GoodSoundClub - Romy the Cat's Audio Site

In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Good midbass is complicated, if not unobtainable.

Post Subject: Tapped Horn ApplicationPosted by skushino on: 9/28/2013

Guest napping now from 16 hrs jet lag, so I have a moment...

Jorge, you raise an interesting point about THs. I may be incorrect in assuming THs sound worse as they play higher in freq. Perhaps instead the limitation is one of narrow bandwidth rather than frequency. In other words, having my TH cover 20 - 100 hz, more than 2 octaves, may be a bridge too far. 20 hz is a very different operating point compared with 100 hz. Sure the system works, but to my ears definitely sounds better when i fix the high pass around 18hz and lower the crossover from 90 to 70 hz. I have a hunch one could design a TH suitable for playing higher frequencies, but in a narrower BW. But I can't think of any practical reason to do it.

No doubt a 100 hz UBH would be fantastic compared with my 142 hz horn. We always want our bass horns to be a little bigger, right? But using the horn to play lower comes at a price - I would want to lower the upper crossover point too, meaning my MR horn playback needs to go lower. And unless I made an even larger folded horn to go lower than 50 - 55hz, the larger UBH just squeezes the operating bandwidth of the folded horn narrower, in this case 50 to around 80 or 90 hz (with boundary and room gain applied to UBH). In that case the effort of building a dedicated mid bass channel is hardly worth operating in a bandwidth less than an octave. So I think if one is using a dedicated mid bass channel under the UBH, maybe 140hz or similar is a good decision for this application.

bty, thank you for sharing the results of your mid bass experiments - your experience is educational for me, and you're one of the few with an opinion informed by real world experience.

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