Dayton Audio OPAL1 speaker launches

[a4eaudio]

Bumping an old thread. The white Opal One is now selling for $399/pair. At this price, it is very tempting to buy and experiment with modifying. ...

This sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Before PE was bought out, you could count on a 12-15% sale around Easter, so you could wait and save another $40+. But since the buyout, sales have been minimal.

 

[Arindal]

My thinking right now is to buy a pair and experiment with making them an active 2-way or 3-way

Don´t quite see the point in active 2-way with these drivers. The woofer is offering surprisingly high linear excursion capabilities and nice lower cutoff freq with passive radiators, but that comes at the price of higher THD and some weird breakup behavior. Both leads to a gut feeling that best midrange might not be thing to expect from that one. I see this thing rather as a subwoofer, driven by 2 separate power amps per driver, or a very strong 2-ohm stable unit. If you happen to have a 4-channel active DSP amp, the might make a good 3-way concept.

 

[CJPopovich]

The 399 price made them interesting to me just to play with. I used coupon code MARCARTC26 for an extra 12% off. ~$352 before taxes and with free shipping was a solid reason to try 'em out.

 

[Ktacos]

Swap the tweeter with an ND25FW/DXT/SB26WG and give it some new filtering and you've got a decent speaker. The sensitivity is crazy low, I have a speaker I was working on that was around 80db/1w and man I felt I had to crank my amplifiers to get anything out of them, can't imagine how hard the he150 is to drive to a good level.

 

[a4eaudio]

The 399 price made them interesting to me just to play with. I used coupon code MARCARTC26 for an extra 12% off. ~$352 before taxes and with free shipping was a solid reason to try 'em out.

1) That is pretty crazy! I had to check just to make sure, but the price of the drivers and passive radiators alone are $504!!

... I used coupon code MARCARTC26 for an extra 12% off. ...

2) Thanks for posting this, I just used it for an order that I forgot to submit last week.

 

[Mark185]

Don´t quite see the point in active 2-way with these drivers. The woofer is offering surprisingly high linear excursion capabilities and nice lower cutoff freq with passive radiators, but that comes at the price of higher THD and some weird breakup behavior. Both leads to a gut feeling that best midrange might not be thing to expect from that one. I see this thing rather as a subwoofer, driven by 2 separate power amps per driver, or a very strong 2-ohm stable unit. If you happen to have a 4-channel active DSP amp, the might make a good 3-way concept.

I am leaning towards a 3-way concept. I have too many TPA3255 amplifier boards laying around to not try this. I also picked up a pair of Fosi V3 Mono amps before Christmas on sale at $75 each. I am thinking the V3 Monoblocks could drive the Opal Ones with internal crossover bypassed and a midrange + tweeter mounted in separate compact enclosure powered by a pair of TPA3255 SAMP 200 boards. If the Fosi amps are not getting it done, there is always my Adcom heavy monster. I will have to see if the Adcom can drive a 2 ohm load. Memory tells me it can but I will have to verify. I will do active crossovers. I have a couple of cheap ADAU1452 DSP boards. Just need to figure out the DAC solution for 6 channels.

The other thing that convinced me to pull the trigger is potential use as compact car subwoofers. $399 does not buy much in the mobile audio world and one of these may be an excellent candidate for a front mounted subwoofer and save me the trouble of making a custom enclosure.

 

[livinon2wheels]

Bumping an old thread. The white Opal One is now selling for $399/pair. At this price, it is very tempting to buy and experiment with modifying. Worst case, I can put them in my truck as dual subwoofers under the back seat My thinking right now is to buy a pair and experiment with making them an active 2-way or 3-way using Analog Devices ADAU 1452 DSP boards that are commonly available on Aliexpress. I have an Adcom GFA5500 amp that should be more than good enough to driver these speakers in the home. Big power Class D subwoofer amps are cheap in the car audio world.

Hi Mark, in a noisy environment like a car where its easy to have 80-90 db background noise, these speakers wouldnt likely be a good bet. They are rated for 200 watts and at that drive level put out 102 db ( their maximum output within cone linearity ) So this would not give you much headroom to overcome the background noise level. In a quiet room they work much better and well below their linear excursion limit.

 

[LSPhil]

Hi Mark, in a noisy environment like a car where its easy to have 80-90 db background noise, these speakers wouldnt likely be a good bet. They are rated for 200 watts and at that drive level put out 102 db ( their maximum output within cone linearity ) So this would not give you much headroom to overcome the background noise level. In a quiet room they work much better and well below their linear excursion limit.

Loudness and bass are two completely different things.
A speaker can sound loud without moving much air, but real b

ass only comes from air displacement. Loudness alone tells you nothing about how much air the driver is actually pushing.

To reproduce low frequencies, a driver needs either a large cone area or very long excursion. If the size is limited (5–6 inches), the only way to get meaningful bass is high excursion, because that’s what creates the physical air movement we perceive as deep bass.

I actually own these speakers, measured them, and listened to them extensively. One thing stands out: as you turn them up, they simply get louder without sounding strained. They don’t give that “painful” or stressed impression that many small drivers do when pushed. They stay clean, controlled, and confident even at higher levels.

For their size, this is genuinely impressive engineering, I haven’t heard many small drivers perform this well.

 

[Penelinfi]

Opal : $352 US
Shipping : $700+ US

I think I'd have better luck buying drivers and a pre-made cabinet

 

[Mark185]

@LSPhil thank you for that information. What that leads me to believe is, if I want to try Opal One as a car subwoofer, it really only makes sense as a front mounted one to augment a larger sub mounted in the rear of the vehicle. They are compact enough that underseat mounting under passenger seat in my Tundra is a possiblity. I know how to make a custom enclosure with fiberglass and wood to put in the footwell but at my age, I prefer not to work with fiberglass and the small size of the Opal One cabinet has me thinking about car use. I will thoroughly check them out in my home environment first. I have a Wiim Ultra in my living room setup and the built in DSP EQ may be all I need to tame the midrange response issues that have been reported. Failing that, I have a MiniDSP C 8 x 12 processor and a low noise linear 12 V power supply that make is useable in the home.

They are short term solutions. I also have several Analog Devices DSP boards but building a useful device with them will take me a good long while longer. FWIW, I purchased these ADAU 1452 boards because I really did not like the results I got with the Sure Electronics DSP boards sold by Parts Express. They were good to start learning on but very limited in capability and sound quality. The Aliexpress 1452 boards are much harder to work with because tech support and documentation is not very good but are capable of much better results after figuring out how to use them.

If anyone reading this is interested in building their own DSP to use with Opal One or any other speaker design, there is another very affordable option to look into. On DIYAudio forum, there is a fellow named UriChy selling his own custom designed DSP boards with on board Texas Instruments amplifier chips and ability to link to an external DAC and bypass one or more amplifier chips if desired. Using an external DAC and high power amplifier will be necessary to drive the Opal One woofer. He sells them with a software load for a 3-way active speaker and he also has a thread on that forum with extensive documentation for his boards. In addition, he monitors the thread and responds to questions usually within 24 hours. The board is called the PDAC-100D and he sells them on Ebay. A stereo pair is approx. $230 delivered to the US. I bought a stereo pair and I am very impressed with the design and his support.

My problem is I have way, way too many pieces to play with on my test bench and not nearly enough time to put them in finished products to listen to. . I need to retire so I can finish some of these projects.

 

[Mark185]

I received my Opal 1 speakers two days ago and have been listening to them in my small TV room. It is ~ 20 x 20 feet with one side open into my dining room. They work very well in that small space. Autotuning the freq response with my Wiim Ultra made a noticeable improvement but I am sure I can do better with REW and spending more time on EQ. @LSPhil I totally agree with you on how they respond at elevated sound levels and I am very impressed. I think these were a steal at $399. That doesn't mean I won't experiment with some DIY work. Right now, I am thinking an interesting concept is to make a small enclosure to put next to them with BG Neo 8 and Neo 3 PDR drivers I have in storage. I can move the crossover frequency down to ~500 Hz to the Neo 8 PDR. I will do this with an active crossover. I have an old Marchand Electronics analog xover and I have several DSP options.

Something interesting I think I am hearing. I tried driving these with a 3E Audio A7 amp and an Apt Holman One amplifier. I think the 3e is rated around 85 watts into 8 ohms and the Apt One is rated at 100 watts into 8 ohms. The difference is the Apt has a dynamic power rating that is at least 150 watts per channel. At high SPL two amps sound very similar and I am not sure I could tell the difference in a double blind test. At moderate listening levels, it seems to me that the Apt sounds much better and has more control between low and high SPL whereas with the TPA3255 chip amp, it seems that the delta between low and high SPL is compressed if that makes sense. My opinion so far is the a Class A/B amp with dynamic headroom due to its power supply design is going to drive the Opal 1's better. I suspect a higher end Class D amp would sound at least as good as the Apt and probably better if it is rated at 250 watts per channel or higher. The 3E Audio A7 is still a great little chip amp but not the best match with the Opal 1.

 

[Mark185]

Opal : $352 US
Shipping : $700+ US

I think I'd have better luck buying drivers and a pre-made cabinet

That is unfortunate because these really are a good value at $352. Sorry that shipping is so much. Usually that is the problem we face in the US because shipping plus tariffs can more than double the price.