I'm not trying to bring down the mood of this thread. Just wondering how beneficial it truly is.
That said, using a sphere from hobby lobby is easier than fiberglassing a baffle to my pillars.
Erin, I've got two of the iMac speakers to spare for testing. I can send them to you if you're interested. Gives you a chance to see the diffraction difference for yourself.
It'd be interesting to see measurements as well, which brings back the spirit of the DIY community.
1. Very cheap - much cheaper than the Aura NS2 and decent used supply available online/craigslist
2. Pre-made enclosure
3. Diffraction benefits (I can't confirm this yet)
4. Ability to play low (250k? I didn't like them at 1K but like them at 1.5k, though I didn't have much time with them)
For anyone else interested in these, the wire leads are very thin and short and makes crimping nearly impossible. I think the best thing to do is to solder on longer wire leads. Hoping to get a full review in the review section but that isn't likely until after the holidays.
John Krutke discovered that it's possible to purchase the midranges used by B&W in their speakers. Here's a pic:
The spherical enclosure used by B&W is based on the principles described in this thread. The enclosure basically makes the speaker 'disappear.' Even a small discontinuity between the cone and the woofer would screw things up, which is why the surround on the speaker is practically non-existent.
In my 25 years of working in this industry, I've listened to thousands of cars and I can count the ones that sounded great on two hands. Most of them have serious problems and some of the worst ones are IASCA winners... 50% of these guys have plans to change all the equipment in their cars because they don't sound good. In every case so far, none of the equipment has been the cause of poor performance. In every case, it's the installation, the adjustments or the system design. AW
There are at least two discontinuities still, the tweeter housing on top and the large woofer on the bottom.
In the linked thread it's said that they cross at 4khz, the directivity mismatch between the mid and tweeter would probably be very noticeable. The lack of suspension on the bottom also requires a rather high crossover point cutting into the meat of the midrange. That roundover design sure seems to compromise a lot on the other fronts. The mid is however built seemingly very well.
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Even a small discontinuity between the cone and the woofer would screw things up, which is why the surround on the speaker is practically non-existent.
Did you ever have a close look at Pioneer's PRS mids? They used an alcantara style material for the surround to counter this. Lovely drivers if you've not listened to them, a side by side comparison to the DLS Iridium (twice the RRP) and 10 or 11 of us out of 12-13 prefered them (Dealers at the product launch)
Quote:
Originally Posted by asawendo
Wow is it 5" midrange? Very beautiful teardrop spheres shape and exquisite craftmanship.
If they're the same as the drivers in the lower spec'd systems without the tear drops they're 6-7" (Alpine UK has these in one of their test rooms for a reference system-though their chief tech isn't a fan of the B+W metal dome tweeters)
i dont know if anyone else had a harshness issue from tweets in their face on their dash? my solutuon; i took my styrofoam balls and faced the tweeters directly into corner of the glass and dashboard, facing 180 degrees off axis.
better then seeing titties for the first time.
I took a look at a link someone shared in this thread to a crafts supply company. These ball knobs caught my eye: 2" Ball Knobs / Wooden Doll Heads
I'd have to drive 2 hours to the nearest Michaels so I'm more keen to buy online.
Earl Zausmer ran those mids in pods on his dash in the last iteration of his red BMW, with B&W 15s in the floor.
Was that the BMW that had them motorized so they came up out of the dash? Fom the mid 90's or so? If so I got to listen to that car at one of the finals. He seemed like a good guy, took the time to explain how it all worked and how they were positioned and all that. As I recall he had a laser pointer where he had you look in the rear view mirror so you could align your seating/posture so the laser was aligned right to your ear.
For some reason I thought they were 13's in the kicks but that was a long time ago. I remember reading about the install and all the work that went into it.
BTW Mr. Bateman, I spent the better part of a few hours reading all your work on your horn experiments. Fascinating stuff...
I took a walk through the small local hardware store after work. I had thought about using rubber toy balls for the tweeter spheres, and I picked up a pair of dog toy tennis balls. It looks like they'll be perfect for my flush mount cups once I cut a slice out for the 1-13/16" hole required. My Dash Designs dash mat will be arriving tomorrow, so if I get that put in I want to try moving my tweeters from the kick panels up onto the dash in the spheres.
hey!, im from jamaica....saw the forum and loved it..
ive always wondered where to put ma tweeters as im into loud sound....the bullet tweeters are way to big and refuse to cut ma door.....sooooo...i got some floats, the ones u use in the valve mechanism of ur toilet....and the small shaft to the back has the metal in it..perfect to mount using a nut and a washer.
who wants to give me some ideas?.....im not sure what to stuff inside of it.
my plan is to use some primer on it after i sand it then spray paint it maybe matte black....
ill take a pic of my car tomorrow. my next issue is i dont kno how to hold the tweeter in place once its inside.....i was considering to use some brackets and bend them into the shape of the inside...but thats alot of stress
Jamaican, we need to see pictures of the tweeters with the cups.
Here's what I did in 10 minutes with a knife and a sanding drum on a Dremel. I'm not sure if the diameter of the ball is large enough for the best effect of reducing diffraction. I might try again with a hole sized only for the tweeter. I think the friction fitment might be good enough for this to work without glue or other fasteners.
I'm stoked about what the pink will do for ess-que.
Grocery stores are all stocked up with Easter stuff now...at least down here in TN they are. I bought a bag of 36 plastic eggs for $5. As I was actually on a mission to find such stuff, I also bought a few styrofoam solid spheres in different sizes (cut/hollow out, cover w/ material?), and some larger eggs that would fit a 3 1/2" driver.
I'm going to take Wed. as a work-on-my-car day, so my plan is to move my tweets (HAT Imagine) from the OEM door spots to egg pods on the dash, among a few other things. I'll post up results if anyone is interested. Right now my imaging is absolute crap, so I admit I have high hopes for this approach.
Here's what I did in 10 minutes with a knife and a sanding drum on a Dremel. I'm not sure if the diameter of the ball is large enough for the best effect of reducing diffraction. I might try again with a hole sized only for the tweeter. I think the friction fitment might be good enough for this to work without glue or other fasteners.
I'm stoked about what the pink will do for ess-que.
Aww...I saw these exact toy tennis balls when I was out on my quest (see post above) and I passed, thinking that the eggs were a better bet. Now that I see/read your post, I think I was wrong about that. It did not occur to me that I might be able to affect a nice friction fit in the tennis ball and obviate the need for glue/silicone/whatever.
Ok, so I tried a few different methods, including the tennis balls, and I settled on what you see below. The balls are EPS (expanded Poly styrene) that is stiff and firm. It's essentially the same stuff you'd find in a motorcycle helmet. I got these at Hobby Lobby for a few bucks.
They are very nice to work with, and sculpt easily with a dremel sanding drum. I was very happy with them, but I jacked up the finishing process so the end result doesn't look great. I am confident that the set that will replace them (next week probably) will look great. Some pics...
I did not have diffraction in mind when I did that. These Pioneer tweeters sound harsh off axis, so I tried them at zero degrees and the harsh sound was gone.
They were on a surface mount before I glue them into the 45*/90* PVC elbows.
Diffraction comes from edges. The bezel of these tweeters are rounded, and there's little diffraction if any.
I do like the ball idea, I may try it, if I can find a 2.5" rubber/foam ball.
Quote:
Originally Posted by subwoofery
Your tweeter cup doesn't help with diffraction... You need round overs on the sides for that (similar to the one a few pics above your post).
I have wanted to do some type of spherical or egg shaped enclosure for awhile now. My thinking is....a spherical enclosure along with a mat might be about the best way to get a small mid on the dash.....as it has to be one of the toughest places in the car to put drivers....reflections everywhere. However, when you have a car with a wide and long dash it is worth a try to put speakers there as there are benefits to dash mounting as well.
I was looking at some of the Gallo and Orb sets to play with. However, I ended up picking up a set of the KEF KHT1000 "egg" speakers in the Picofote1 IPOD dock. Mated with a sub, these are some nice sounding small speakers. The enclosure and the Uni-Q driver do a nice job in these....even more so in the larger models.
I hope to do some type of sphere or egg shape enclosure for some 3" fullranges to be mounted on the dash...will see...
I wrote the following post about the Kef, over on diyaudio. Thought I'd repost it here, since it definitely fits the bill of a 'low diffrraction wide bandwidth' loudspeaker.
And, yes, I did buy ten of em
I know there's a lot of people reading this thread that don't have the time to build a synergy horn, or the space that's required to get it to play down to 300hz. Here's an alternative you might consider:
This is the satellite from a KEF KHT1005. Here's a list of reasons you might consider it in lieu of a Synergy horn:
1) after screwing around with Unity horns for over half a decade, I'm convinced that their fundamental goodness has little to do with their efficiency, and a LOT to do with the near-perfect transition from midrange to tweeter. Basically a Unity/Synergy horn fools our brain into thinking it's one wide-bandwidth driver.
2) Once you hear this done properly, conventional two-ways will never sound the same; I can't listen to a conventional two-way without *immediately* knowing that something is wrong. Literally the second I walk into a room.
3) The KEF UNI-Q isn't perfect, but it has a LOT of the Unity goodness. I think this is due to (you guessed it) the near-perfect transition from midrange to tweeter. This is especially notable on vocals and percussion.
4) One way to determine if a loudspeaker has some of that Unity goodness is to look at the polar response. The graph above shows the polar response of two loudspeakers. The first is a conventional two-way (Focal Chorus 807V) and the second is a Kef UNI-Q (Q900).
Note how the transition from the Kef's midrange to tweeter is nearly perfect? To the microphone, it seems to be one driver. There's a little 'wiggle' at 5khz where the midrange hands off to the tweeter. But that 'wiggle' isn't as severe as the noticeable widening of directivity that occurs with the Focal two-way. (Note how the Focal directivity gets much broader at 4khz? That's because the tweeter is much smaller than the woofer, and so has wider directivity. In the Kef, the midrange cone acts like a waveguide for the tweeter, so the directivity change is verrrrrrrry slooooooow.
I couldn't find any directivity plots of the KHT1005 online, but I'm willing to bet it's comparable to the Q900 that was measured by Stereophile.
Here's a frequency response measurement of the KHT1005 satellite, from Home Theater magazine.
Last but not least, I think that one of the most important reasons that Synergy horns don't sound like regular speakers is that they're symmetrical. For instance, a regular two-way speaker is generally optimized for good horizontal directivity (if it's optimized at all.) It's hard to get good vertical directivity from a two-way, due to the fact that the pathlength differences vary greatly depending on angle. The Synergy horns don't have this problem; if you flip an SH-50 on it's side, the directivity is the same.
The same is true with a Kef UNI-Q, at least down to 300hz or so. (Synergy SH-50 is admittedly symmetrical down to a much lower frequency.)
If all of this has piqued your curiosity, the final icing on the cake is that the UNI-Q can be had for about $50 per satellite for the next 24 hours. Newegg has them on their Black Friday flyer. Even if you DIY, it's pretty easy to spend $50 per channel on a Synergy horn *crossover*, and that doesn't even factor in the cost of drivers, labor, failed experiments, and anti-depressants when your midranges don't work
I'm putting my money where my mouth is, and buying ten
promo code is EMCJJHF34 and it's good for 24 hours.
Happy Thanksgiving!"
In my 25 years of working in this industry, I've listened to thousands of cars and I can count the ones that sounded great on two hands. Most of them have serious problems and some of the worst ones are IASCA winners... 50% of these guys have plans to change all the equipment in their cars because they don't sound good. In every case so far, none of the equipment has been the cause of poor performance. In every case, it's the installation, the adjustments or the system design. AW
I tried sphere enclosure with Morel tweeters couple of years back. Here is another take on Sinfoni Midrange and tweeter in Sinfoni Demo Car made out of fiberglass. The mids sound much more open and airy.
Wow! That's quite a read. A lot of useful ideas Backed by some data and a lot of personal experiences. I am looking at changing things up in the near future and am very interested in trying this. What do I have to lose for $2 and some of my time? Some good looking and decently integrated installs as well. Thanks everybody.
Re: Improve Your Soundstage for $2
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