Dynastat tweaks

Planar Speaker Asylum

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In playing around with the Sound Lab Dynastat hybrids, I've come across a few worthwhile tweaks.
The Dynastats' woofer enclosure has room for improvement - the box has some panel resonances and is therefore a source of coloration. Hey, the speaker is designed to hit a price point, and building a truly dead box is very expensive. Here are my suggestions:
1. Stuff the port with drinking straws cut to length. The straws cut down on the port's internal resonances (imagine talking through a toilet paper tube). Stuff in enough straws and they'll stay in place by friction. You'll have to remove the front panel to do this, of course.
2. Glue a subwoofer "Deflex" pad (available from Michael Percy and Madisound) to the bottom of the enclosure (on the inside). Just for good measure, I cut a second Deflex into eight pizza-slices and glued them to the side walls as well. In other words, two Deflex subwoofer pads per cabinet - one on the bottom, one distributed on the sides. Two 4-oz bottles of Welbond glue is sufficient for both cabinets.
3. Put a heavy weight on the middle of the top of the woofer box. A brick or two should do it (on a piece of felt), but I like lead even better. Lead shot is not nearly as good as solid lead - in fact, 25 pounds of lead shot is less effective than a solid two pound chunk. Ten pounds is very effective. This tweak significantly deadens "knuckle raps" on the top of the box.
4. I haven't tried this, but a five or ten pound lead weight attached to the center of each panel, inside the box, would significantly reduce resonances in each of the panels.
5. Solder the leads to the woofer - it will sound smoother than just using the crimped connections, which can sometimes jiggle off.
I used to suggest stuffing the enclosure with a bag of Polyfill, but since installing the Deflex pads the Polyfill is no longer necessary, and is actually a net step backwards. The system has a bit better tightness in the bass without the Polyfill, and the Deflex seems to reduce internal resonances more effectively than the Polyfill did.
When voicing the Dynastat, use the bias control as a midrange level control. I end up with the brilliance control max'd out, the woofer at "5", and the bias set well below the "crackle" level. There seems to be an optimum bias level, kind of a "knee", above which the speaker is too midrangey and below which the speaker is too dull. You find it by ear, and when you've got it right female vocals sound sweet. That's what I use to find it.
Some of these tweaks might apply to other hybrid speakers as well.
Anyone else have a Dynastat tweak or two they'd like to share with us?

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Topic - Dynastat tweaks - Duke 02:15:00 03/26/01 (1)

Re: Dynastat tweaks - Arbelos 12:06:22 03/27/01 (0)

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