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Does anyone make a subwoofer using a sealed enclosure? If they do, and you can't build one yourself, buy one.I just finished building my own sealed sub, using the Madisound 1259 driver in a six cubic foot enclosure, and it is waaaay cool. The bass is so very tight and articulated, with clean, powerful transients and no hangover or boom whatsoever. Very smooth response, down to around 25 Hz, with some weak response even below that. It integrates very well with my B&W 802's to give me a solid bottom octave that was missing before.
This unit replaces a higher end, expensive model of a very well known brand of premium quality ported sub, and the homebrew is considerably better in every respect: musicality, transient response, overall smoothness of response, and integration.
Design and construction of a sealed enclosure is simple, requiring no complex calculations or tuning. I'm sure more audiophiles would opt for a sealed enclosure if they ever heard a really good one and could accommodate the space required. I think most manufacturers offer ported designs because they are cheaper to make and sell, and can be used more conveniently, but it is a compromise design which suffers from uneven response.
If you're capable of building a sealed box, it's not much more difficult to turn it into a great sounding subwoofer for a fraction of what you'd pay for an equivalent commercially available item.
I can send pictures and details to anyone interested enough to email me.
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I have two sealed (or acoustic suspension right?) subs in my system. I run then from an active crossover and a big ole Soundcraftsman amp. They make all the difference in the world and there is no way I would have a ported sub for my two channel analog music. Ported subs are great for home theater but I have never been able to get them to sound right for music,
Sealed subwoofers can offer excellent performance with much better transient response (lower group delay) than traditional vented designs. The downside is lower sensitivity and the demand for greater driver excursion. High power amplifiers and new driver designs offering large linear excursion have largely conquered these problems. Quality parametric equalization is another major boon and can elevate performance of even the highest quality subwoofer by allowing room effects to be minimized.Currently, I use a pair of sealed subwoofers based on the Adire Audio Tumult 15" driver, O Audio plate amplifiers and a Velodyne SMS-1 digital parametric equalizer in my home theater. The total cost was not inexpensive (about $2000), but has been well worth it. In-room response at my listening position is essentially flat from 15Hz to the above my 80Hz crossover frequency and the system has prodigious output capability. Both movies and music benefit tremendously with room modes controlled and the other speakers freed of the burden of handling the low bass.
DIY subwoofers, such as yours, can certainly be had for relatively small investment. Parts Express sells a variety of subwoofer kits that can be easily completed by a novice and come with quality preassembled cabinets. Some of the amplifiers available even have simple single-band parametric equalization. Madisound and others provide similar offerings, and these can compare with commercial subwoofers costing many times the price. Thanks for sharing your experience.
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According to Madisound, the NHT 1259 woofer is no longer available. The woofer they are offering as a 1259 substitute (they still call it a 1259) is made by a different company and has different specs. I have no reason to believe that it is not a good woofer, but it is not the same as the original NHT 1259.
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closed boxes need to be calculated also although they are easy and can be done with simple tables. Otherwise you lose control of F3, Qts and efficiency. Assuming reasonably low F3 I consider a low Qts(BELOW .707) essential to quality bass. Unfortunately low F3 and low Qts usually leads to large boxes without equalization. Over 30 years ago Henry Kloss published the math that showed a relationship between these 3 factors. Change one and at least one other must change.
The other problem with closed boxes is that since ported designs are in, most drivers are designed for them and not for closed boxes.
I strongly agree and did essentially the same thing with a NHT 1259 several years ago.
The B&W ASW 850 I own is a sealed enclosure with deep bass down under. The ASW-850’s full response extends to 18 Hz, and its useful output (-6 dB) to a floor-lifting 14 Hz to 16hz. It is a closed enclosure design.V/r
An inexpensive DIY subwoofer used with an inexpensive digital parametric EQ will provide more natural sounding bass at the primary listening position (at reasonable volumes) than any unequalized subwoofer at any price IN MOST ROOMS.The only competition for an EQ'd sub in most rooms is dipole bass.
One Madisound 1259 driver in a sealed enclosure is not enough displacement for many two-channel audiophiles, and not enough for most home theater owners.
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"Design and construction of a sealed enclosure is simple, requiring no complex calculations or tuning. I'm sure more audiophiles would opt for a sealed enclosure if they ever heard a really good one and could accommodate the space required."RG
The main reason for building DIY sealed subwoofers is the huge design margin of error inherent in sealed designs.With decent drivers, you can design a good subwoofer without even measuring the driver parameters (very important for ported designs).
Fine tuning can be done with enclosure stuffing.
A unequalized sealed subwoofer and unequalized ported subwoofer designed for a flat frequency response (many are not) will have almost the same frequency response when placed in the same location in the same room.The ported subwoofer will extend perhaps an octave lower.
It is very unlikely that merely listening to full range music would allow a listener to know whether the sub was sealed or ported, except the extra range of a ported sub design might be audible with some music. Some ported subs do have deliberately non-flat frequency responses, especially inexpensive designs -- that sure could be audible.
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" I think most manufacturers offer ported designs because they are cheaper to make and sell, and can be used more conveniently, but it is a compromise design which suffers from uneven response."RG:
Ported designs are more expensive to manufacture than sealed designs.Uneven response is more likely in ported designs only because they are much more sensitive to driver parameter variations AND many engineers deliberately design ported subwoofers for a non-flat frequency response (louder mid-bass impresses many listeners more than flat bass does)
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If you're capable of building a sealed box, it's not much more difficult to turn it into a great sounding subwoofer for a fraction of what you'd pay for an equivalent commercially available item.
RG
You could buy a box, hire someone to build a box, or use a cardboard concrete column form with two wood end-caps, as I did for my last DIY sub.
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so don't give me any of that seniority crap. How do you know better than I do how my speaker sounds?I'm trying to encourage people to break away from the standard commercial overpriced junk and experiment on their own, and most people will obtain far better results from a poorly designed sealed enclosure than they can get from a poorly designed or poorly executed ported design.
There is plenty of bass available from one 1259 in a sealed enclosure. Your proclamation that only one is insufficient will merely discourage people from experimenting.
I'm saying that the reason more (almost exclusively) ported designs are available is that manufacturers can sell more and get more profit from small ported boxes with faked bass than they can get for a larger sealed enclosure with excellent bass. The industry has moved away from quality toward convenience and WAF, and I'm trying to make experimenters aware that there are valid alternatives to the complexity of designing a ported enclosure.
I'd like to see some support for your argument that a ported design costs more to make. How can it cost more to build a one or two cubic foot box and put in a crappy driver, low-power amplifier, and a plastic pipe to make a ported enclosure with boomy bass than it costs to build and ship a three, four, or more cubic foot sealed box with a quality driver that requires a more powerful amp?
The difference between the average ported box and a quality sealed box should be readily audible to anyone listening to any kind of music. The sealed box I just built sounds better than the REL Stadium sub I was using, and I think that REL makes a pretty high quality piece of equipment.
Who wants or needs another half-octave below 25 Hz? How much musical content is there at 19 Hz? Mostly all that can be heard is traffic rumbling and stage noise. And what ported enclosure (and what room) can produce 19 Hz?
Thanks for your disagreements. Inmates who frequent this forum are probably not surprised that you know more than anyone else, even about the sound of their own system.
to diy but have built three subs. Two sealed subs using the RS 15" Dayton woofers for my stereo. Bass is truly outstanding and is a part of music I've always loved. The cost of the subs is cheap considering the quality of bass I have. With a Q of 6.5 and F3 of 30hz I know I have all the bass I could want for music with ease.I did however build a sub tuned to 16hz using two SS RL-P 15's in a huge box with a 30" long 8" port! The low bass in some movies is astounding.
In both the high quality subs and the Ht sub I built the cost to performance ratio is excellent to outstanding. It's actually not that difficult to build wood boxes if you have some woodworking skills and tools.
The design part is important though. You don't want to just buy a driver and put it in a randomly chosen sealed or ported box. Using Winisd or Unibox helps alot. Also talking to the guys at HTguide.com can help immensely.
Madisound and Partsexpress both have forums to help newbies and the help is wonderful. Those people helped me realize something I'd been wanting to do for a long time. I won't ever buy another sub now that I can design and build a very high quality sub for less money.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
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Disagreeing, with not even one sentence or phrase to refute my post, strongly suggests you had nothing of value to share.That's just plain rude behavior (from someone who 'didn't want to start an argument')
Try that tactic with your wife some day!
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
Okay, and there's no human caused climate change, is there?
- This signature is two channel only -
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
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As you may have read below, I am interested in Dipole bass, simply to compliment my newly finished (okay, last four months, but still new to ME) Adire DDRs.Would you mind an exchange of correspondence via email?
"David! You can KILL a man with a chopstick!" -Keith Charles, Six Feet Under
Push - Pull Sealed Sub: One woofer facing in, the other facing out - bigger box.Oodles more impact - even harmonics you get at higher levels cancel out. I like my sub boxes big, too! But you have to build then well and with proper bracing.
I built two 3cuft sealed boxes to hold my pair of Dayton Titanic Mk II 12" subs. These subs have an fs of around 17hz, so these boxes get down into the low 20 with relative ease.Now the next thought for me is DIPOLE subs...
"David! You can KILL a man with a chopstick!" -Keith Charles, Six Feet Under
Just bought this Amp as a sub development tool - the built in DSP will be great for dipole and general sub EQ - lots of power here too.
The Crown looks fun. Also very flexible for the application. I just don't understand their lowest claim of 650X2@ 8 ohms when it only draws a max of 8 amps (120X8=960 watts) of AC current. And then there are claims of 3200 watts@ 4 ohms bridged a 1% THD. The numbers sdon't seem to be possible. But at $999 or so it looks nice.ET
Well, now I've got a big "hmm" going on in my head! An amp with all that variable stuff built in, and software driven? That's tres cool...As a professional musician and tech rep in the industry, it always amazes me that the pro end gets stuff together and out to market much quicker than the audiophile market ever has, IMHO.
Mind you, some developments have been great in the audiophile world, but I sometimes think that it shoots itself in the foot for sound quality whilst turning a blind eye (at times!) to advancing the technology of it all.
Again, just MHO...
"David! You can KILL a man with a chopstick!" -Keith Charles, Six Feet Under
Hi thereThere are a few drivers that can be used in a small sealed enclosure.
This sealed, downfiring sub has a net internal volume of about 1.1 cubic feet. The f3 is about 36 Hz. The driver is the Dayton Titanic MkIII.
That is practically a subwoofer for a desktop computer speaker system.
- This signature is two channel only -
I can imagine. At 6cu ft, it would be very powerful indeed.
I used to use those woofers for many different types of projects and for sealed, they do well. If you want high eff., bass below 20hz and sealed, you have to add so MUCH more money for woofers that can do that.The heavy industrial ATC 12" (600w) woofers with fs of 19hz (34lb woofer) is the next level..but over 1K$
Short of spending a lot of money, the 1259 is a good choice.
I'd like to see the build. The moniker is the email addy.
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