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B&W Whitepaper on Bass
Advantages of Producing a Coherent Wavefront

One remarkable fact was consistently noticed during the development of the new 380mm bass unit for the Nautilus™801, and that was that a single large and stiff bass cone always sounded better than a number of smaller cones, even though they may well have had the same aggregated properties. One possible explanation for this is the concept of the production of a “coherent wave front”. This will be produced by a single large very stiff cone, which can couple with the air in a uniform manner over the whole of its surface area unaffected by differences in loading over that area. This behaviour is to be compared with that of several cones which, even though they may be closely spaced, will still leave gaps of “uncoupled air” between them. The very stiff cone material of the large single driver, which is a thick sandwich of Kevlar® reinforced paper fibres with a very stiff skin, makes it less responsive to local changes of acoustic impedance or unbalanced modal pressures either behind or in front of the cone.

A “coherent wavefront” simply means there is either a constant or a smoothly changing phase relationship between neighbouring parts of the wavefront. So even if two drivers are relatively close together compared to a wavelength. Also, even if their contributions are equivalent to a single large driver, their different acoustic environments will mean that their outputs are slightly different, in terms of both amplitude and phase.

Furthermore, the air between the drive units is not being driven at all and this will translate into a change in phase across the resulting wavefront as the air tries to “fill in” the lost contribution. One can postulate that, at low frequencies, air can “spill off the edges” of the
individual cones more easily in an array of small cones, which obviously have more edges for it to spill off, than from a single large one. For instance, two 12 inch drivers have a combined circumference of 1630mm whereas one 15 inch cone has a circumference of only 1037 mm. It is also interesting to note in this context that the radiation resistance and reactance at low frequencies of one 15 inch cone, is actually larger than that of two 12 inch cones, even though the area of the 15 inch cone is 0.02m2 smaller than two 12 inch cones. This is because the change from a steadily rising radiation resistance characteristic at low frequencies, to a horizontal one at high frequencies, occurs at a lower frequency with one large driver than with two smaller ones (Fig 15). Mutual radiation impedance effects will redress this imbalance to some extent, provided
that the two individual drivers are close enough together for one driver to acoustically load the other, though it will only be totally redressed if the array of small drivers produces a totally contiguous surface in all directions.


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  • Vote for SINGLE BIG WOOFER - scooter 12:02:26 04/01/12 (0)

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