selahaudio Messages: 56 Registered: September 2009
Baron
Marlboro wrote on Mon, 28 September 2009 09:14
Recently Rick Craig made a comment somewhere that his building of line arrays has switch from using 5.5 - 7.7 mid woofers to using 3-4 inch speakers. His most recent double line has HV 3 inchers in it. This is the model that I used from the beginning, though probably for other reasons than Rick Craig.
We all know that with sensitivity and dynamics as the only issues, line arrays beat the pants off even the best point source speakers.
But what about tonality? Does the use of smaller 3 inch wide ranges along with a stereo woofer system impact the tonality part? or what does the use of the smaller wide range units bring to the table that the 5.5-7 inch models not?
Marlboro
Wrong - that's not what I said. I've found the 3"-5" woofers work best with the majority of planar / ribbon tweeters in a passive design. If a DSP crossover is used then the 7" drivers can easily be implemented as well. I've built several successful designs with the 7" woofers but the 5" drivers tended to integrate better when passive crossovers were used.
In choosing 3"-4" drivers you have to be careful. The Fs must be low enough and some excursion capability is needed. That's where your drivers fall short because the Fs is too high (more suitable for a midrange)and the x-max is very limited.