Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

slowmotion wrote:

I'm not so critical as you to open baffles for midbass, tho, in fact I think they can be made to work quite well, if one doesn't have the room for midbasshorns.

You suggest that open baffles might be more successful in a small room. I would very much challenge this observation.  A time-aligned midbass horn can perform well in a room of a fraction of size that would be necessary for a midbass open baffle.

In order to make an open baffle do not short acoustically at midbass the size of the baffle should be quite considerable. Those large horizontal panels HUGELY screw up imaging of playback and destroy the quality of MF channels due to the curved-reflections (Courtesy to Klangfilm, Altec and few other). To deal with this problems the baffles should be in VERY large room and be heard form a VERY large distance. That creates a bunch of other problems and I therefore I consider the concept of large baffle as a dead-end approach.

Contrary to this a midbass horn is self-contained and the distance form that it could be listened varies only by the precision of time-alignment. If it perfectly time-coherent with the rest of the drivers then it might be used even from 8-9 feet of extreme nearfield. If some other integration techniques are employed  then it could be made work well even from 6-7 feet!!!  All of this perfectly allows a midbass horn to live in extremely small rooms; WAY SMALLER then would be necessary for baffles. 

Also do not forget that baffles decay in the room in the foolish-dipole manner, that makes very difficult to introduces any complimentary LF section. However, a midbass horn has no such a problem and it has very nice, LF-friendly and very civilized low knee slope…

The caT

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site