Tools for building better speakers

[illusonic]

I don't know why this point keeps getting made. Of course NFS, or anechoic chamber don't design speakers by themselves. And having one as tools, doesn't assure a good design.

I as a reviewer could have done my job without these as well. But with massive amount of work and possibility of inaccuracy. Heck, I even considered building a $100K anechoic chamber! But decided to get the NFS. Using it sharply increased my knowledge level and ability to analyze performance of speakers. And create a highly defensible objective barrier to people dismissing my work. There is no reason to argue about this and say that I could have been doing reviews without one.

Sometimes comments about NFS seem overly optimistic regarding effects on product development and NFS seems almost a requirement for development of SOTA speakers. NFS is absolutely perfect for speaker evaluation. For development, measurements often focus a limited frequency range and can in many cases be obtained much quicker with gating or nearfield measurements. Less time to obtain measurements is why an anechoic chamber seems the better option for development work compared to NFS if one can choose. Low-frequency limit of anechoic chambers can be a drawback.

None of the products I have reviewed from them are from that era. In every case, I am given anechoic measurements which I have replicated very closely with Klippel NFS. What the company did back then is neither here, nor there. Unless you can show no progress in using an anechoic chamber.

The O500 was at least on par with KH420. It's the only speaker I know with the ATC midrange in a proper dual waveguide with the tweeter. It sounded phantastic. There were already 80/120/300 series speakers that were very close to current products. Most of the acoustic work was done back in that time. It may be that they used an external chamber for final measurements.

 

[john61ct]

I want to design LF bandpass enclosures using a PR rather than ported,

1cuft to 1.5cu ft max form factor, forward facing only

based off @Wolfs' "Overdrive 10" project, aka Kilauea

He used Unibox to model in separate segments.

Which more recently updated tools would y'all recommend for that type of project? How about VituixCAD?

 

[Azrael]

If I understand correctly, the Enclosure Tool in VituixCAD can simulate 4th order bandpass enclosures that use a passive radiator instead of a reflex port. That would be the "Band pass type 1P" preset.