In Reply to: Ideal Parameters for OB Woofer posted by Joseph Cohen on February 3, 2007 at 12:28:05:
Open baffle means a 6dB/octave bass roll-off which is another way of saying low efficiency.Because of the front/back cancellations dipoles need a lot of displacement for deep bass output, so high XMAX drivers, which are rarely efficient, are the obvious design choice.
Some dipole builders may want drivers with a Qts of 0.70 (rare) which can be equalized passively with a single coil ... but you could use a lower Qts driver, such as the Sigfried Linkwitz designs using low Qts drivers + electronic circuits available at his website.
Using the words "efficient and speaker" in the same sentence could be thought of as an oxymoron, although "high efficiency open baffle" is the ultimate audio oxymoron.
All bass speakers are inefficient tools creating far more heat energy than sound energy!
With an open baffle bass drivers are ultra-low efficiency!
Because of the open baffle, low noise driver motors are mandatory.Anyone can use four large diameter low-XMAX high efficiency drivers to build a dipole subwoofer ... but two high-XMAX drivers will be roughly half the cost of four drivers, and require half the baffle surface area.
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Richard BassNut Greene
Subjective Audiophile 2007
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Follow Ups
- "High efficiency open baffle" is an oxymoron - Richard BassNut Greene 12:50:46 02/03/07 (5)
- I have an open Baffle bass system that is 106db/w/m at 40 cycles - MyOhMy 15:46:49 02/03/07 (2)
- I don't believe you - Richard BassNut Greene 09:42:24 02/06/07 (1)
- FWIW I do... - The Easter Bunny 12:16:39 02/06/07 (0)
- Re: "High efficiency open baffle" is an oxymoron- here's a 21" on 2'x4' baffle - freddyi 14:28:08 02/03/07 (0)
- Re: "High efficiency open baffle" is an oxymoron - Tom Brennan 13:01:12 02/03/07 (0)