I put together a cardboard mockup of an array of 8 of the PE 269-469 4" wide range drivers. Curved the baffle top to bottom with a radius of 8 ft (used 8 ft. string to trace curve on cardboard to get a reference curve, then laminated the curve with 4 layers of cardboard, glue, and tape).Close to baffle, sound sucks, back up to 8 feet and everything snaps into focus. I was just puttering on the other side of the room and was suddenly struck by how the instruments on some tracks sounded like they were in the room. Very natural sounding acoustic. I've heard that dipoles can have this effect... No bass, of course, but a dipole woofer setup a la Linkwitz might be in order. I think that this will be tricky to measure, since you have to be so far away for it to sound good...
I got interested in this type of design because one of my goals is a solo listening room that isn't "loud" or boomy, since it is right under junior's bedroom. The dipole supposedly helps in this regard, and the multiple drivers increase sensitivity for lower powered amps. Anyway, just thought I would share. The bass list folks seem to be using these drivers more for DJ/club setups, so moving the discussion here might be useful (?) Even as an experiment it was well worth the $20 PE min order and hour of mock up time.
-JR
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