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Eduardo,

Thanks for your thoughts and illustrations. I also do not feel that loosely-suspended very small metal cone might be a right solution for midbass. To develop LF you need pressure, pressure is surface by exertion – there is nothing else. I do feel at that at some point in bass it is more effective to increase size then exertion. In addition the increasing size and using right materials allows a cone to “write” harmonics in break-up mode. I do not know how metal cone of bass compression drover would behave in “collapsing” mode. It is soft suspended –it is very difficult to say what would happen with it. If you ask me that the wide and soft suspension of the drivers like YL1250 might act at LF as secondary diaphragm. What driver cares let say 30Hzn then the driver creates absolutely crazy pressure in the little front chamber. The spherical cone of the excurted cone let presume can handle the press pressure how about the very wide skirt of the soft plastic spider around the cone? This surface cannot handle high pressure and it will be deformed back, contra-balancing the excursion of the voice coil driven cone. It might act as some kind of self-damping but I feel that it take something off from sound as well.

With all my mixed interest and skepticism to the light-coned compression drivers handle any sub 80Hz region I have to admit that I never heard the results. The speculations are great but it might be fun to hear ALE-160 driver working.  As you understand the entry tickets for such an experiment is not just the cost of the 4” bass compression driver – that would be an easy part, but rather a sequel of very costly and very time consuming actions to make such drivers to work properly in context of the whole installation.  Topologically the use of the ALE-160 vs. the use for instance my 15-incher would require very different ways to implement LF, so the mistakes are VERY costly, and the cost is so high that the price of the driver might be negligible.

It is important however to keep sanity and to understand the abstract meaning of the “mistakes”.  They are not truly mistakes but rather purely subjects of Kafkarian fiction. If you built your installation with a pair of ALE-160 driver and 40Hz horns but I built my installation with my 15-incher and 40Hz horns then how to correlate the results? My current installation use some tricks that make any bass to sound very good (5+1 walls pattern) another room might not have it and who the hell know how to correlate the conic results of two different bass channels? So, what we might call as “mistakes” are not truly mistakes but rather “the ways what it is”. Many year back John Hasquin pitched to me a very sane idea. He told me that people who do bass horns do not make it better or worth, they construct whatever they construct, get a random result and then they live with it, calling the results with deferent adjectives. There is a lot of truth in it. Still, I would like to analyze patterns and conditions before committing my own mistakes. Russian says that mistakes are good and that people learn by mistakes. Well, I would prefer to learn by mistakes of others… If I do my proper midbass horn then it will be once in life-span project and I would like to have at least an intellectual pleasure that I knew that I was doing.

Anyhow, I wish more data about the bass compression drivers were available. I with the people who use them were more outspoken. I wish the people who sell/make them did not act so cowardly as they do, and I wish they furnish opportunely for their LF bass solutions to compete on the market of “open availability”.

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