Speaker Asylum

RE: Your big speakers are fairly unusual two-way designs...

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"Your big speakers are fairly unusual two-way designs... that might work well in a small room, as you say. But many other big speakers are 3 or 4-way designs that won't integrate properly unless the listener sits farther away from them, regardless of pattern control. Right?"

Good question; I've been looking at the role of radiation pattern width and uniformity in a small room, and don't think I'm qualified to reliably comment on the distance at which 3 or 4 way big speakers' drivers integrate properly. My guess is that it depends on the specifics. I can tell you that my woofer/horn hybrid two-ways (1.5 kHz ballpark crossvoer) seem to integrate well at about 3 feet as long as your ears are on the tweeter axis; move your ears down to the midpoint and you can hear the vertical discontinuity unless you also move back to about 5 feet.

Of course a smaller room usually gives more boundary reinforcement in the bass region, which starts to take effect higher up than in a big room. That can work against big speakers. While mine are big, I trade off much of that big for efficiency rather than deep bass extension, and also have a user-adjustable bass tuning system that helps adapt the low end to the room.

Now there is really no reason why anyone can't lower the tuning frequency of a ported box that is putting out too much bass for the room. Simply figure out a good way to decrease the cross-sectional area of the port over its entire length, and that will drop the tuning frequency. The theoretical downside is an increase in air velocity in the narrowed port which can lead to chuffing, but in a small room you aren't going to push a big speaker real hard anyway so in practice that's not a problem. Or stuff the port with damping material. Or stuff the box. Or convert it into a sealed box by sealing off the port. There are usually ways to reduce the bass output of a big speaker so that it works better in a small room.

One final technique that I haven't tried is to place a small subwoofer very close to one of the big speakers and operate the sub in reverse polarity. By varying the level of the sub, you can theoretically vary how much of the big speaker's bass it is cancelling. If your big speakers are sealed boxes, which don't give you the option of changing the tuning frequency merely by messing with the port, this might be a reasonable approach.

Duke

Me being a dealer makes you leery?? It gets worse... I'm a manufacturer too.


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