First, a little background...
Almost a year ago, a good friend asked us to build a pair of stand-mounted monitors using the Seas Exotica 8" high efficiency woofer and tweeter. When I first fired them up, I recall immediately thinking I was listening to something really quite special. But the drivers were quite expensive and the design only played down to 51 hz.
I liked them so much, though, when we left for the Rocky Mountain Audiofest last October, I decided to take them along. Needless to say, the reaction to them was very positive. So we added them to our web site. Of course, $6000 is somewhat pricey (although certainly worth it for the right application) for a speaker that only plays down to about 51 hz. But based on the feedback we received at RMAF, I felt the need to develop a 3-way model using these drivers.
Where to go from here...
The question is, what would we use for the woofer section? If we used a high efficiency woofer (so as not to lose any sensitivity), the cabinet would be very large and the resulting speakers would still not play all that low. So, while certainly workable, it just didn't seem like the optimum solution.
At the time I was thinking about all of this, Brian Ding at Rythmik told me about a new dual 8" subwoofer design he was coming out with. I thought this new design might play high enough to use in this application and provide bass down into the mid-20's or below. If so, I thought that this might be the perfect solution. So we waited through months of production delays (always the case for new products) for the drivers and amps to become available. Brian was kind enough to ship us some early units right off the production line so we didn't have to wait any longer than necessary to begin our testing.
We started with the basic Exotica 2-way (using the same Dennis Murphy crossover used in the Exotica 2-way). But we didn't need it to play to 50 hz. So we removed the front slot port and went with a sealed cabinet for what would become the midrange section of this new design. This took the F3 from 51 hz up to about 110 hz, which means we would be relieving the woofer of some bass duties and increasing power handling in the process.
We then measured the roll off of the Exotica woofer and developed a complimentary cross to the dual 8" woofers. Following that, we adjusted the phase and gain for the best possible crossover to what would become our woofer section.
We were able to tap off the speaker binding posts to generate the input signal for the servo amps (a separate amp for each driver). So no separate preamp input would be required for the woofer section.
What we ended up with was a passive design for the tweeter/midrange section and a sealed, active, servo-controlled woofer section with 400 watts of power applied to each of the 8" woofers.
Axpona was coming up, so we decided to build a production cabinet and see if we might be able to preview this new design at the show. Of course, we were still fine-tuning and didn't yet know if this would end up being a product we would release or not. And since I don't like to talk about designs before they exist, I didn't want to say much more than we MIGHT have something new for the show.
As is often the case with products that are show-bound, we finally finished the first production pair of cabinets the day before we were leaving for AXPONA. So we still had nothing to announce.
Final assembly started the next morning and was actually taking place as we were beginning to pack the trailer. We were able to get all the final assembly done in time, but didn't really have a chance to give them a good listen in their new cabinets. So we brought a pair of SoundScape 8's for backup.
When we got to the show, we set up this new model in order to run it through its paces. Right from the start, I knew it would remain in place for the duration. And the reaction to them was universally positive.
I will take some pictures of this first pair when we get them unpacked. And I would be happy to answer any questions as well.
That's the story and I'm sticking to it.
- Jim
