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Planar Speaker Asylum Welcome! Need support, you got it. Or share your ideas and experiences. |
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Planar Speaker Asylum Welcome! Need support, you got it. Or share your ideas and experiences. |
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I got interested in audio exciters, basically speaker coils without the cones. Inmate Ziggy posted his experiments with these back in 2009. They come with fast acting adhesive to stick on a surface - any surface - and turn that surface into a speaker. Of course, some surfaces sound better than others, and the one that doesn't require a full blown workshop to work with is poster board. Just need a straightedge and an Xacto knife to trim, and a drill or awl to drill corner holes. I wanted to make a planar bedroom speaker, so these are suspended above the bed and toed in 45 degrees. For some reason the website here refuses to show the view with the bed correctly, so it isn't included. Doing some YouTube research, I cobbled together this design with 3/16th inch thick 20"X30" panels, trimmed to 18-1/2" width to the Golden Ratio with the length. Similarly, the placement of the exciters on the back is based on the Golden ratio distances from the panel edges. Why? To eliminate as many panel resonances as possible. Suspended above the bed, they sound pretty darn good; a poor man's Magnepan. "Mingus Ah Um" sounds heavenly, for instance. Unfortunately, they don't do deep bass, but either a subwoofer or, in my case, inexpensive bookshelf speakers which I already owned placed under the bed do a good job extending the bass response down. I'm using twin Dayton T amps under the bed; one for the panels, and one for the bookshelf speakers under the bed. My wife even likes the way they look! Did I say that they are ridiculously cheap to make? I used 2 different models of exciter for each panel, wired in series to get an 8 ohm load. The smaller one does high treble better, and the larger one goes deeper. Oh, these are more omnidirectional instead of dipolar, so the placement rules in a room differ a bit from Magnepans.I have been doing some more experimentation since making these. Preliminary results: 2 boards the same size glued together go a bit deeper in the bass and have a bit more lower midrange richness. 3 or more sandwiched don't seem to have more bang-for-the-buck. And another material I'm excited to try is 1 inch thick corrogated cardboard, of all things; a small piece was included as packaging with a mail order, and it sounds at least as good if not better than similarly sized poster board. Being stiffer, it could make a pair of self-standing panels. I need to source some 2 foot X 5 foot corrugated panels towards that end. Watch this space.
MG-bert
Edits: 05/26/20 05/26/20
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Topic - Audio Exciter Experiment - MG-bert 00:36:09 05/26/20 (0)
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