Some new design

[Sumanta]

Hello all,
Back to HFV after years. Well, I started my music listening related DIY with my first OB, then some TL and again another OB. They all got liked and taken away or rather given away for just the making price (or in exchange of 100s of LPs). The main goal was to make space to make next ones.

Post the first wave, some new designs were inside me, bubbling to come out. Because of Sine curves in career through Covid, like many other things, speaker design too was on hold.

Recently I could ultimately bring my designs on to paper and then in to their reality.

Sound is creation of AIR. Basic physics right?
If I jumble air flow, sound will be jumbled too.
My design basis is to have cabinets (or no cabinets at all) when I need free and natural like sound reproduction.
Open baffle lets air free to flow, follow Physics. Simple, is not it?
Here I am showing three of my designs.
One, the smallest in height (the heaviest one) is a transmission line design. The lean one is a mix of Open baffle and other design principles where basics still is the Free Air Baffle and the widest and tallest one is another Open baffle with Dipole design for the bass.
All of them have one two things in common, FAB and Co-centric mid/high reproducing drivers.

Enjoy their look.
Posting a few of their images.

 

[Kannan]

Wonderful time spent yesterday with @Sumanta Dada.
He is a very affable person, down to earth and it was easy going from the word go.
The Open baffle speakers pictured above is in the hall of his house.

It is quasi active with a simple passive crossover between the mids and the highs, which by the way is a 12-inch coaxial driver.
They have been built with utmost care and shows the great love and passion @Sumanta has towards this hobby.
He said that in his journey, he has listened to a number of amplified and unamplified concerts to help him fathom the tonality, timbre and naturalness that he says he has fully utilized in building these speakers to recreate what he heard live.

Though many of us go on a journey of changing various components like DACs, amps etc, the most critical of the lot are the speakers, and Sumantha has righty started from that.

The setup is active between the coaxial drivers and the two 15-inch woofers that are connected in series.
The woofers and the coax drivers are powered by separate amplifiers.
The active crossover box is in the analogue domain with individual High Pass and Low Pass settings and fixed 24db slopes. As the crossovers are continuously variable, they can be changed in real time, meaning one can vary that while a track is playing.
The speakers are rated at 97db spl and the amps are simple low profile Class D variants.

The vocals are breathtaking, especially the Bismillah track was played back with great intensity. The instruments present a greet feel with a nice tone and timbre. However, having almost lived the last 2 decades with bookshelves and in smaller listening spaces, my ears have come to like the bass from sealed enclosures, a more focused center image and a wider stage.

With larger drivers playing out in our smaller listening spaces like above (especially to the sides and the rear), we get a bigger center image and a little shallower stage. Though open baffles are more forgiving to acoustics, they still need lots of space on the sides and rear to fully bring out the magic, in my experience.
Since Dada prefers the bass transparency from open baffle woofers, and since he used two of them, possibly, he can try one of them in ported/sealed and the other as open baffle, will need an additional crossover and an amp to achieve that.

His chain other than the speakers may seem underwhelming, but they do a fantastic job. Will upgrades there improve fidelity (well…..)

The DSP technology has advanced very much and now offers numerous tools, even for someone like Dada and me who go tuning about with ears only. Hope to spare sometime with Dada to try introducing a digital crossover in his setup, as I have one in hand.

Guys in Chennai can coordinate with @Sumanta to listen to his uniquely made speakers.

Thanks again to @Sumanta for being a great host, for the two refreshing cups of black coffee and most importantly rekindling the DIY bug in me. Special thanks to my dear friends Ragu @liverpool_for_life , Sivakumar and Murlidhar for sparing time to come over for a listen.

 

[Sumanta]

@Kannan - I thoroughly enjoyed our meet with you and other friends.

Let's meet more often while we do tweaks, learn new things and tricks and Whys.

Let's enjoy music together. Because of you all, I could enjoy so many good songs (including Theeruda Theeruda again after a long time).