I have been building up a very modest little system in my second home to have sound with my TV Projector and to occasionally listen to music, mostly background use. Anticipating an upgrade to something much better (AMR) soon, it could not cost much and it had to be quick & easy to do as I did not want to spend much time on getting it going.
Looking around at what was locally available 2nd hand for little money I came away with a cheap DVD-Player (for movies mainly), a ShengYa Vincent VL-250 hybrid Amplifier (yes, the "UR-Vincent") and a pair of Tower Speakers with a Yamaha Badge on them but basically fakes, still they sounded semi-decent, had fairly solid and well made enclosures and about the right size holes to be upgraded later using some NeoFones.
After a few weeks a friend managed to bring me back a pair of NeoFone fullrange drivers back from Brian in Hong Kong while I got my hands on a pair of RT1L Ribbon Ring Radiators to use as supertweeter.
Over the last weekend I finally got around to putting everything together.
The NeoFone in this Tower happens to have 20 Liter sealed to itself (I did not want to add another partition and open up more space to the woofer) with the original okayish quality (about level with Peerless CSX series) woofer in 35 Liter vented (tuning in the lower 30Hz range by ear, using cardboard tubing to extend the original port).
Using the FRD Consortium Tools for modeling the system (including Tolvans Edge for modeling the baffle losses and including the floor image of the woofer) I found that a really spartan crossover works well enough at least in excel and in reality it also sounds nice enough. I used a 1.5mH Choke and an RC impedance correction (6R8 & 22uF) on the woofer, 110uF (22uF X 5) MKP as highpass on the NeoFone and 0.66uF (2 X 0.33uF Arcotronics KP 1.72) as highpass on the RT1L, all drivers connected with the same polarity.
Sound is very good, especially since I just received my very cheap CD-Player, an ancient, but very nice sounding Pioneer PD-UK5, a japan only model broadly similar to the PD-S904 but UK tuned... I would still not call it High End or even what one may understand as "HiFi", but the sound id coherent, enjoyable and generally fun to listen to.
And unlike the NeoFone's on their own (like my breadboxes project), these Towers play plenty loud and low, tones in the lower 30Hz range are reproduced with authority. The somewhat laid back charater of the NeoFones helps when playing loud, no shoutiness like some other fullrange drivers, even Haendels Messiah on Deutsche Gramofone CD sounded great, listenable and involving....
Ciao T
