How to make a good three way loudspeaker - which bargain drive units ?

[Kwesi]

Well, my answer to that question was this:

The "Scandinavian Connection":

Seas 27TAC/GB
SB Acoustics SB15NBAC30-4
2x Scan Speak 26W/8534G00 in ~60l CB
Hypex Fusion FA123

The midrange and woofer have additional magnets glued on which increase BL by measured ~5% (mid) and ~9% (woofer, resulting Qb in 60l is around ~0,7 then).
Midrange and tweeter each have a LC notch in series which blocks the current distortion harmonics at the membrane breakup frequency at ~10kHz (mid) and 27kHz (tweeter).

Project started 2015 with same enclosure - but with only one woofer in vented tuning, another tweeter and midrange driver and a passive crossover. Contiuous learning and development lead to the configuration today (8th revision till now). It has become my personal reference also to voice other speakers against and it sounds terrific to me.

Best regards
Peter

 

[Wolf]

Love those tweeters, used them twice now...

 

[Wolf]

June Sale 25% off components

Meniscus Audio is coming soon

We are doing some work on our site. Please come back later. We'll be up and running in no time.

meniscusaudio.com

Not just that, clearance and closing up shop. Mark is retiring, so as it disappears, no more will be.

 

[Tangband]

Well, my answer to that question was this:

View attachment 293026

The "Scandinavian Connection":

Seas 27TAC/GB
SB Acoustics SB15NBAC30-4
2x Scan Speak 26W/8534G00 in ~60l CB
Hypex Fusion FA123

The midrange and woofer have additional magnets glued on which increase BL by measured ~5% (mid) and ~9% (woofer, resulting Qb in 60l is around ~0,7 then).
Midrange and tweeter each have a LC notch in series which blocks the current distortion harmonics at the membrane breakup frequency at ~10kHz (mid) and 27kHz (tweeter).

Project started 2015 with same enclosure - but with only one woofer in vented tuning, another tweeter and midrange driver and a passive crossover. Contiuous learning and development lead to the configuration today (8th revision till now). It has become my personal reference also to voice other speakers against and it sounds terrific to me.

Best regards
Peter

Nice building.
What crossover frequencies are you using ?
Are there any softwarebugs in the dsp Hypex plateamp ? This looks really interesting.

 

[JRS]

Not just that, clearance and closing up shop. Mark is retiring, so as it disappears, no more will be.

Yea I was seriously bummed to get the ennouncement. He has a great selection of kits--two I built for my daughters and one for my smaller system--also a Carmody design IIRC.

 

[notsodeadlizard]

Goals = 100 dB at listening position with low distortion 30 -20000 Hz inroom, with two loudspeakers. The construction should be a dsp active loudspeaker with 3 power amplifiers and active crossovers.

My suggestion for each loudspeaker :

Tweeter : SB acoustics adc 26 ( crossover at 2.2 kHz 24 /dB linkwitz riley )

Midbass : SB acoustics nbac 15 ( crossover at 220 Hz 18 dB/oct and 2.2 kHz 24/dB Linkwitz riley )

Bass : two paralleled 10 inch 8 Ohm woofers from Daytons reference series , closed box with Linkwitz transformer. ( crossover at 220 Hz 18 dB/oct )

Cabinet : 110 cm high, 40 cm deep and 30 cm wide.

This is my driver suggestion of a DIY threeway loudspeaker , with good, but not very expensive drivers.

Whats yours ?

Have you already made such a loudspeaker or is it just reasoning on the topic "it would be nice to do this"?
100 dB? 30 Hz?
Well, well.
One of the best multi-way design, Thor, is based on really good not bargain drives, uses very smart acoustics design and still is far away from 100 dB:

http://www.seas.no/images/stories/diykits/thor/audioXpress_Thor_Review.pdf

The issue of activity/passivity of such a speaker is generally not relevant to acoustics at the main stages of design, just like DSP. You can always add this later.

 

[JRS]

Doesn't it get expensive once you add 3 power amps + DSP though?

Not necessarily. My amps were sourced through Ebay back in the day when deals were plentiful--but a nice 5x180 Marantz cost me 550 and a nice Retel 2x200 for a few hundred. DSP can be virtually free, but you also need a multichannel D/A convertor. Topping has an 8 channel now thats not hideously expensive.

Particularly with 3 way speakers, active is the way to go. It's not that 2 ways don't benefit as well, but it's infinitely easier to get one XO done well than two. Active also doesn't require goody bags of capacitors and inductors, the latter can be quite expensive, as can caps but those are fancy upgrades, not simply meeting spec, and I find the differences to be subtle at best. Another reason to go active--you don't need to worry whether those Uber expensive wonder caps would have made it better?

One of these days mini-DSP will have exhausted the seemingly endless almost perfect devices and make one with all the I's/O's and taps one can ever need. Oh with free Dirac of course.

 

[Plcamp]

I remember being impressed with the Klippel results on 5” and 6” sb ceramic drivers, which I think are very similar. As I recall, distortion was very low from 300 hz up, but usable displacement to maintain low distortion was somewhat limited.

At the time I thought I might need two of them (in mtm config) to achieve high spl?

 

[JRS]

100 dB? Seems like 3 approaches will get you there. The highs are not hard, many ribbons and AMT drivers get close or better. And of course there are horns.
Mids--not so easy. But a couple of pro drivers in parallel such as the very high fidelty Fatail's can get within spitting distance, and there are many more choices with DSP.
Woofers--again going PRO is the way to do it, unless one is plagued by the belief that home drivers are invariably better. Again with DSP, texploihis isn't close to being true. Granted

But in the end I wonder why 100dB is even a design goal?

Getting in the mid nineties would stomp just about every non-horn home hi-fi speaker on the planet. Granted there are choices like a 10 watt SETI amp might not be able to fully exploit, but that's another camp difference that most of us here would find implausible and misguided.

96 + 200 watts is 119dB at a meter which only a handful of home SOTA speakers can achieve. If one is tri-amping, it would be difficult without resorting to tubes to even find 3 amps that don't total 200 watts.

Anyhow no attack--just wondering about that particular criterion.

 

[Kwesi]

Love those tweeters, used them twice now...

We had this already on diyaudio.com.
The tweeter is fantastic - it is transparent to the absolute details without any kind of harshness, can go loud and dynamic and sounds very "real" and neutral whatever is played. The DXT I used before was also nice but with the TAC/GB I was able to voice the speakers to another level.

Nice building.
What crossover frequencies are you using ?
Are there any softwarebugs in the dsp Hypex plateamp ? This looks really interesting.

Thanks, it is crossed at 250 Hz and 2,15kHz:

What bugs do you mean? It works fine, a bid fiddly/laggy when you want to switch between the inputs via remote, but the usability and sound quality is very high in general.
Screw a Wiim Mini or Pro to the back of the master speaker and you have a complete DIY active streaming system.

100 dB? 30 Hz?
Well, well.

You won't get 100dB@30Hz at ~3-4m distance from 4(!) 10" woofers, but if you hear Rock or Electronic Music where the bass hits at 70-80Hz, such levels are reproducable within the xlim.

I remember being impressed with the Klippel results on 5” and 6” sb ceramic drivers, which I think are very similar. As I recall, distortion was very low from 300 hz up, but usable displacement to maintain low distortion was somewhat limited.
i
At the time I thought I might need two of them (in mtm config) to achieve high spl?

The 15NBAC/CAC is adequate sized for 2x 10" in CB each side. Had only one of the 26W in the same enclosure in vented tunig before, and the clearly the woofer was the limit. Now with 2x10" it is balanced.

The 17NBAC has the same quality with some larger headroom due to more SD, a littel more stroke and higher power capability due to larger voicecoil. Drawback is that you have to cross to the tweeter a bit lower and/or get a bit narrower dispersion.

 

[moonlight rainbow dream]

Doesn't it get expensive once you add 3 power amps + DSP though?

Very affordable solution:

Dayton DSP-408 (even cheaper solution would be to scavenge an old motherboard with analog 7.1 outputs and do everything via windows+EqualizerAPO)
Old AVR with 7.1 multichannel inputs from Craigslist

 

[badspeakerdesigner]

Very affordable solution:

Dayton DSP-408 (even cheaper solution would be to scavenge an old motherboard with analog 7.1 outputs and do everything via windows+EqualizerAPO)
Old AVR with 7.1 multichannel inputs from Craigslist

I'm using the 5.1 onboard card for mine along with eq apo. Works great, not a fan of the 3.5mm plugs though, they don't really grab and I'm always worried about one popping out and blowing a tweeter.

The dayton dsp is interesting but I question it's transparency when placed in a system. I may try it one day, I live near PE. I had bad luck with the minidsp non-hd, it degraded the quality of the signal in some manner that I wasn't really able to deduce but this was long ago. Live sound part of me is leaning towards a used driverack pa2, not much more than a minidsp hd.

 

[DanielT]

Samuel has built three-way speakers in line with what you are thinking.

Drivers:

SB SB26ADC-C000-4
SB SB15NBAC30-8
Satori WO24P-4

Waveguide in Samule's three-way speakers from :

Waveguides | somasonus

www.somasonus.net

I think he chose 5" waveguide.

Samuel Powers Bass Drivers Satori WO24P-4 with this:

Behringer A800 Stereo Amplifier Review

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Behringer A800 Class D Stereo Amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member. The A800 costs US $299 including free shipping from multiple sites. The member who loaned it me has done a youtube video of it which you can see by clicking on this...

audiosciencereview.com

For the mids and tweeters, I don't remember what he used for amplifiers. Crossover with DSP plus that he fiddles with measuring FR and fixing it so it fits his listening room.

I've heard Samuel's speakers at a Vintage DIY fair and I have to say I thought they sounded really good.

Samuel thought a lot about the C-C distance and ended up going with Kimmo's line:
(or inspired by that principle)

"Minimum c-c is 1.0 x wave length and maximum about 1.4 x wave length at XO frequency assuming that design is conventional uni-directional box (not open baffle) with phase matching (acoustical 4th order) slopes. Good and quite flexible initial/design value for c-c is 1.2 x wave length at XO, giving smooth combination of power and early reflections i.e. balanced sound without significant power dip at XO due to bump in DI and dip in vertical early reflections. In other words, this concept aims lobe nulls to directions which are the least significant for power response and vertical early reflections - and listener sitting in sweet spot of course."

#2 in the thread:

Some help with lobing

I think I understand the concept but can't figure out the solution. "Lobing occurs with any two drivers producing the same frequency range in parallel (identical signal) where the distance between the drivers is greater than 1/4 wavelength of any frequency they are reproducing." So if I am...

audiosciencereview.com

Maarten had a similar approach regarding C-C when he built a two-way speaker with SB acoustics adc 26 tweeter and SB Acoustics SB17CAC35-4.

SB Acoustics SB17CAC35-4 6 Inch Ceramic Midwoofer Review

SB Acoustics SB17CAC35-4 6 Inch Ceramic Midwoofer Review

www.erinsaudiocorner.com

https://user.faktiskt.io/Maarten/Diverse_m%e4tningar/R%e4v-L/Byggbeskrivning_R%e4v-L.pdf

 

[DanielT]

Aha, Tangband you said:"Goals = 100 dB at listening position with low distortion..."

If you are looking for drivers that you can play really loud while maintaining good sound without annoying distortion, then maybe one of these will suit:

Speaker B&C Speakers 10NW76, 8 ohm, 10 inch

800 W continuous program power capacity 76 mm (3 in) copper clad aluminum wire voice coil 65 - 3500 Hz response 96.3 dB sensitivity Neodymium magnet allows a very light yet powerful motor assembly Aluminium demodulating ring for very low distortion Ventilated voice coil gap for reduced power

en.toutlehautparleur.com

Test Bench: The 10NW76 Pro Sound High SPL 10” Driver from B&C Speakers

The driver on this Test Bench is from B&C Speakers and clearly designed for professional audio. The 10NW76 was designed for uses in line arrays, small two-way monitors, and as a subwoofer, or as a midbass driver in multiway systems. It uses a proprietary 12-spoke (six double spokes)...

audioxpress.com

"B&C Speakers’ highest power handling 10”, the 10NW76 woofer."
"Given the data collected, and the consistently good performance exhibited by B&C Speakers’ woofers, the 10NW76 looks like an excellent to addition the company’s 10” woofer category. "
For the lowest frequencies, that driver should be supplemented with a subwoofer.

Another proposal. Considering the x-max and 12 inch size, with this you get good SPL and don't need a subwoofer if you build with a big enough box, not as small as 50L as BMS simulated in. A popular driver:

Speaker BMS 12S305, 8 ohm, 12 inch

Recommended reflex enclosure: - 30 L / 50 Hz, BRD = 100 mm / 226 mm long - 40 L / 45 Hz, BRD = 100 mm / 204 mm long

en.toutlehautparleur.com

But if you live in an apartment with noise-sensitive neighbors, it might not be the most optimal thing to do. Definitely not four BMS anyway like here Rigi's solution:

4 pcs BMS 12" together with SB17NBAC o SB26ADC:

faktiskt.io • Logga in

 

[Severian]

I'm using the 5.1 onboard card for mine along with eq apo. Works great, not a fan of the 3.5mm plugs though, they don't really grab and I'm always worried about one popping out and blowing a tweeter.

The dayton dsp is interesting but I question it's transparency when placed in a system. I may try it one day, I live near PE. I had bad luck with the minidsp non-hd, it degraded the quality of the signal in some manner that I wasn't really able to deduce but this was long ago. Live sound part of me is leaning towards a used driverack pa2, not much more than a minidsp hd.

I've been using a Dayton DSP-408 more or less since it was released and I find it to be audibly transparent. It's a great bargain. My only complaint is that the USB connection for programming it is extremely spotty.

I spent all day yesterday using one to make an active crossover for the SEAS DXT tweeter, ER18RNX woofer, and a Presonus Tremblor T10 sub I had sitting around. I used a Sabaj A20d and two ICEPower 125ASX amps. It sounds phenomenal.

 

[badspeakerdesigner]

I've been using a Dayton DSP-408 more or less since it was released and I find it to be audibly transparent. It's a great bargain. My only complaint is that the USB connection for programming it is extremely spotty.

I spent all day yesterday using one to make an active crossover for the SEAS DXT tweeter, ER18RNX woofer, and a Presnus Tremblor T10 sub I had sitting around. I used a Sabaj A20d and two ICEPower 125ASX amps. It sounds phenomenal.

Sounds like it would be a cost effective and good solution for me. If only all my amps had stepped volumes pots, my cats like and myself have knocked the amp knobs a few times and thrown everything out of whack.

Do you have any passive components on the tweeter? I've heard it's smart to toss on at least cap.

 

[Severian]

Sounds like it would be a cost effective and good solution for me. If only all my amps had stepped volumes pots, my cats like and myself have knocked the amp knobs a few times and thrown everything out of whack.

Do you have any passive components on the tweeter? I've heard it's smart to toss on at least cap.

I don't, but I should. When building the ICEPower amps, I reversed L/R on one of them and definitely hit the tweeter with the woofer's signal when I was getting started, and even cranked up the volume a bit. However I don't think it did any damage.

The DSP-408 really is incredibly cost-effective for number of channels it gives you. I can't imagine being satisfied putting in all of the effort to build a fully DIY system only to be limited to two-way if relying on the entry-level miniDSP products. Like the speakers I just built may be two-way, but for me to be happy with the system as a whole it needed the addition of a subwoofer to make it three-way. To do that with the basic miniDSP units, you need to use the crossover built into an active sub and give up DSP.

This particular project was more of a proof of concept and learning experience for me to dial in my own active crossover. Eventually I'll be building Mark K's ER18DXT passive circuit for these and passing them on to a new home and repurposing the DSP for a full-range three-way floorstanding speaker.

 

[badspeakerdesigner]

I don't, but I should. When building the ICEPower amps, I reversed L/R on one of them and definitely hit the tweeter with the woofer's signal when I was getting started, and even cranked up the volume a bit. However I don't think it did any damage.

The DSP-408 really is incredibly cost-effective for number of channels it gives you. I can't imagine being satisfied putting in all of the effort to build a fully DIY system only to be limited to two-way if relying on the entry-level miniDSP products. Like the speakers I just built may be two-way, but for me to be happy with the system as a whole it needed the addition of a subwoofer to make it three-way. To do that with the basic miniDSP units, you need to use the crossover built into an active sub and give up DSP.

This particular project was more of a proof of concept and learning experience for me to dial in my own active crossover. Eventually I'll be building Mark K's ER18DXT passive circuit for these and passing them on to a new home and repurposing the DSP for a full-range three-way floorstanding speaker.

I appreciate the info.

I too would like to pursue a passive network. I built a pre-designed speaker, but made some changes that were enough to throw everything off, and also changed the tweeter so now I've got these nice xover pcb's and components that are a paper weight. Luckily I think I can actually do much better than the original xover. Just have to borrow my friends DATS.

 

[Severian]

I appreciate the info.

I too would like to pursue a passive network. I built a pre-designed speaker, but made some changes that were enough to throw everything off, and also changed the tweeter so now I've got these nice xover pcb's and components that are a paper weight. Luckily I think I can actually do much better than the original xover. Just have to borrow my friends DATS.

For me, the big hurdle to trying my own passive network design is that I don't have a good setup for taking quasi-anechoic measurements. I don't have a garage or other large workshop, so I have to painstakingly haul a large amount of gear out to my deck which requires a lot of time and a good weather window.

I actually attempted it for the first time for this project. My intent was to take quasi-anechoic measurements of the individual drivers to bank for later work in VituixCAD to make passive network, but I quickly realized I was pressed for time after all of the setup and mostly limited my work to roughing in an active crossover using gated on-axis farfield measurements at 1m (I was working with finished 20L enclosures tuned to 38Hz that I already had from an old project, and planned on a sub, so the low-end response wasn't terribly important). Then I set up the system and fine-tuned everything with in-room measurements and listening.

Would it have been nice to do the final crossover tuning based on quasi-anechoic measurements? Sure. But I think I still ended up with something that sounds excellent. I would never try to force an active setup on someone who wanted me to make them a set of speakers, but for my own use I don't know why I'd ever bother with passive at this point.

 

[badspeakerdesigner]

For me, the big hurdle to trying my own passive network design is that I don't have a good setup for taking quasi-anechoic measurements. I don't have a garage or other large workshop, so I have to painstakingly haul a large amount of gear out to my deck which requires a lot of time and a good weather window.

You have described me to a T there lol. Toss in the fact that I live next to a highway and things get tricky.