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HiI have been looking a lot in the asylum and I couldnt find a thread that explains what kind of sound in terms of soundstage, inmediacy, coherence, imaging, tone, etc you can expect from a front horn and from an Open Baffle.
How do they sound?
If properly implemented,
which one will image better?.
which one is more natural?
which one is more non fatiguing?
which one is more envolving?
which has better soundstage?
which one interacts more with the room acoustics?
Follow Ups:
Considering that I now have both side-by-side in my room here are my thoughts:
OB is easy. You can bang something together in about an hour, and you can spend as little as you like. I once had a mono fullrange-on-OB setup that consisted of an $8 (on sale) Radio Shack driver, a piece of 4"-wide scrap lumber, and some cardboard wings. It wasn't bad! That's a plus for the DIYer. There's something to be said for a project that you can actually sit and listen to. Also, by "easy" I mean that you get about 90% of what you're ever going to get with FR/OB with hardly any effort. That's different than, say, a sealed or ported box where you can fuss with damping, crossovers, etc. etc. forever.I like the 6" FR+sub suggestion. There's a certain magic to FR drivers in the 4"-6" range. The 8"-or-bigger drivers seem to lose that midrange effortlessness to some degree, and rely more on their "whizzer cone" -- the typical tradeoff is more headroom, often better efficiency and more upper bass in the 100-200hz range. The 3"-or-smaller drivers lose lower midrange and have no headroom whatsoever. (They can be just the thing for a desktop-type system however, and I should point out that probably half of all DIY speakers built in Japan use the Fostex FE103) If you don't use a sub or helper woofer you are probably going to have virtually no bass below 80hz. Some people can live with that but I personally am about sick of anemic "audiophile" fullrange speakers.
OBs have a very spacious, reverberant, non-directional kind of presentation. Nothing wrong with that. Great for sitting out of the "sweet spot."
Horns are complicated. You are going to have crossovers, and multiple drivers. Then you have integration issues, questions about speaker-level or active/line-level XO, multiple amplifiers, on and on to any degree of complexity. If you use speaker-level XO, you lose that freshness that comes from a direct amp-driver connection. Construction tends to be complex, although you can work with ready-made speakers or modular components. Often expensive. Horns also tend to be directional, at least the simple flares favored by audio fans. You're bolted into the sweet spot.
In the end it tends to boil down to room size and how you want to listen, in my opinion. Plus, the degree to which you like to putter in the garage instead of listening to music. The bigger the room, and the more you want to listen at "performance volumes" (typically about 115db peaks whatever the style of music, no 5"-diameter piece of cardboard flapping around fullrange is going to deliver that) the more you'll appreciate horns. In a small apartment where you don't want to bother the neighbors, the FR strategy comes into its own. You can listen to horns at low levels as well, but their advantages over FRs are not as prominent in this format.
The same applies to amps as well. In a small room/low level format, you may be able to run a 90db fullranger from a 2A3 and be pretty happy. In a big 2000ft room, you might find that even with a huge 105db horn system, your 300B is running out of gas.
I've been experimenting with "wideband horns" with some success. It is all-but-impossible to find gear unless you spend considerable $$$. The present rig is a 200hz-5Khz compression driver plus a 5Khz+ bullet tweeter. With active highpass XO to the compression driver and a one-cap crossover to the tweeter, this gives most of the attractions of fullrange drivers with most of the advantages of horns, in my early opinion. The Lowther-on-150hz fronthorn comes to a similar middle ground from the other direction. Both are complicated by the fact that they don't mix well with off-the-shelf subwoofers.
Someone might also try playing with production coaxials on OB. Beyma makes a 15"coaxial you can buy at www.usspeaker.com. B&C also makes 10" and 12" coaxials. (partsexpress.com) Combining these with a 15" OB sub driver on a baffle might be a nifty way to go. The Eminence Beta12CX is another interesting driver -- The Beta12A is the evolutionary base of the Bastani Prometheus but the CX comes with a coax horn tweeter that kicks in around 4khz.
Hi
I have been thinking of doing almost the same as you like the Bd design Orphean that use a compression driver from 250 and for the lows a plate amp with an onken bass cabinet.
But I was wondering, if these compression driver really sound natural. Because they are designed specifically for PA use.concerts, live venues.
In your experiment, how the compression sounded compared to a normal cone full range?Some say that the compression driver cant reproduce timbres and tones better than a good FR. is it true in any way?
I was thinking on the driver used in the orphean the BMS 4592ND.
Does anybody has used it?
Alan
In your current experiment with the wideband compression what driver and horn are you using?Thanks,
Well this is my first post on this forum, I hope it helps.I have played quite a bit with OBs and have found the sound can be quite amazing, but in my opinion most people go about it the wrong way. I have tried large and small drivers, with and without subs.
The real magic to my ears lies in using efficient 4-5 inch drivers plus a pair of subs with rear firing super tweeters. I reason you are never going to get real bass from open baffles (unless the room is really large) and drivers beyond 6 1/2 inches or so just don't stick to a waveform the way the smaller ones do.
Most larger drivers sound pretty honky and beam in this arrangement. yet don't go really high, but smaller drivers sound very live and have a much extended high end so the crossover to the rear firing tweeter works really well, providing a wonderful sense of ambience. If the main drivers can be made to go from about 80/100hz to say 10,000 cleanly the result is very coherent. And a good 4 inch driver with bass equalization can certainly do this and 10,000hz is a walk in the park.
As for efficiency, you get more volume for open baffles compared to regular boxes but not as much as horns.
Here is a little idea to try just to get a taste, find some reasonable quality 2 way car speakers in around the 5 inch size, go for something with high efficiency and just mount them on a couple of bits of MDF say 1m by 800mm and a little of centre. This won't be the last word in OBs by a long shot but its a cheap way to see if it has promise for you. Way better when used with a sub too.
To me the sound of OBs is very much like a real performance, it has none of that boxiness/hi fi sound that most come to accept as the sound of high quality audio these days. Overall I feel all audio nuts should try OBs at least once, you might just be sold on the idea, despite the apparent simplicity.
The room does have a strong effect on the sound but that also means it can be used very effectively to tune the sound as well. I don,t think OBs are really right for very live rooms, it could become pretty congested.
Zero One
Hi Zero One,Is the rear-firing tweeter wired to have the same or inversed polarity with the front-firing driver?
Regards,
HiThanks for the answers. I have a room which is 13 feet wide x 17 feet large. Half of the room have a roof at 8.96 feet high and the other half at 20 feet. I usually use the highest part of the roof to put the speakers along the 13 feet and I sit just at half of the lowest part of the roof. So, due to the unregular roof and considering that this space is a living room that I cant use to put room treatments, I would think that front horns will be the best options, am I right?
Alan
Hola Alan!To position open baffle I found its best to use the distance to the wall according to the freq. response of the bafle or a fraccion of it. Open baffle are very easy to make and very rewarding.
Horns you can just put against the wall and they will sound good. The bass module actually likes the wall for better response. Be sure to have a way of adjusting volume level for each horn and the bass system, if you biamp better.
One can always 'upgrade' until the cows come home [to watch a DVD (even have some popcorn)]. But, one can buy a wide range or full range vintage driver for pennies. Then buzz out some holes in two plywood pieces, prop a stick on the back. Bang, boom, bing .... done.Music.
I've got mebbe a hundred twenty five dollars total, in me current speaks (vint 12" cast frame, alnico wide range. Vint alnico cast bullet horn tweets, cap assortment, L-pads, angle bracket feet, spikes). No inductors (thank you very much).
Hard to believe twelves can have midrange magic, and also disappear (no, I ain't complaining). In my small room, I attenuate the back wave with a single drape of fabric, over the speaker's back (season to taste). I have imaging and depth in spades (and .... a luverly bottom end). Theory, talk, indecision, projection. Just grab you somethin, an get a listenin :-)
I can speak for both, I have both and I like each quite well. The OB's with a full range driver can be very satisfying, especially with stereo subs. There is an open, free of resonances quality that is very nice and transparant; can be magical.Horns are more efficient and sound more effortless and 'complete.' Imaging may be a touch more spot on and soundstage is better defined. You lose a little bit of the immediacy because of the crossovers though.
If you listen in near field, OB might be the trick, or if you have an abundance of space and can do the big baffles with wings with some PHY drivers: very nice.
I'm doing horns now because I need more efficiency, but I still like my OB set-up.
If you can, try them both. The JE Labs design is really easy and cheap to build for OB, get soem vintage drivers or whatever you like and try it out.
I had experience with both: I changed from OB to Horns.which one will image better? Horns all the way, the best imaging I have ever heard was Avantgarde at RMAF...scary good.
which one is more natural? Horns if you mean by natural more acording to reality.
which one is more non fatiguing? Open bafle can be very relaxed but in order to get all the sounds from the source you need to pump up the volume, with horns you can listen at very low volume levels and miss nothing, no fatigue.
which one is more envolving? Sorry but Horns all the way, foot stomping clapping good.
which has better soundstage? Better sounstage and image better...horns.
which one interacts more with the room acoustics? Open baffle, you need a really big room to use open baffle and anything you put on your walls will change the sound. Horns are more direct radiation pattern with less interaction on the room, very small sweet spot on horns though, Soundstage in Open baffle is terrible IMHO...unless you have Genesis speakers in a huge room (they will give you the minimal measurements of the required room, Genesis 201 do sound great!).
I've tried the same 10" speaker on OB (a few different ways, with lots of midbass support) and in a rather large front horn (with sub).Fronthorn = more natural. Less excursion / less strain at high volumes.
Fronthorn = more involving. For me involving and "realistic" SPL are kinda synonomous.
OB interacts MUCH more with room acoustics. It kinda defines them.Soundstage, natural etc don't mean much to me, I like rock and techno :-)
As an aside, I found that in a front horn, a tweeter is required for off-axis listening, whereas on OB, I could be a way off axis, and the highs would be OK.
Thought I would chime in here, as my system is both.
15" OB for low end - Altec 811 horn for mids/highs. Also use a rear firing horn tweeter.I like the combo a lot, but can't say if an FR would be better on top - I haven't tried it!
If you go for OB bass, you will need a bass boost - and power. A simple shelving low pass in the preamp works great. Your driver and baffle will determine the amount of boost and the frequency you need. E.G., I use +6dB shelved at about 90Hz for my system. By ear it should have another 2dB for my room and tastes. But that's easy to change.
Running passive filtering at the moment, bi-amp gives the best results. Baffles are medium size, 40" tall by 21" wide with wings. 8" wings on the outside, 11" on the inside. The wings help the mid bass a LOT.
The Selenium 15" that I use has a Qts of about 0.6, so it works well in OB. Just enough damping, just enough bass. Some people like higher or lower Q drivers.
I agree with the OB comments above, the lack of box coloration and the um, I can't think of the term... (trainage, in French) is really nice. Sounds start and stop very suddenly with an OB. Quite surprising.
Imaging is good, like a lot of horn systems. Don't know if it would be better wih horn loaded bass. There isn't enough room in my house for a full front horn loaded woofer. %-{
OB is great, but for bass OB you need to do some "tricks" like the bass boost and the mid to high Q drivers. And you need more power than a driver in a box. That's been my milage so far.
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