There aren’t many constant directivity waveguides for 1.4″ compression drivers, but one I had not been aware of until Paul Spencer and SvenR on SNA forums brought it to my attention was the 18sound Xt1464.
After reading up on it I found it online for sale (inc shipping) not too expensive at www.thomann.de. It did take ages to show up though, with very detailed notifications of the first and last 2 days of shipping, and nothing for the 3 weeks inbetween.
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Did this mod over the weekend. It’s a bypass of the Behringer output stage to get a cleaner output from the AKM AK4393 DAC chip.
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I’ve been running through ideas for some cabinets for the Lorantz woofers.
The current fairly rough PA cabinets that came with them OK, but I’m not getting the full bass the speakers are capable of.
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I just revisited my tweaks to the DSE A2667 speaker (an OK quality cheap speaker commonly available second hand in Australia for about $20). This is because I had the loan of a WooferTester 3 unit from Col, so I could measure the drivers properly, and also had been given an extra pair to experiment with (thanks Gavin!).
TLDR summaryI made one additional adjustment to the crossover that made the response even flatter, by adding a 4.4uF capacitor to the LF portion to make it a 2nd order filter, while inverting the polarity of the tweeter.. but at the cost of an increase in measured distortion at about 3.5khz.
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OK, we know that simple on axis, straight into the speaker frequency measurements aren’t the whole story – getting a range of measurements at different angles gives a better idea for speakers getting general use, not the whole glued to the magic sweetspot that a lot of hifi has.
So it was time to do some directivity measurements. I don’t have the a licensed copy of ARTA so I can’t do the heatmaps ala Gainphile’s site
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It was very interesting when I read that Paul Spencer of the very informative site Red Spade Audio Blog was revitalising Aussie kit speaker company LSK Loud Speaker Kit
Even more interesting, for those of us put off by US import prices for the bang for buck Dayton Audio products is that LSK is now a distributor for Dayton products in Australia. Great Stuff.
I wanted to try some different waveguide options besides the FaitalPro LTH142 before I start making enclosures – and noticed the Pyle PH916 was a quite decent looking, inexpensive, candidate – but very little information about people using it at all on the web, unlike lots of other waveguides. But it is sold as a constant directivity waveguide, and in fact the waveguide I use in my Econowave speakers is a smaller model from Pyle so I gave it a try.
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Well I had made a shortlist of all sorts of great drivers to work through the cabinet simulations with, including the B&C 15TBX100 (Italy), BEYMA 15B100/R (Spain), RCF LF15N401 (Italy), Selenium 15WS800 (Brazil), and even some from Lorantz (Dandenong, Australia), though the Lorantz ones were out of my budget, despite being locally made.
But I got very lucky with ebay and scored a pair of Lorantz 15″ C390X B1 for a great price. I’m told these are asbolutely amazing quality speakers.
Conveniently the auction even included some PA cabinets – though not great for loungeroom use long term at least I can get some instant gratification and get started with measurements and integrating the speakers before I start the big task of building some nice permament enclosures. When placed upside down they even position the speaker quite close to the waveguide, which is how I want the new cabinet to have it.
Not measurements yet. I’ve just quickly hooked up the bass drivers with some temporary banana sockets connected via the bass reflex port.
Build Intention:
A “simple” two way speaker with the advantages of the Econowave, but deeper bass than my current woofers, and more directivity by using a compression driver/waveguide that extends down to a lower frequency.
Eventually building the speakers with “modular” cabinets, to make changing parts easier.
note: article incomplete, I need to tidy up the graphs and clarify what the lines are.
I recently purchased a MiniDSP UMIK-1 calibrated USB measurement microphone to help with speaker tuning. I already have a Behinger ECM-8000, but the Behringer isn’t calibrated, while the MiniDSP comes with a calibration file, you just download from their site keyed on the serial number of your unit.
As you can see, the two units come in similar, but not the same packaging, and also look quite similar:
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