ways that I'll use in my listening room positioned at the sidewalls. Not surround speakers, but the reflection replacement idea I talked about in the video. The drivers are the Vifa P13WH10-4 midwoofer and the Scanspeak R2604 ring radiator tweeter. The baffle will be a solid hunk of ash 24" long, 2" thick and 8" wide. Crossover will be 2nd order Linkwitz-Riley at 3500Hz (subject to change). Yes, I used the "don't ever design a crossover with that online tool" online tool, but I've found it to be good enough to put me in the ballpark and I can tweak from there. Yes, I know all about using Xsim and the measured impedance and frequency response to design the crossover. That method rocks, but involves more prep work than I'm interested in doing for this project. I'll use a small class D amp to power these and will probably add a highpass filter to the input of the amp to keep the midwoofer from being over driven at low frequencies.

[@erics.4113]

Neat looking is an understatement! You have a great design sense and the renders look fantastic! Question about crossovers: have you ever bi-amped and done the crossover digitally? It seems as though a DSP could deliver more granular controller at the crossover point than a physical network. Additionally, you aren't committing to building anything physical for this task, can tweak it later on, and possibly do it all before the decoding with almost zero sonic penalty. I suppose the potential drawbacks are all cost related? (Another amp, DAC, and a competent DSP)...

[@IBuildIt]

My main speakers are fully active with digital crossovers, and I've made several videos about that.

[@AncientEgyptArchitecture]

from a visual aesthetic standpoint, this design seems quite elegant to me.

[@rcpmac]

I'm new to this channel. I like this guy. I like his logic, practicality, his engineering, craftsmanship and his handmade shop tools! I would not be surprised to find an espresso maker in his kitchen made of plywood. Subscribed!

[@pablohrrg8677]

Looks like you slowly are becoming a multichannel atmos-like lover 😆😆😆 In multichannel surround systems the interactions with the ambient are simulated. Just teasing you.

[@aarondcmedia9585]

Based on the thumbnail the design looked brilliant.

[@michaeltablet8577]

Very interesting! I've never considered putting speakers on the sides like that. Great video!

[@daifeichu]

Those speakers look really cool.

[@shaunfaesolar]

interesting about the timing of the reflections, because them arriving later to the ear is what the brain uses to place them in 3d space and give you the impression of the room. This is probably why you're not getting that impression but are getting more of a feeling of immersion.

[@IBuildIt]

Our brains interpret the direct sound and the reflected sound as one sound (if they are separated by less than 40 milliseconds), but also detect the location of the reflected sound and that provides the spacial cues to let us know we are in a room. But that doesn't include the destructive comb filtering that happens when you have two sounds arriving at different times. The sound that reaches your ear is already corrupted by the reflected sound. By absorbing the reflection and then providing a direct sound source to replace it, you eliminate the comb filtering, but still get the spacial cue the brain uses to give the listening space dimension.

[@sc0or]

@@IBuildIt Not exactly. When a phase delay is more than 50-60msec we will hear two sounds delayed. From 2 to 7 msecs we can extend a stereobase toward a speaker that plays a signal first. Delay time in between makes a sound source more extensional (what is not good at all) Check out Haas effect. It will work with two tweeters but up to 5kHz only.

[@carlosoliveira-rc2xt]

@@sc0or Nope! 50 ms with quickly varying music up to 80 ms with slowly varying music. A ms is equivalent to a foot distance at speed of sound.

[@sc0or]

@@carlosoliveira-rc2xt 330m/sec * 0.05sec=16.5m If that was a foot, that meant 1msec and that's roughly about what I mentioned above if I'm not wrong. Any way this is pretty interesting thing and I will definitely try to use two additional full range drivers with an appropriate crossover (500Hz-5kHz) aside of main loudspeakers for experiments.

[@bobb7134]

Great idea. One suggestion though. It looks like they would tip forward with little more than the wind from your air conditioning blowing on the back. The simple solution is to extend the base plate to the front about 6 or 8 inches forward of the front baffle.

[@davidbailey6350]

Can’t wait for the build….!

[@JasonsLabVideos]

Super clean idea !!

[@gregmize01]

I MAKE ACOUSTIC PANELS AS A SIDE HUSTLE AND FIRST REFLECTION "TREATMENT" MAKES A MASSIVE DIFFERENCE IN CLARITY.

[@jake_a_g]

Looking forward to it

[@isaeagle4031]

While the sensitivity is close, you are going to lose some of that on the Vifa due to baffle step loss. The ScanSpeak can also handle a lower crossover point, as low as 2k and that is where I've used it numerous times which gets away from any cone breakup of the Vifa as well.

[@IBuildIt]

Since bass is not a requirement, baffle step losses won't be an issue. I'm looking for good response from the lower midrange and up and don't need anything at all from these speakers below that. And I'm working on the crossover right now, but I doubt I'll go as low as 2K. If possible, I like to cross a small midwoofer like this higher and take the strain off of the tweeter.

[@tillaard61]

I'm wondering: won't the dipole Open Baffle cause MORE reflections? The base is very interesting looking!

[@IBuildIt]

Every new source adds more reflections, but not all reflections will be as destructive as the first reflection from the main speakers. These sidewall speakers will be pointed at my listening position, so the reflection from the rear will be angled forward, away from my listening position. They will also be playing at a lower volume.

[@word2RG]

hi John, why do you prefer tweeter xo @ 3-4k is rather than 2-2.5k?

[@drhfhs]

Hello John

[@earl007]

Why do open baffle speakers need filter panels ? Check the net

[@Ro-ni7nm]

I think your logic is flawed John, when would the "natural reflection" arrive perfectly in phase at your ear and sum with the initial point source of say a guitar?? Love your content mate!

[@Ro-ni7nm]

not to say what you have done isn't beneficial to efficiency and the ability to pan

[@IBuildIt]

You are thinking live performance vs reproduction. If you are listening to someone playing guitar is a room that can give the best performance, the reflections will be controlled as much as possible so they won't adversely affect the sound, but they then become part of the performance. Compare what playing in a nightclub sounds like with playing in a high school gym shower room. Maybe the excessive reflections and long reverb time is what the player is looking for if he's playing in the shower, but that's then the sound he wants and THAT becomes part of the performance. But to play back that sound, adding in more reflections and comb-filtering from YOUR room changes it. That's especially true if the room you are playing it in is highly reflective and has long reverb times (like that shower). Take my word for it: setting up this the way I've done it is infinitely better than letting the reflections run wild. You can hear the music as it was recorded, and keep as much of the room out of it.

[@TheSteveMeister]

So John likes anime confirmed?

[@Xmvw2X]

I have a hard stance that ALL reflections are bad, and the excuse people have for room reflections = good is because their speakers aren't very good at sound reproduction or they are too accustomed to an excess of noise from other applications like their car or at concerts. People become trained to expect noise from all around them.

[@carlosoliveira-rc2xt]

You couldn't be more incorrect! By your logic, a good speaker in an anechoic chamber would sound amazing but it instead would sound dead and lifeless. They DON'T design concert halls to be dead and reflection free for a reason. You can pull up ideal reverb times as well for various types of rooms ( studios, auditoriums, etc.) FYI my main speakers are in the multiple six figures but have several systems with speakers even in the 4 figures.

[@IBuildIt]

They design concert halls to project the performance out into the audience, like a large acoustic amplifier. A concert hall is not a small room - there's a world of difference between the two. BTW, a small room is basically anything smaller than a concert hall. As for speakers sounding dead and lifeless in an anechoic chamber, here's a quote from Bruno Putzeys: "To that I can only say: "you have to try it". The myth that speakers don't sound good in an anechoic chamber gets repeated time and time again in audio circles and I have no idea where it comes from. It's completely untrue. Many more speakers sound good in an anechoic chamber than do in a real room." The reason is that you get to hear the music, and not the music plus the terrible room acoustics. You hear the speakers playing the music as it was recorded in an anechoic chamber, not the endlessly unchecked reflections, reverberations and room modes that make up nearly 50% of what you hear in an untreated room.

[@Xmvw2X]

@@IBuildIt beat me to it, but right on point about the differences. I think one important point to make is the audio recording includes the concert haul experience. It includes those reflections/reverberations of that concert space, that recording studio, or whatever space the recording was done. That's IN the music. You don't need to attempt to duplicate it again. The anechoic chamber part is amusing too because what about headphones? How do they get away having nearly zero reflections and sound good? Interestingly, headphones (or in my case I prefer IEMs) are sort of the attempt at the perfect "room." It's an attempt towards high quality drivers, well developed sound profiles, and then packaging that has nearly no outside interference. Perfect is nothing but the driver emitting sound. What you're left with is just the competency of the driver(s) and little else. When you transition away from head-fi to home-fi, you have to deal with a whole mess of other factors like room acoustics. And if you go from home-fi to car-fi, it just gets wildly worse with reflections, excitation of panels, and horrid driver placement and off-axis angles. I started way back at the car-fi end, ran 3-way fully active setups running a mix of car and home audio drivers, fully independent amps, level balancing, x-overs, TA, and even independent left and right EQing, all in an attempt to counter the absolutely horrid "room" space of a car. This was like 25 years ago. As the shift goes back toward head-fi, the whole equation simplified down to a very basic set, pretty much driver choice, good engineering of the setup, and decent enough enclosure design not to have weird resonances (some cheap headphones/IEMs or early generation stuff was kind of bad with this). Headphones are darn near an anechoic chamber, and it's easy. It's really easy, and there's so little that needs adjusting besides some light EQing. Home audio adds this whole realm of complexity. One thing I'll say is, I've never once added acoustic treatment and made the audio sound worse, not once. Acoustic treatment has always brought forth more detail and sound stage specifically because it removes the noise and cancellations happening. A non treated room is like talking to someone in a noisy cafeteria. You end up losing half the conversation in the sea of noise. You'll literally hear half the conversation disappear from existence. It's exactly why white noise generators are used by people for sleeping in a noisy environment. It just annihilates structured sounds. That happens in a noisy room with level of detail AND presentation of sound stage details. This later part is quite important because sound stage representation is IN the quiet parts of the audio. It's that low level background noise in the recording. A bad room just produces so much crap that it just wipes all of that fine detail out. Sound stage is someone whispering to you in a noisy cafeteria. If you can barely hear a person nearly yelling at you, you never hear them whispering.

[@carlosoliveira-rc2xt]

@@IBuildIt Nope! There are lousy sounding halls and good ones. If all they were designed for was to project sound out into the audience, they would all sound bad. Have you even been in an anechoic chamber? I've been to the one at the NRC several times. If they sound so good everyone would dampen the shit out of their rooms, quick and easy and my 29 years in acoustics would be mostly wasted. Your perceptual cues and spatial awareness goes out the window. Your perceptual noise floor actually goes up because you hear yourself swallowing, breathing etc. Members of the Bavarian RSO tried to play music at the IBT and found it difficult and unpleasant to be in. Yeah, a great place to listen to one's system! Reproduced music can sound glorious or in a room or can sound like crap, that's a given but in an anechoic chamber, (not someone's quiet basement) it will always sound lifeless and dead. There's a reason amateur singers seek out stairwells to sing, it simply sounds better due to the reverb. Even professionals request a little reverb when they sing. It's beyond me where you obtain your nonsense. Chambers were once useful for designing speakers but the best manufacturers have gone the Klippel route making the job much quicker and more thorough than even the largest chamber. The one at the NRC is actually flawed.

[@IBuildIt]

@@carlosoliveira-rc2xt "If they sound so good everyone would dampen the shit out of their rooms, quick and easy and my 29 years in acoustics would be mostly wasted" If you actually had 29 years of acoustic experience, you'd know that "dampen" the shit out of their room certainly isn't "quick and easy". Besides, they've been fed the lie that people like you are spreading, that treated rooms sound dead and lifeless. So why would they spend the time, money and effort required to do it? And they almost completely ignorant on the subject, with no real technical understanding of room acoustics. As already mentioned, why do so many people use and absolutely love headphones when they are the absolute closest you can get to an anechoic chamber? No reflections, no room modes, no reverb - just the pure sound as recorded.

[@gizmobowen]

Would love to see the board cut into 1 inch thick boards and then cut into the two foot lengths. Then you could put the 1 inch thick pieces back together so the grain would be the same for both speakers. Sort of an extra thick bookmatching exercise. Not sure if I'm being clear but that's the best way I can think of getting the grain to match from a single board.

[@IBuildIt]

I get what you mean and it's an interesting idea. These speakers will be on opposite walls, so the bookmatched effect will mostly be lost because they won't be seen together.

[@jsaurman]

1) What are your thoughts on L-pads to tweak the volumes going to each individual driver? 2) What are your thoughts on active crossovers versus passive crossovers?

[@IBuildIt]

You mean user adjustable l-pads or fixed? Fixed is often needed to bring the volume of the tweeter down to match the woofer. Active is always better, but too complex for this application.

[@jsaurman]

@@IBuildIt I was thinking of adjustable ones. Seems like that would be far easier than swapping out components on a crossover board. I don't know how much of a purist you are but if you have multiple amps, you might want to invest in an active crossover unit like a DriveRack by dBX or a Behringer UltraDrive, they can do some amazing work. Some people think everything needs to run through a single amp or else its somehow tainted but I've never been one to subscribe to that view.

[@IBuildIt]

You seem to be forgetting that I already have all that - my main speakers are active 4-ways along with the infinite baffle subwoofers.

[@Matrix...777]

Prečo nevyužiť výhodu fullrange - deliaca frekvencia môže byť vyššia. 8kHz ...? Fyzika ľudského ucha vraví že 3.5kHz je najhoršia frekvencia aká môže byť. Najlepšia je 1kHz, 9kHz. Smerová charakteristika je druhoradá.

[@TheLevitatingChin]

Watch yer bass bins.