 
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
|
|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
192.91.147.35
In Reply to: RE: Why aren't corner speakers more popular? posted by Craiger56 on June 16, 2011 at 09:36:24
I'm a little confused about your goal to have a taller speaker than a Khorn. I'm also curious why you need a narrower speaker than a Khorn.
However, note that Klipsch produced the Shorthorn (2 models) and Rebel (2+ models) in the 1950s, but discontinued them in favor of the Heresy, Cornwall, and La Scala. Later, the Belle was added. All three speakers were said to be corner-optional speakers. In fact PWK said that you can place any speaker in the corner and get better bass (in fact, you'll have to EQ the lf down, but what you will achieve is much lower bass frequency modulation distortion).
Assuming that you might use an off-the-shelf tower speaker, I think the biggest issue that you will run into is controlling the midrange SPL polars so that they don't interact with the walls which significantly affects stereo imaging. Tower speakers with horn-loaded midranges all seem to lose polar control below about 1500 Hz (vertically) and 1000 Hz (horizontally) due to the small linear dimensions of the midrange horn mouth horizontally and vertically.
I'd look at the K-510 horn from Klipsch's commercial product line as the smallest possible size for a corner-loaded speaker, and plan on putting a little ceiling treatment halfway to your listening position. I've not heard the Peavey Quadratic Throat horn, but it may not require ceiling or side-wall treatments. There are other midrange horns out there that could also do the job less well but none of the viable options are "slim".
You could use a La Scala II, but turn the bass bin around to face the wall--which will produce significant lf bass extension and aid lf smoothness (counterintuitive but well documented in JAES papers).
Another approach is to use a pair of horn-loaded woofers or even subs in each corner and crossover ~150-200 Hz to smaller conventional tower speakers placed away from the walls for soundstage imaging performance to keep them small in size. You'd need to correct for time misalignment using an active digital crossover or AVP --which will also do lf EQ.
Chris
"As far as the ear can tell, consistently clean and spacious bass can be reproduced only by a driver unit coupled to a horn-type acoustic transformer..."; Jack Dinsdale, May 1974
Follow Ups:
Hello Chris
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, I'm liking the big 'Montana type' speakers, or maybe something from the crazy guy in the sweater, but in the corners not free-standing out in the room.
I was curious why I'm not seeing 6'+ tall speakers designed for placement in a corners, I remember small corner speakers from Allison Audio but haven't seen any larger.
Your comments about interaction with walls is likely the reason.
We can't use K-horns because there's a window in the way.
I'll have to read up on Mr.Dinsdale, thanks Craig.
"I was curious why I'm not seeing 6'+ tall speakers designed for placement in a corners"
This is an interesting observation. Note that the width of most cornerhorns is usually a function of "bifurcated" or "W" horn section in order to evenly load the mouth of the speaker's bass horn with the room's corner extension. It you try to move a Khorn to one side or the other reltive to the corner centerline, what you get are two unequal horn "mouths" that are not conducive to lf Hi-Fi reproduction. One way to fix this is to enclose the back or the Khorn (something that was done on the 60th Anniversary Khorn design) so that you can actually move the speaker out of the corner a bit (up to about a foot before you significantly affect the 200-300 Hz band) and so you can aim the speaker at your listening position. This is a pretty big deal, as it turns out.
If I were to design a corner-loaded speaker to be high and slim as you suggest, I would first design the midhorn to control its polars in order to keep early reflections off the walls, floor, and ceiling. This means that the midrange horn mouth would necessarily be about 2.5 feet wide and tall (speed of sound dvided by the low crossover frequency: 1132/~500 - the wavelength at which the horn loses polar control) .
The bass bin, if it were to be horn-loaded down to a reasonably low Fc, would need to have about 12 feet of horn length (a folded design of course). [BTW: using a direct rediating bass on a speaker with a horn-loaded midrange/tweeter isn't going to be very aurally satisfying since bass frequency modulation distortion will be the ruling factor in how the speaker "sounds" for dynamic sound reproduction. This is why the Khorn has survived for ~70 years of production.] So the basic choices are: a bifurcated horn or a folded single horn. A tapped horn design (e.g., Danley, etc.) would have interesting horn-mouth bounce dynamics, but at least 3 dB more sensitivity but reduced bandpass relative to a conventional folded horn. As you might see, this is not going to be easy to design in a "slim" style, but it could be done. That's where I'd put my greatest effort: designing a 40 Hz Fc corner-loaded folded horn that is about 4 feet tall and about 2 1/2 feet wide, and TBD feet deep. Note that a single horn would tend to experience higher-order modes that would tend to be cancelled in a "W" design with its symmetric-but-opposing horn mouths. Additionally, the 1/4 wavelength distance corresponding to the distance between the two horn mouths horizontally determines your crossover point to midrange horn/driver - above that frequency, diffraction starts to come into play.
An interesting problem...Hoffman's Iron law still holds (TANSTAAFL).
Chris
"As far as the ear can tell, consistently clean and spacious bass can be reproduced only by a driver unit coupled to a horn-type acoustic transformer..."; Jack Dinsdale, May 1974
You can find articles by Dinsdale here: http://www.volvotreter.de/dl-section.htmMy cornerhorns are about 6' tall, but they're not narrow (see linked picture at
http://gallery.audioasylum.com/cgi/wi.mpl?u=45900&f=IMG_1576_16x9_small.jpg&w=500&h=281): they're Klipsch Jubilees.
"As far as the ear can tell, consistently clean and spacious bass can be reproduced only by a driver unit coupled to a horn-type acoustic transformer..."; Jack Dinsdale, May 1974
Edits: 06/22/11 06/23/11
Post a Followup:
| FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:
Top of Page ]
[ Contact Us ]
[ Support/Wish List ]
[ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]
