From Snowy Chicago:
Over the last few weeks, I have been developing a new speaker called the Sentinel. It will embody all of the same design principles found in the Ronin, a coaxial midrange/tweeter on an open baffle and sealed bass system. The tweeter will benefit from the waveguide loading of the midrange diaphragm, and the system as a whole will have excellent power response.
Basically this will be a smaller version of the Ronin. This will undoubtedly be one of the most compact open baffle dipoles ever made.
I have built and tested 'scrap' enclosures to test various drivers and bass alignments using digital crossovers to emulate standard passive crossovers as a 'truth telling' of what the speaker will be capable of. After this, I did some basic measurements and passive crossover design to further develop and test the idea of the whole thing. The original 'idea' was to do something like I posted a few weeks ago:
That ended up being pretty close to what I actually came up with and a few days ago completed the first real pair of enclosures. Here are some pictures, the back curves and sides are made of laminated maple plywood, formaldehyde free of course
. The sides also have a bend to them halfway up to give the speaker a few more curves and get rid of that plain old rectangle look from every angle.
These will probably be veneered assuming that this is the final cabinet layout and I may investigate ways to make the rear out of a single bent piece of plywood assuming it will be rigid enough. I will also make another pair in Bamboo of course. I am not sure on what these will be constructed of for full production, they use quite a bit of wood and would need almost an entire sheet of the expensive bamboo ply.
I'll post some shots with the drivers installed later today, after that thread last weekend, we will all recognize at least one of them
.
Post all your thoughts and questions,
Paul Hilgeman
