Posted by Duke [ 63.87.108.184 ] on August 26, 2006 at 02:19:49:
Well two of my three full-range speaker projects are moving along well. The third, my largest and most ambitious, has been abandoned. I decided that it didn't sound good enough to be competitive in its price range.
The smaller speaker, Stormbringer, combines a 1" throat, 10" diameter round constant-directivity waveguide with a 12" custom Eminence woofer. The woofer employs a copper shorting ring to reduce flux modulation distortion. The woofer has a 16 ohm (12.4 ohm DC resistance) voice coil. My goal was a reasonably affordable speaker that would work well with OTL amplifiers. Efficiency is around 93 dB for a 1 watt input, and bass extension is into the 40 Hz region with a bit of boundary reinforcement from a nearby wall. The 90 degree CD waveguide is crossed over to the woofer roughly where their radiation patterns match up, so the power response is unusually smooth. This one will sell for about $2200 a pair, and will be on display at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in Denver this coming October, in room 9002.
The larger speaker is the Jazz Module, which I was hoping to debut at the Great Plains Audio Fest earlier this year but that first pair of cabinets came out too poor to show in public. I use the same waveguide but a bit better compression driver, and a nice TAD alnico-magnet 10" woofer. In addition, the Jazz Modules use a rear-firing midrange and tweeter, with the response of the rear-firing drivers tailored to help generate a natural-sounding reverberant field. These will be around four grand a pair, and will be shown in room 1100 at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest.
Initial production runs of both speakers are under way. My marketing plan is to hit the road and give scheduled demo's in cities where an audio club or group of interested audiophiles can be assembled.
One unforseen, but in retrospect quite foreseeable, advantage of the constant directivity approach is that the speakers can be placed fairly close to a wall without the midrange becoming colored. The port length can be adjusted so that the speakers don't become too bass-heavy if they get a lot of boundary reinforcement.
I doubt that designing and direct-marketing an obscure line of loudspeakers is the shortest path to fame and fortune, but so far I'm having an awful lot of fun with the design stage.
Duke
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