Hi rjbond the 3rd
That smatching looking lady is not my better half. I just borrowed her to pose for having possibility to compare sizes. She is with my friend.
But you are right. My better half cares for my happiness. And she never complains neighter about those "Le Viathans" nor those room partitions.
I got the enclosure plans from
www.hornlautsprecher.de. (Luckily German is my mother tongue). Then I tried to get optimum volume of the compression chamber for the philips (here I did with 4", 6" and 8" Full Rangers, all from Philips). After that I used the help* provide also in this webboard for calculating lengt of throat and size of horn's mouth. I am very happy with the outcome.
In this picture to the left of this little angle is cabinet of 8".
*In this website is a sheet where you can calculate your horn contour by putting the length of horn, area in cm² of throat (not exceeding 50% of surface of your diaframe) and the size of the mouth in the formular. Voila!
Only the 8" Philips full-range speaker units sound hard in mid-range. It does not go very high and has modulate (acceptable) bass. Maybe I am spoiled by those 15 inchers!
In general, this kind of expo-back-loaded horn makes driver unit sound softer. When you get the optimum volume of the pressure chamber you will have quite natural sound and the "out of the box" effect. If you place them in your room well and standing 1 metre away then you were not be able to locat the speakers.
Once I did try with 8" from Hemp Acoustic. Here I gained enormeous bass and high freq in good quantity and have lost some mid-range. A step forward I had to add some more synthetic wool into pressure chamber in order to compensate adquately the needs of Hemp Acoustic's volume.
The front-loaded with 15 incher is a bombarde. I built 3 of them; 2 are passive and the other is active. I provided the last mentioned a 100 watts mosfet and use it as sub-woofer. Why do I need another sub. No! I did not. It was just curiosity. I let it work from 50 Hz downwarded. Sometimes one can feel sound of bass rolling along the horn's throat until it hit us. From the very first moment of listening I put Cello Suite of J.S. Bach and I was meltet. First time that I have such precise and perfect volume of lower freq. Maybe I was dreaming since I heard vrey realistic how bow stripping on the strings. After few months this kind of low freq became quite acquentain to me.
I find that bass performance of this driver in multiple quantity and in OB configuration far more exciting! In short words this kind of bass horn is good for rock music and HT.
The blue one is an OB line array with 10 x 8" Philips full-range. I did built a pair of it. Here I have quite clean mid, not very broad minded bass and a very good dynamic and also dynamic contrast and with extremly low distortion. The sound stage is always good when I got the correct position. he scale is good. The size of instruments and the singings are quite realistic.
We are not talking about sweet spot here. We are talking about sweet area instead. I stil miss very high and low-end. If I ever have a chance to built another line array then I would go for 2 or 3 ways.
I disintegrated the drivers for using elswhere and thrown away the baffles since I have not enough space in my corridor.
The most advange of concav baffle line array is that there is no interferrent among those drivers as long as one does calculate the radius precisely. I have designed them for listening from distance of 190-200 cm. And indeed that was the range it had to be kept. It is quite impossible to listen to them neither from smaller distance nor from a greater distance.
To th last here is a reso-box. The side panels are only 3 mm and pieced with ITT full-ranger 6x9" ovali
