Rich

Perhaps someone here can fill in with some more technical info about designing for baffle-step. I built my Premium Stage 4 Pi's a little bit taller and narrower than Wayne's cabinet design, and even modified the cabinet volume a bit to get a little deeper bass and I'm very happy with the performance of my system (see picture).

Regards,
Colin

• Well, its a web page...

At vocal overtone frequencies and above, speaker drivers within the system are in half-space because room boundaries are multiple wavelengths away and only the baffle is significant. But there may be a range of frequencies in between these two points where room boundaries are too far and the baffle is too small, and for these frequencies, the radiators operate in freespace.

This phenomenon is discussed in Chapter 3 of Augspurger's "JBL Professional Sound System Design Manual."

Thanks for the very good technical answers. Sorry to sound like Beavis and Butthead, but I am still not sure what the practical answer is. It seems like there "MAY" be a drop in bass response (ie what Colin said). Again, sorry for the basic questions, but I'm just curious.

Thanks

Rich

But most of the time, loudspeakers are placed near a room boundary, such as the walls and floor. In this case, sound radiators are usually constrained at different frequencies. For example, if we have a speaker that has been placed on the floor and the sound source of the 250Hz to 1kHz frequency range is less than 16" off the ground, then those frequencies are bound by half-space regardless of the width of the baffle. In fact, if the baffle were wider than 16", then the system would act as quarter-space even if the cabinet is pulled away from other room boundaries, i.e. in half-space. In this case, the region would have a 6dB DI gain, rather than the expected 3dB that half-space placement offers.

So all that just to say that you can mount the speakers on the 13" side or the 16" side and you can expect good performance. There will be a tiny bit of difference, but certainly nothing you can hear. And if you'll position them in a corner, where they'll act as quarter-space (radiators too far off the ground to be eighth-space) - If you'll put 'em in the corners, you'll not have an issue with baffle step anyway because the midrange/woofer will be close to the walls.

Care to show a close-up of the speaker grilles?

The 2 Pi's I posted pictures of a week or so ago are 17.5"
wide. Because of the frame, it looks pretty well balanced.
Without the frames, it looked a little wide. If you put grills
on, who cares.

Chris