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In Reply to: Sealed enclosures for subwoofer posted by madisonears on April 12, 2007 at 20:37:19:
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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Follow Ups:
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
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