Posted by hurdy_gurdyman [ 4.229.162.218 ] on August 30, 2006 at 22:48:08:

In Reply to: Re: OPen baffle designs posted by akhilesh on August 30, 2006 at 22:09:44:

HI Dave,
the more I thought about it, the more I abandoned the idea right now of OB with that driver. IT has almost no X, when you psuh it you can see that. So your intuition/experience is right.

It is a beautiful 3 way 15" coaxial. It came in a large sealed box. Large meaning around 2-3 cubic feet. An old Altec sealed box.
The guy who sold it to me (some dude from tennessee) swore up & down it was one of the best drivers he had listend to.

I am going to listen to it there (believe it or not I haven;t heard them yet) and then decide. I haven't measured them yet at all.

It seems there are too many reasonable modern drivers around that are built for OB to muck around with vintage anymore.
-akhilesh

Hi akhilesh,

A 2-3 cu ft box really isn't a big box for a 15 inch driver. It's actually modest sized. That alone probably means the driver was designed to need plenty of help from the air in a box.

If you ever want to try vintage drivers on OB, try old EV's like the TRXB coaxials or the LS-8 and LS-12, or SP-12b. These should all work well on an OB. I've seen LS-8's go for under $50 a pair on epay. They are a bit cleaner sounding than the LS-12's but don't have as much bass punch. On OB's, all of these drivers tend to roll off under 70-80 Hz. I doubt if they'd like eq much, either. However, I occasionally punished my LS-12's with my h-k citation 16 (200 watts/ch) and they held up fine. The LS-8's would occasionally bottom out on some movie soundtracks. Made a big "crack" sound. Once I even tore the voice coil braided lead wire off! The volume was very loud for this to happen. Never had a problem with the 20 watt Scott or 15 watt Heathkit driving either of them.

Todays new drivers are, in the long run, probably better suited for OB use, especially if you are into high powered stuff.

Dave

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