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Omnidirectional 2way completed
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Just sharing my most recent project: small 2 way omnidirectional speakers with a 5" Scanspeak midbass and a Neo 3 PDR tweeter. The cabinets are a non-equilateral octagon with barely enough room to fit two crossover boards, a large port (it's all relative), and a pair of braces. The port is tuned to about 45Hz, the bottom 2/3 are stuffed, and there is an open path from the midbass to the mouth of the port. The cabinets themselves are cheap plywood, held together with lots of biscuits and dado'ed braces. The joint are sealed with gorilla glue and accessible areas were damped with eDead (aluminum backed butyl damping material).
While they are surprisingly light for DIY speakers, putting your ear to the cabinet walls while playing loud music demonstrates that they are free from the type of ringing I am used to hearing with MDF enclosures. The response had to be tapered off on the listening axis in order to deal with the unmeasured directional energy of the vertically firing midbass.
They are going to reside permanently in the living room where I have a pro amp dealing with their horrendously low sensitivity. However, when I finish building the new amp for the home theater in the basement (with the cojones to drive the octagons), I can give them a shot in a more acoustically friendly environment.
Overall, I am happy with them, and they certainly spank my wife's displaced Aiwa system. I would definitely recommend against making octagonal cabinets, or leaving internal dimensions that require such tight tolerances. Then again, I am probably done making rectangular cabinets. Being different is part of the reason to DIY in the first place.
Just sharing my most recent project: small 2 way omnidirectional speakers with a 5" Scanspeak midbass and a Neo 3 PDR tweeter. The cabinets are a non-equilateral octagon with barely enough room to fit two crossover boards, a large port (it's all relative), and a pair of braces. The port is tuned to about 45Hz, the bottom 2/3 are stuffed, and there is an open path from the midbass to the mouth of the port. The cabinets themselves are cheap plywood, held together with lots of biscuits and dado'ed braces. The joint are sealed with gorilla glue and accessible areas were damped with eDead (aluminum backed butyl damping material).
While they are surprisingly light for DIY speakers, putting your ear to the cabinet walls while playing loud music demonstrates that they are free from the type of ringing I am used to hearing with MDF enclosures. The response had to be tapered off on the listening axis in order to deal with the unmeasured directional energy of the vertically firing midbass.
They are going to reside permanently in the living room where I have a pro amp dealing with their horrendously low sensitivity. However, when I finish building the new amp for the home theater in the basement (with the cojones to drive the octagons), I can give them a shot in a more acoustically friendly environment.
Overall, I am happy with them, and they certainly spank my wife's displaced Aiwa system. I would definitely recommend against making octagonal cabinets, or leaving internal dimensions that require such tight tolerances. Then again, I am probably done making rectangular cabinets. Being different is part of the reason to DIY in the first place.
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