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So to get back on topic, can anyone please explain how the dipole effect from a 3 foot wide baffle applies to a 20 foot long bass wave (60 Hz) any better than the raw driver itself?Should the home listener not prefer to use the same basic technology (box versus dipole) to recreate what the studio, mixing, and final production staff used (assuming the goal was to endeavor to recreate a quality recording).
David Janszen makes a couple of clever hybrid electrostats which are unique as far as I know in being monopolar - the back wave is absorbed - so they don't need to be so far out in the room to work to maximum advantage.
There is no "dipole" effect for a 60hz tone.Do you listen to yoir music while sitting at a mixing console?And how many instruments are mounted in a sealed or ported box?This looks open baffe, to me
And how many instruments are mounted in a sealed or ported box?This looks open baffe, to me
Many instruments, like electric guitars, use boxed amps not open baffle amps.
That is PA speaker, of course. Almost all guitar amps are open in the back, so they are, what I would term, a modified OB speaker.
Well, it is a horn - so do you listen to brass instruments through horn speakers?
I'll confess to be a little ignorant in this area but would this Fender amp be considered open baffle?
No, but I do use a horn loaded tweeter on my OB speakers. I find it very effective to further reduce problematic room interactions. To be clear, the reason I like OB is that it offers a reasonable technical solution to a difficult problem - poor room acoustics. With a traditional box speaker, it's designed to measure flat in an anechoic chamber. The problem is that an AC is built specifically to mimic open space, not a room. In real life, with a box speaker, the wide monopolar radiation pattern of the tweeter will tend to wash over and "light up" a room with treble energy more readily than will happen with the midrange. So you end up with a speaker with an overall brighter tonal balance and more smeared imaging than optimal. The only real way to deal with this in a typical room is absorptive room treatments, especially in room corners and seams where the acoustic energy tend to re-radiate at the highest levels. So if you are gonna compromise with a poor choice in speakers, you're gonna have to make up for it on the back end by treating the room fairly heavily to compensate for a box speaker's acoustic behavior.Horn (or waveguided) tweeters are another option to minimize this behavior and I think are a good option if you are gonna do a box speaker. But that's not all! (as they say on the TV commercials). If you order in the next 30 minutes you'll get a free set of steak knives, a $30 value! Hahaha, just kidding. More seriously, the bass is the other area that box speakers really perform poorly in pretty much any room. Again, because of the monopolar radiation, the length of the bass waves, and room dimensions, box speakers simply cause parts of the bass to be overwhelming and other parts to be completely absent. 20db swings in most rooms, seriously. That is the very definition of lo-fi, a total lack of fidelity to the original signal. Imagine if your CD player or Amp had 20db swings built into their response, you'd very correctly kick them to the curb. But it's inherent to box speakers and people just docilely accept this horrid performance. Most can't even hear it. Some even come to prefer it. Gah! Again, if you go down the box speaker route you have to treat the room with bass traps (tuned to your room's problem frequencies) to deal with it. And it's usually not a perfect solution. Another option is to use multiple bass sources throughout the room. The "Swarm" approach. It is also effective (if a bit tedious to get set up), however now you have at least 5 boxes sitting in your room, with IMO is actually more obtrusive than a couple of OB speakers in the room. So, to sum up, box speakers interact in typical rooms that cause poor high frequency performance in the absence of absorptive room treatment (which are usually ugly), and poor bass performance in the absence of bass traps or using a "Swarm", both of which are big and ugly. OB speakers neatly avoid the vast majority of these issues due to their figure 8 radiation patterns and side radiation cancellations. It also allows them to be placed MUCH closer to the side walls and not have their performance affected. And putting a horn tweeter on an OB speaker is an even better option, which I highly recommend. Notice I didn't talk much about the midrange, because IMO the midrange can actually sound pretty darn good on a well designed box speaker, and the mids tend to not interact with the room in a way that causes as much damage to the total sound as the bass and highs. This is why box speakers like the AudioKinesis and Gedlee speakers sound so great (and I imagine the Altec Lansings that Wayner mentioned).
Tyson.....Sunny Cable also does box speakers with horn loaded mids and highs. I own the H2W10 model -- definitely not bright, no typical horn colorations or nasties, and the bass is quite good........even with zilch acoustic treatments in my room. Spacious, dynamic, rich tone. Just a superb speaker all around.They are pictured in my avatar.http://www.stereotimes.com/speak101007.shtml
There is another way to take the room out of the equation, that would be "near-field" listening, which I do in my vinyl room. The room is actually too small for what I ask it to do (be a music room) at only 10' x 14', so to overcome the size, I do the near field trick. It does work very well considering the situation.I did hear some nice sounding OB speakers at RMAF, but I suspect they too, need a big room to sound "big" in. Never owned a pair, but do have an interest in them.......
Well, and I'll just make one observation - the Rhythmik audio servo OB subs are flat out the best bass I've ever heard. And that includes going to RMAF and hearing some of the best the industry has to offer for over 10 years.
What do you think of the sealed Rhythmik servo subs vs. the OB versions. Do the OB subs pressurize the room sufficiently to give you the physical feeling of low bass? There's bass and then there's bass that hits you in the gut.
What do folks consider near field?
