Change to Changes…

Ah, not only the exterior design of the speaker changed. I’ve also choosen other drivers to lower the total costs of this build. Woofer: Scan-Speak 10″ Revelator,  Mid: Scan-Speak 4″ Discovery and Tweeter: Wavecor 22mm Dome

Rationale behind driver choice: As the woofer is a woofer and not a subwoofer it should perform well at above 300Hz frequencies. The mid is almost a “fullranger”, I’m looking at having this driver to cover the 350Hz to 3500Hz range. The tweeter is a small faceplate design, placing the tweeter close to the mid makes ik more like a point source. The woofer and mid do not suffer from severe breakup (unlike the Seas Excel units ) which hopefully results in an simple x-over filter with 2nd order slopes and no extra components to suppress breakups or to create steeper slopes, 3rd or 4th order. The relative high x-over points also keeps the coils in check not beeing too big to become very costly too. The 350Hz x-over should also be quite okay for the baffle step compensation.

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Loudspeaker…

As said, I changed the design of the loudspeaker, still a 3-way with 10″ woofer, but the cabinet design has changed for an easier build. Lazy Me.

It will look close to the following:

Sidewalls will also act as stands and will be made from solid timber.

The idea is to built a passive 2nd order x-over. Drivers choosen have no severe breakup that need special attention.

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Update…

Yes, still alive, was just too busy and never came to post to this blog. Although busy there is little worthwhile mentioning here. Just one thing: a few posts down I presented a loudspeaker design. Well it did not happen. I did change the design and started the build.

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Toys 4 Boys…

New toy for the boy. (D800 + 24-70/2.8)

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No Words #73…


Maastricht, 2011

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Pondering…

Where is Apple taking iMac/OSX towards? Even more life-style computing (to keep this remark a bit friendly).

I think that my next PC (no, not soon, in 2 years or so) most likely will be a Windows machine again.

Windows 7 used at work is running stable and smoothly, which has rebuild some confidence I lost and Apple is heading down a direction I don’t like or at least I get no warm feelings about.

 

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Life is too short…

Well another month, sorry, 2 months went by…..life is short for sure.

The speakers described below, well I moved in another direction (easier to build) but I’m slowly returning to the concept and design as shown in the posting below. I’m not in a hurry to finish the build, it should be a project I can spend time on, nothing to be done with within a 100 hours or so.

In the meantime…..I sold my camera…..yeah, you guessed it right… I got myself queued up for a Nikon D800….will I be taking better photographs? hell no! but it will sooth my mind  :-)   Anyway, this looks like a camera I’ll stick with for a longer time (sorry nikon), I can’t imagine any upgrade into teasing me to upgrade again. More frames/second? no, don’t need that. Even more megapixels? no, don’t need that. Clean ISO 25600? no, don’t need that.

The day before I sold my camera I took it out for a last farewell, well to be honest the daytrip was scheduled well ahead of any D800 announcement. One of the last few photographs:

Margraten, Febr 2012.

There was one little, but annoying, lens flare that I took care of in Photoshop (A 11×17″ print for you if you can tell were).

Played with LR4 Beta and even though it now has soft-proofing I’ll stick with Photoshop for now. Aside many other things, the Canon photoshop plugin for printing is just too nice to let go and I can’t care much for the LR stuff that comes after ‘develop’.

 

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Life goes on…

Here an update that was long due. As many of you know my dad passed away a few weeks ago. But as they say: life goes on. So I’m picking up life again were I left it.

Some time ago I noticed that my 20 year old ready-made speakers show audible signs of aging.  The units themselves look fine and it is probably something like capacitors in the x-over filter that have aged. The whole sound can be described as muffled in the mid-tones.

With the positive outcome of my first (but not yet 100% finished) DIY speaker project I started to think about replacing my main speakers with another pair of DIY speakers. The main goal is that they should sound at least as good as the old ones once did.

I’ve choosen to make it a 3-way system. Whishlist: fairly deep bass extension. Smaller than the speakers they replace, high quality drivers.

I’m not sure I met the size requirement :) . The f3 will be around 32 to 34Hz. By using SEAS Excel drivers I’ll have top notch drivers that should not fail with high distortion, compression etc etc.

The cabinet design follows the current trend of small baffles and deep cabinets. I’ve choosen for 1 10# woofer instead of multiple smaller one’s. The baffle needs to be relatively wide to accommodate the woofer. But with sloping side panels and facets I think I managed to keep the whole looks of the speaker as sleek as possible.

After creating above impression from the construction drawings I’ve changed one thing: the bass-reflex port has been moved off the baffle. It’s now located under the cabinet into the stand. It gives a more clean design.

With an internal height of almost 1mtr the first standing wave will occur round and about the 350hz. All other higher order/frequency standing waves do not influence the woofer as they are above the cut off frequency. But the 350hz is just on the edge of the planned x-over frequency. So I integrated a helmholtz resonator into the cabinet to dampen the expected standing wave.

 

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Alpe d’HuZes!!!

Jullie kennen de Alp d’HuZes actie vast en zeker!!

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September came and went away again…

Same as with August, too busy with all kind of things but little time for hobbies. Recently I’ve taken the speakers apart for new base coat and filling the last irregularities so that they get prepared for the decorative color coat.

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