Thanks for the video. I have open baffle 3 way hybrid speakers from GR research. They have open tweeters and mid range drivers with sealed woofers. Placement is very important being at least 3 feet from the front wall. The sound stage is bigger and doesn't focus attention to the speaker as the sound source. A subwoofer fills in the lower frequencies. What a great time for quality sound systems and audio enthusiasts.
You could have the same woofer box with an open baffle for the two planar drivers. It would sound more open. You can move the top baffle independent of the bass box which has advantages for time alignment and eliminating first reflections on side walls. But, you cannot put them closer than 4 feet from the wall, and there in lies the problem. You limit your market size to quasi dedicated listening rooms.
Chris is awesome! I chatted with him at AXPONA, and in email, he sent me some very helpful links. Personally, I would love to see you guys build a huge line array as a tribute to Arnie.
The Acoustic Elegance, American made woofers dipole model 12's can get to without equalization to 26 Hz. The 15 and 18 inch models to 22 Hz. Just require a baffle large enough to prevent cancellation.
Maybe Paul needs to visit GR Research and buy himself some NX Tremes and sell his Maggie’s lol Would make a great video having 2 legends coexist in the same room!
I always thought that if you want to build your own custom speakers go the open baffle design. Planars operate like that but most dynamics need to have the back wave damped to prevent destructive interference. Coaxials like some classic reference standard Tannoy speakers can be excellant, I think that some of the Zu speakers have that design.
This is not an issue at all with the Martin Logan ESL speakers from the Masterpiece series. Forward and rear firing woofers keep up with the line source / dipole electrostatic driver. 🙂
I had made some open baffle speakers with some very vintage Philips drivers it was great, not high end though. Jamo made some open baffle speakers too, R606/608.
Yes .. JAMO made the R907 with 12 inch bas drivers .. and the top model R909 open baffle speaker with 15 inch woofers .. I still Got the Big model after many years, because its the most universal speaker I have had in my life .. I am a 59 years Old Dane, and been playing with hi-fi since I was 10 years Old .. Open baffle rulles !!❤️
@@MrCorolla64 Yes, it were the R907 and R909 indeed. They were expensive when new, would be difficult to find them used here in the Netherlands. Would be more easy in Scandinavië. Jamo made some lousy speakers like the compact but olso great stuff like J series from the 70's and the concert range. Had the Jamo proffesional 200 disco speakers aswell. Only open baffle speakers I had were with a 60's Philips broadband speaker home made.
GR Research has a few different open baffle subwoofers. A buddy of mine heard them in a demonstration and said they were the best subwoofers he's ever heard. I'm not sure what their lower range is, but I would like to have a chance to hear them someday, maybe build one for myself?.
They're servo-controlled and play down to 14Hz, and I agree, for music they're the finest sounding subs I ever heard. Not sure home cinema (irrelevant to me). For a DIY project, building H-frames isn't too demanding. But the end result is big and heavy, and they need to be placed at least three feet from the front wall, apart from that, they're in-room response surpasses any sealed or ported design.
Paul - I have 2 OB sub arrays from GR at my house about 4 miles from you guys in Boulder. They are IRS style with 6 12" drivers per array. Feel free to come over. The speakers they are with are driven by a BHK250 if that makes it more enticing
@@noahhorton8901I have dual triple stacks and absolutely love them, the most musical subwoofers I've ever heard along with bass horns that wouldn't possibly fit into my home. Among other, I love what they do for the soundstage, and can only assume dual six would, despite the fact the contribution is "only" bass, contribute to stage height, apart of course from lower distortion (half the cone excursion). Nice!
1:39 I actually love tubes more than boxes. Tubes are impossible to stretch and compress due to the natural round shape and can be made lightweight. Boxes on the other hand require thick wood, lots of bracing to avoid walls flexing and can weigh a ton. I’ll always prefer tubes over boxes but to each their own.
The company Celestion years ago, came out with dipole subwoofers in their 6000 system. One woofer in the semi-enclosure facing forward & another woofer in the same semi-enclosure facing backward. Excellent bass that is well dispersed. The Watson model 10 around 1980 is a great example of a dipole midrange and high frequency panel mounted atop a bass cabinet. The cabinet was filled with heavier than air hexaflouride gas for better damping. Never heard bass done better. Or as good? The Acoustat X from around the same time was a full range electrostatic speaker that needed no subwoofer. It makes almost all modern speakers (even ultra high end ones) sound downright lacking in clarity; including in the bass. There was some great experimentation going on back then. People who hear speakers like that can't help but think " how far we have not come." I am seeking a patent on bases to elevate cable risers. Cable risers lift your speaker cables off the floor, but the cable risers themselves are touching the floor! That's not ideal. Some people instead of using cable risers, tie thread to their speaker cables and elevate them from the ceiling. Using something thicker than white thread would be highly visible and it would end up looking like the David McCallum episode of The Outer Limits called The Form Of Things Unknown. A few guys forgetfully and accidentally have walked right into their suspended thread set up and it brought their speakers crashing to the floor. Near invisible white thread can be a double edged sword.
@Douglas Blake. It was a boring near week. I like this better. People said the same thing about the Wright Brothers. Their thing involved getting things off the ground also. Besides the static field of carpeting (the static field will even play havoc with the high frequencies of cassettes that have been lying on the floor, for a long enough time), the vibration of the floor from low frequencies will affect speaker cable transmission. Any time you can lessen extraneous vibration from anything in the audio chain, it makes an audible improvement. Cable risers are much better than using nothing, but they are also a vibration carrier, and transmit a % of floor vibration to the speaker cables. I realize that some vibration will be transferred to the cable risers by my device. Maybe down the road, there could be something to put under the cable riser"risers".. and so forth and so forth, and so forth. Even how tightly the speaker cables are wrapped in their shielding makes a difference. Just about everybody (who has "ears") notices how quiet, good high end cables sound. There is actually a more silent background. It sounds like it's finally stopped raining in the background. It's dark black silence there. No more electronic "rain". I noticed this also, the first time I played a familiar recording on an over the top speaker cable. Sorry to rain on your parade; but once again $5,000 speaker cables are outside the realm of your experience. Not that it would be impossible to make speaker cables that good at a much lesser price. Maybe there are even ones like that out there. There's an ocean of different stuff out there for the consumer. The difference between you and I, is that I realize I am only in a little boat in a big ocean. You think you ARE the ocean and everything else IS just a little boat. Also, unlike yourself, I only speak out on things I actually have experience with. Isn't that what all good scientists do, to be rightly called a "real" scientist?
@@Douglas_Blake_579 Good first stereo for kids. DIY Baffle speakers with a mini Bluetooth amplifier. They sell both mini tube and mini digital amplifier.s. Use car speakers, they come with individual external crossovers. Inexpensive to build and buy. Just need an old phone and WiFi network connection. 👍
@@sidesup8286 You just can't help yourself, can you? _" Sorry to rain on your parade; but once again $5,000 speaker cables are outside the realm of your experience."_ The other day you asked a straight forward question about crossovers. I gave you a straight forward answer. And look where you are today... making stuff up just so you can bash me, writing hallucinatory crap about pseudo science that's been debunked decades ago and telling us all just how great you are. You gotta get back on your meds.
@@FastvoiceYes, would be great if they made some affordable monitor speaker. But do they even have a dealer in Europe? Would be to expensive for me aswell...
Well..., you didn't answer the question Paul! It was strictly about mid and tweeter drivers. They're in their own box! (why? In fact, I'd never ask this question: I kinda know, since long, that ALL dipole membranes would benefit from a classical, in-a-box mounting. YES, even the big ones -even the HUGE ones!...)
Open baffles only make sense for HF drivers since the wavelength is short enough not to wrap around the baffle. There you have a true dipole and something worth experimenting with. With any sort of LF driver... forget it for too many obvious reasons. If you _insist_ on running an open baffle LF driver, one this size might work half-way decent: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-f6j703wMQTI.htmlsi=xxQeZIhvXjwl7n41 Gonna need a lot of crossovers to get to the tweeter, tho.
Only? When you have a dedicated system and room. Then my two 18" Open baffle is just fantastic and no box at any size can't do less harm and bring out all details all the way to subsonic. Unbeatable! But and a big but it is the furthest from a home theater type of speaker.. it is the most HiFi in the bass you can get.
@@AmazonasBiotop Yes. Only HF drivers if we are talking strictly in terms of objective performance (FR, SPL, efficiency, distortion, etc.). If you wanted to get the same anechoic corner frequency of 50 Hz, which is typical for a standard floor speaker, the baffle would need to be about 10 feet across. I think one reason people perceive them to be "better" is that the roll-off happens at 6 dB/octave below the corner frequency and is fairly constant. If you had a 5 foot wide baffle, below 100 Hz, the output will drop by 6 dB at 50 Hz, then another 6 dB at 25 Hz in theory. While the in-room response will be better, it won't have the true bass extension of a proper boxed speaker. Now, this is for a rather large baffle. For a speaker in a baffle size people often use, the bass will usually start to plummet below about 150 Hz. That's a typical response you'd expect from a satellite speaker. And this doesn't touch on all the potential issues that you can (and likely will) have if you try to use a driver that is not specifically made for use in an open baffle. Given that good, high quality speakers can often hit distortion levels of only a few percent at low frequencies, and cabinets and properly damped ports can be made free of audible resonances, the only true attractiveness to open baffle design is that aesthetically pleasing speakers that have a response that is simple to predict can be made quite easily. That into itself is worth something, but I wouldn't trade it for something that has good linearity and an in-room response that is flat down to 35 Hz or even lower if a sub is involved. If you are ok with bass that rolls off below about 100 Hz or so, then run with it and have fun.
@@AmazonasBiotop For some actual data, here is a quick rundown of a typical open baffle design done by Joseph Crowe (pulled more or less at random): ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9Eqs5aumhnw.htmlsi=78N9HLiSXRFcvH2b The design is reasonable, and if you were willing to apply room corrections, you could get decent bass extension down to about 50 Hz, and the drivers are not too terribly expensive. If you intended to only use it for modest listening levels, it would be entirely acceptable for music. But the cost will be sensitivity, and dynamic range. For optimal performance, I would probably run electronic crossovers and maybe a 3-way setup to ensure the woofer's breakup modes can be avoided and to clean up the in-room response. It would be a fun project for sure if one has the space and time for it. From the looks of it, the distortion was quite reasonable at an output of 90 dB, so it could make it into the ballpark of conventional floor speakers if the response doesn't need to go below 50 Hz. However, there is a real penalty to be paid in driver alignment since it will be virtually impossible to get the HF drivers in-line with the LF units due to them being nearly as tall as the room. That will hurt your directivity in the lower midrange. Edit: And up into the upper midrange since they are being used up to 800 Hz. Id want to get them out of the picture by about 300 Hz.
@@mysock351C I am a measurement guy in some way. But a simple test: put a speaker in a corner yes it will have more spl from the wall reinforcements. But it will sound bomy and bloated and not HiFi in any way or form. And that is easy to test. What I am saying measurements is probably not be all end all. In my dedicated symmetric and treated listening space. My two 18" is in a H frame so the space of a big ugly baffle is gone. They also hang in the air by wires to get off the boundary reinforcement that the floor is. Everything is done to obtain sound quality and as little compromises as possible that a DIYer can. Now I use a calibrated measurement microphone 🎤 and REW.. So the H frame 18" OB goes flat (after PEQ without it is less flat) down to well below 20 Hz with no problems. Then on top of that flat adjustment I add my personal preferences that is exactly a copy of "equal loudness curve". That brings the levels way up. As a way to compensate Homo sapiens fall of of hearing sensitivity as the frequency is decreasing. (Just the nature of us humans and concluded on young healthy individuals in their best years) So equipped with a measuring microphone and REW. I know that I am playing lower in frequency and with higher SPL (dB). That 98% of all tower speakers can do or could produce, but that is unimportant. The OB is NOT loading the room nearly as much as a bass vented/sealed box does! Major sound quality with better clarity when nothing is rattling/vibrating and is for most not still hanging around in the room for 1000 Ms (that is AFTER it has left the cone!) that is more normal for traditional boxes at those frequencies and levels. The box is smearing over the details that you should be able to hear but when the previous note is bouncing around in your room for a whole second then those are smeared over. And as a bonus we don't need that much sound absorbing treatments to tame those issues that boxes produce. The major contribution for the OB is that it is canceling up, down, and to the sides (360°). And a box is omnidirectional problem maker for HiFi. Yes, a box is more efficient enclosure but today when watts has not been cheaper then it is no reason to compromise on sound quality. I can hear new details down to subsonic like if I had almost like a magnifier. That is my experience with measuring my and audiophiles friends systems (when you have the means you are invited by friends to their audiophiles friends for measuring their rooms.. all want to know how good it is and where they has issues that they need to solve. So I gain experience also from all of the different setups.👍 Measuring is to know.🔊✔️✨ And with a DSP I can do so much more than purists cant do and I get more sound quality than they can't access at all and are missing out! For alignment that is no issue you know the difference in distance, and we know the speed of sound in the air pressure and temperature. So it is just to calculate (or messure) a delay for the mains so they start playing when the sound has reached them from the 18" that are further back. So alignment is fixed. Plus we can place the bass driver where it sounds the BEST in the room and midrange and tweeter where they sounds the best. Note that is usually not at the same place as the compromise of tower speakers needs to live with.. 🥰
@@AmazonasBiotop Maybe I am misunderstanding you, but by “H-frame” are you saying that the 18” drivers are being run in free air? If so that puts the point at which the roll-off starts at around 350 Hz. And if that’s the case you WILL hear a lot more detail due to psychoacoustics and how the tympanic membrane responds. There is a phenomenon called masking and low frequencies are quite effective at masking higher ones. Remove the bass, and there is a dramatic sense of more detail, but the sound will be very treble-centric.
Not true at all. My gr research triple 12" servo controlled subs are truly flat to 20hz and - 3db at 14hz measured in room. Your fr30 are like - 12 at 24 hertz your - 3db downpoint (as measured by I think stereophile) is like 50hz lol.
@@Error2username about 4k for all the material and you build yourself (really not hard, cabinets are cnc and you glue together, gets you everything you need including the servo amps (pair.) it's a steal and sounds better than any of the high dollar subs I've heard
ANY woofer can reach DC ... go ahead try it... touch a 9 volt battery to the speaker terminals and watch the cone move out and just sit there. What they can't do is overcome the acoustic cancellation at low frequencies.
@@njc9911 A woofer in an acoustic suspension (sealed) enclosure actually changes the air volume in the room as it moves. This is something an open baffle will never do.
@@Douglas_Blake_579 Yes, that's true, which turns it into a matter of preference, not ability. If a person is primarily concerned with accuracy, the open baffle takes it, while others preter the fluttery experience of a loaded room. I simply stated that designs exist in the real world with responses that rival speakers in boxes. I appreciate your passion on the subject, but I don't think we're going anywhere. You'll not convince me that something can't exist when it already does.
If you think open baffle lacks bass that is because you have never seen open baffle done right. What it boils down to is that there is more profit to be made in the ones you make because you need a lot more bass drivers to get the same SPL level. But the one thing you didn't address is that open baffle bass is far superior to anything you can build in a box.
John 3:16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Isaiah 53:6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.
