Posted by Duke [ 63.87.108.184 ] on December 12, 2006 at 17:51:53:
I'm working on three more speaker design projects right now. One of which I'm pretty sure will make it into my line-up; the other two are still in earlier stages.
The first is a subwoofer system that will try to address some of the acoustic problems involved in reproducing long wavelengths in small rooms. The prototype was highly encouraging, and if my woodworker stays on schedule I'll be showing the sub at T.H.E. show concurrently with CES in early January. I'll probably use it to fill in the bottom octave for a pair of Jazz Modules, making the system more suitable for classical music. Anticipated bass extension is 25 Hz ballpark, but I'm shooting for quality over quantity.
The second system is a roughly one cubic foot, 95 dB sealed stand-mount that cuts off at about 80 Hz and is intended to be used with the subwoofer system. By conceding the bottom two octaves, I'm able to goose the efficiency quite a bit. By using a sealed enclosure, I don't have to high-pass-filter the standmount to protect the driver against overexcursion.
The third is my sellout speaker. Give the people what they want, right? Well, it seems that what the people want is a small speaker with deep bass, which of course means low efficiency. I suppose it makes sense for a budget speaker, as solid state watts are a fairly cheap commodity. So I'm going pretty far into low efficiency territory with this speaker - down to 83 dB or so. The good news is, they'll be much less expensive to ship out for in-home demos than my other speakers are. Developing this speaker is the biggest challenge out of these three projects, and I'm not entirely sure I can pull it off to my satisfaction.
The one that I'm most excited about is the subwoofer system. It's shooting for quality rather than loudest deepest possible bass in the smallest possible box. I think there's a market for a subwoofer like that among owners of Magneplanars. Most Maggie owners at one time or another want more bass. Typically they buy a subwoofer, like it for a while, then end up going back to just the panels alone. If I can come up with a subwoofer that really works well with Maggies, I might finally start making money instead of just hovering around the break-even point!
Duke
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