BWC (Big Woofer Club): Why Big Woofers Matter

Discussion in 'Speakers' started by nishan99, Aug 5, 2020.

  1. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Check Fs for Delta 12. That needs to be low! If it works, make it x2. OB excursion is nuts. Cheap Eminence BL curve turns to shit after a few mm of travel. Actually, that could be good for OB.
     
  2. spwath

    spwath Hijinks master cum laudle

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    55hz so not that low.
    Also these are an older model so can't get more of the exact ones easy. Think I got all 4 of these eminence for like $50 though.

    Maybe best thing is to get something better eventually. I wonder if those altec horns could pair with some 15" open baffle at some point...
     
  3. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Kappa 18s with DEQ are better bet. A network would require big big coils that cost more than the drivers.
     
  4. Psalmanazar

    Psalmanazar Most improved member; A+

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    Of course JBL and the Brits do the right thing.

    Open low e on a bass is the lowest played thing with a transient in most popular music at 41hz and that’s getting high pass.

    808s are 50hz. The 20-30hz something bass drops and “bass textures” are for club music and navel gazing idm losers who want their ass wiped for them by a distorted 28hz sine wave while sitting on a subwoofer respectively. There are no real transients down there and it’s getting processed to oblivion by a decent mastering engineer if the hip hop or electronic producer has them, even if they spent a million bucks like Daft Punk. Unlike Daft Punk, most of these guys are f'ing losers who’ve already ruined everything with ozone or waves limiters on everything.

    Daft Punk rejected the master without a look ahead limiter that Bob Ludwig did favor of the 2d slam job for the club and car. Whoever mastered the record played the cat and mouse game of keeping the bass away from the limiter pretty well. high pass filtering, broad and precise eqs, Multiple rounds of compression (bass has more energy than is perceived so it is compressed first which is where the high pass filters to prevent pumping come from), and more eq to keep the bass away from the limiter that will fuzz clip it.

    Music pre 1990 is all high pass filtered for vinyl and now music is high pass filtered for the limiter. Sub bass eats into your headroom and for most music, you want to get rid of it. Even rap. They just have a lower cutoff and modern pop rap and most current teeny bopper shit is the most lofi bullshit imaginable and will fuzz up the bass anyway and will have audible clipping.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2020
  5. Azimuth

    Azimuth FKA rtaylor76, Friend

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    JBL started designing speakers to be put close to the back walls, so yes, they do dropoff at the extreme low end, but that is to account for the low end buildup. I know my JBL LSR32's are designed this way.

    KEF does something thing today, they just ship speakers with foam plugs for the bass ports since Brits have stone construction and we American's have gypsum walls. And many pro speakers have bass adjustments for this very thing.
     
  6. Serious

    Serious Inquisitive Frequency Response Plot

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    @spwath measure it, simulate it. Use tools like Basta! to help visualize what these TS parameters mean for the actual response. You can tweak around the low Qts in the crossover, but that will waste efficiency.

    I think I never mentioned it (mostly because I was too embarrased), but I rigged together a three way OB speaker from parts a friend of mine had left over years before I built my actual first OB speaker with the FE83En and Beta 15A. 10 or 12" woofer with low Qts, I think 5" mid and 1" dome tweeter. I only had parts for just one speaker and I ended up listening to some of my favorite tracks, rediscovering how they would sound on a speaker (at the time I only had headphones in my room).
    As for how I did it, I measured the drivers on the baffle, did a quick simulation and just used the crossover parts I had to make the best with what I had available in parts. The rest of the response I simply EQ'd to reach my target response (LOL). The point is that even if you end up not getting much bass extension or not getting the response you want you can do a hack job with EQ and just listen to it for a while. I think I disassembled the speaker a couple weeks later and gave back the parts. I'm not even sure what happened afterwards for a while. Use it as a learning experience and move on from there, even if not immediately.

    Later when I built the FE83En OB for dirt cheap (considering what it was - the thing cost me about as much as my HD600) I bought the Beta 15A's because I knew they would work in an OB. Today I would probably not get the FE83En again, but even then it was impressive how seamlessly you can go from a 15" woofer to a 3" widebander (not sure if RobS is still reading now - the 8" Voxativs sound way faster despite higher Mms than the cheapo Fostex**). I'm not even sure there are other small 3 or 4" widebanders I'd get instead. I now have these cute coaxials on my desk (will post pics later) that have replaced small widebanders for me. I think that's the approach I'd take now instead of using a small widebander. All of the smaller widebanders I've heard seem to have a more screwy response than the Voxativ 8" with worse technicalities and seemingly worse treble extension aswell. Good (and inexpensive) coaxials at least get you a smooth response (yes @Psalmanazar, such a thing does exist).

    With OBs most of the bass extension is determined by the baffle and the room. Real life in-room measurements will likely be a lot more usable (more extension) than simulations for anechoic conditions. I think I got lucky with the baffle design I have now and the room my speakers sit in because I get good extension down to 24Hz (my lowest room mode). Outdoors they are flat to 40Hz! (20Hz is roughly 10dB down from my measurements.) With OBs the response will null for frequencies larger than the longest dimension in your room. When wavelengths are larger than the room there is no modal behaviour and your front and back wave cancel almost entirely*. Keep that in mind when designing OBs for your room. As Marv mentions, get a sub if you need it.
    *At least that's what I think happens. There's thread on diyAudio on that matter.

    @purr1n As for the Beta 15A vs the PAP woofers, @sphinxvc did end up going for the older production PAP woofers. So as far as SBAF is concerned I seem to be the odd one out here preferring the Beta 15A. FWIW the Beta 15A did seem slightly (~1dB) more efficient (with better bass extension aswell - the PAP woofers only reached the Beta 15A efficiency at 35Hz IIRC) and I consistently measured far superior bass distortion on my Beta 15A. The PAP woofers have a bit of a higher Mms and the cone itself felt more flexible.
    Maybe it's just that they're better suited for my speakers. The better top-end extension (reaching 2kHz instead of 1.5kHz before rolling off) is almost necessary for my speaker with my crossover. It's also possible placebo made me prefer the Beta 15A: knowing that it was the driver with the lighter and stiffer cone - however I did not find out about the high bass distortion until after I was set on my impressions.

    **Thinking about it, the Mms per surface area may very well be less.
     
  7. LetMeBeFrank

    LetMeBeFrank Won't tell anyone my name is actually Francis

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    I've found my KEF Reference three's actually sound best 8" away and perpendicular to the wall. The dual 8's enclosed in each cabinet pressurize my 16'x22' living room pretty well.

    I'd love to hear a properly set up big woofer system to see if I'm missing out with my KEFs. I used to have some 12" 3 way JBL towers but I gave them to my father when I bought my Klipsch VF-36 skinny boys back in 2011.
     
  8. dark_energy

    dark_energy Friend

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    Something about impulse and transient to make myself clearer. To be continued...

    In short. One way to understand how impacts(drums, effects, synth) are created is to understand square wave harmonics.
    The big driver is only a part of the impact. It doesn't need to be really faster because of the frequencies it creates.
    30Hz can't be "faster" than 30Hz. It can be bigger in amplitude...
    The factor in sound would be how quickly it can come from low amplitude to high.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Square_wave

    ( Tyll Hertsens had a great video on this where he explained square wave response in measurements and what it could mean in headphone sound)
     
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2020
  9. dmckean44

    dmckean44 In a Sherwood S6040CP relationship

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    3-Way horn designs suck in small rooms because it takes quite a bit of a space between the speakers and the listener for the drivers to properly integrate.

    2-way horn designs work fine in a small room and large horns work particularly well in small rooms as you basically take the room out the equation.

    Also, most Americans think their converted bedroom listening room is small when it's actually pretty large.
     
  10. Ash1412

    Ash1412 Friend

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    Not related to big woofers but I always figured this was why people had differing impressions towards the Hifiman and Focal timbre, with some calling it a non-issue while I personally got headaches within minutes. The super high-tension Hifiman diaphragms and high-excursion Focals seem to start shitting the bed sound-wise at lower volumes than the usual designs or literally break apart when you feed it pure bass in the case of Focals. I don't even consider myself that much of a high-volume listener compared to friends, though I never bothered to measure. This might also be accountable for the differing choices in OB 15" Eminence among the members: the ones picking high Qts designs probably don't listen that loud.
     
  11. dark_energy

    dark_energy Friend

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    https://www.szynalski.com/tone-generator/

    To continue my upper post.

    Play some sine and while at it choose something in 1kHz - 14kHz range and then just chose something in 20Hz-40Hz next. Sounds like an impact effect to me.
     
    Last edited: Aug 8, 2020
  12. nishan99

    nishan99 Friend

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    I highly disagree about the Focal. The Elex was one if not the best headphones at low level listening. I would also say it's actually the opposite, they start losing control at higher SPLs, +90dB. And yeah it's true for egg shaped Hifimans until the HE1000se.
     
  13. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    I think that's what he meant.
     
  14. nishan99

    nishan99 Friend

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    Okay... weak English again lol.

    On the excursion thing, I think the higher the excursion the higher the demand from the amp to control the driver. The Elex were very revealing of amps compared to the other headphones I tried. So I think big woofers that "don't move" will actually be easier on the amplifier.
     
  15. batriq

    batriq Probably has made you smarter

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    After I set them up, my mother-in-law who lives with us, handed me a pamphlet and said: this goes with them

    IMG_20200809_170138.jpg IMG_20200809_170148.jpg

    She also told me their story. My father-in-law bought them while in Japan from a Japanese preson in London. Then shipped them with him when when he moved to the US in the late seventies. He's had them since. I then drove them from Alabama to CT when my mother-in-law sold the house. So yeah, it sounds like they were babied.

    Thanks Marv for encouraging me to set them up!
     
  16. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    Thank you for sharing.
     
  17. hvbias

    hvbias New

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    In the last photo the large midrange/treble horn up top is a Klipsch K-402. Usually sold with a Klipsch folded bass horn from pro dealers to make the Jubilee. For me it was also the best speaker system I've heard with regard to scale. The K-402 is absolutely massive (never seen any pictures including ones I took of the owner's system that capture just how wide it is) and IIRC most Klipsch owners high pass them between 300-400 Hz and the popular drivers are Klipsch (I think a rebadged B&C) and TAD TD4003 with a throat adapter.

    The sound of that system with symphony music and some piano and violin concertos still echo in my head. Also had midrange density/presence/tone that I hear on the ESL57, just remarkable to have both that and scale/dynamics.
     
    Last edited: Sep 12, 2020
  18. dmckean44

    dmckean44 In a Sherwood S6040CP relationship

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    Klipsch Jubilee 2-ways with the K-402s are also the best speakers I've ever heard. I would own them already if I had the space for them. I was lucky enough to get to listen to all my usual test tracks plus watch half an action movie on them. It was quite the experience.
     
  19. hvbias

    hvbias New

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    That's cool, here is a picture I took when I heard them. Do you know what amps you heard them with? The popular thing on the Klipsch forum is using massively powered amps actively driving the Jubilee bass horn and K-402 separately. I have to imagine what I heard would have sounded even sweeter with better amps, like really good full DHT SET or SIT-1 type things on the K-402 since it's something like > 105 db/w with the TADs.

    What did you think of the bass? The music I was listening to didn't have that much bass but when you hear tympani strikes or piano playing fortissimo that little voice in your head whispers "jesus", it's not speaker bass it's just... bass

    I'm actually planning to buy the K-402 and do a custom straight midbass horn for below the K-402, either down to 80 or 100 Hz. Have not figured out what to do for subbass, things like folded horns seem good but then I see how much EQ is needed to make them flat. Most of those guys like Bill Fitzmaurice that make those tapped or folded bass horns think it's not a big deal but I'm not as certain. Something like a tower of 5x 12" or 15" drivers on each side with barely any excursion.

    [​IMG]

    Some ideas floating around for bass horns:

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Sep 13, 2020
  20. dmckean44

    dmckean44 In a Sherwood S6040CP relationship

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    Yeah, I heard them with huge pro amps (I can't remember what brand) and xilica active crossovers. The bass of the stock Jubilee was amazing and when I was watching the movie he demo'd for me, people just getting in and out of cars and slamming the doors shut sounded so real.

    These constant coverage horns need quite a bit of EQ and even the compression drivers themselves need some EQ. When you're using horns with a two inch throat, all sounds above 9400khz are going to be coming straight from the mouth of the compression driver. That's probably a good argument for a 3-way, but you need a about 20 feet between you and the speakers for the drivers in a 3-way horn system to properly integrate with each other.

    I wouldn't really worry about needing to EQ a folded bass horn too.
     

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