Well, I just fired up my first (and only to date) test baffle.
It's something like 750 by 1400 at the moment, I can always cut wood off easily enough, more of a pain to add it!!
I have two xls 10 in a sealed box right at the bottom, then the PHL 18, PHL 1660 and tweeter above them all centred on the midline of the baffle. I would presume some sort of asymmetry of baffle shape (thereby 'offsetting' the drivers) would be preferrable, if that's indeed true then I may consider it as well. Having said that, the deqx's verification measurement of it's correction looked pretty flat. Maybe the problems associated with regular shaped baffle are real problems if you have to try and passively correct?? With the deqx it's a doddle by comparison. Of course there may be other issues than simply getting a flat response, if so I'd love to hear them.
I only have one baffle, the other side is still the old sealed boxes that I'm thinking of switching from. My idea was to be able to mute each side in turn and then compare the sound of the two, not that I have a mono recording!
So at the moment it's a bit of a nether world, neither one way or the other!
The only real OB's I've heard are the orions, I fell in love with the dipole bass but was not super impressed with the rest of the package. Sure, I could see the attraction but I felt they delivered quite a bit less resolution than I was used too. I then realized that unless I placed MY drivers in OB I couldn't 'write-off' the concept of OB itself, all I could conclude that I preferred my sealed system to the orion, which is a different kettle of fish than saying OB is no good, if you can follow that (I thought it would be clear when I started typing, but I've given up as a lost cause being clear in that sentence!!)
So, my main concern was in losing the detail, as I noticed diminished on the orions.
Jury is still out, I must admit I can't hear any real obvious loss of detail, which is certainly encouraging. I've not done any room eq yet, not sure how it will affect two different topologies each side. I only did speaker correction down to 80 hz (as my subs come in under that, and only one side has subs at the moment) so of course in the comparison I turned the sub off.
There was no real knock out blow for either alignment yet, although I thought I could clearly detect the 'boxy' sound people talk about. That was using an old measurement tho, and with eq in the deqx that flattened the dipole but of course also acted on the sealed as well ( the single eq tab affects both speakers), so that is inconclusive yet.
There is one test track I know well, a single female vocal left of centre with a solo electric bass guitar to the right of centre. The test baffle was the left speaker so must be reproducing most of the voice.
Not sure if I'm kidding myself, but I'm not sure that I've ever heard that vocal so clean and lifelike before. Promising signs.
On the other hand, and once again I could be imagining things, the soundstage (whilst still large) could be slightly less extended out from the left speaker. Strangely enough, on these particular tracks I use to test that, it might not be a bad thing!!! as the soundstage is SO wide it almost is unsettling and you are concentrating on how wide it is!! ie it can be slightly unreal. So perhaps it is not a bad thing ha ha.
Again, only by comparing instruments in the left vs in the right, it seemed that the instruments were not as 'point-like', sort of occupied a larger point in space, yet having said that they could very well have sounded more real as a result.
Of course, early days yet and I'm sure the entire presentation will change once the second baffle gets made, and really only then could I start to make REAL conclusions.
I'll try and attach the verification measurement, but if it fails (read if I muck it up!) across the midrange (96 db slopes at 300 and 3000 hz) you can see a slight residual undulating shape, a result I assume from driver response within the large baffle. In any case, the worst result within that pass band is a difference of about 2 db and that lessens in the undulations as the frequency rises.
Anyway, lets hope the graph gets up.
no, what I thought I had to do - didn't.
will have a look for a sticky on posting an image, but till then this will have to do.