Re: tubular speakers

[quote author="buttachunk"]my next speaker project;

http://www.partsexpress.com/projectshowcase/tubular/index.html

...but with different components...[/quote]

I saw results of calculations of frequency curves for differrent forms of speaker boxes, such "tubular" box had one of the curviest curve, where ball type enclosures give the flatter response. I suppose, vertically aligned balls may be the way to go.

my balls are horizontally aligned and it works for me

Here's what I designed a few years back...



Merry Christmas, guys!

Martin

Wow, those look like real works of art. :thumb: Nice!

Butta:

Yeah, the Totally Tubular project caught my eye as well. I wonder just how good they sound...

JLM Audio ... the BAM1 proto-type




DIY from the above link

:green:

chicken and egg stuff
who did what first and it probably doesn't matter anyway
so many ideas have been out there for such a long time

what is a Bose Bass Cannon anyway ? ... :green:

About eighteen years ago, I saw some Bass tubes at a car stereo shop. They were winning the competitions with those speakers. A cardboard tube with a woofer at both ends, they may have had a port in the middle. The bigger the woofer, the longer the tube. Well, I cut up some two liter soda bottles, and put some jambox speakers in each end, adjusted the length to ear. The bass was increased, Devo never sounded so good, except live.

[quote author="buttachunk"][quote author="Wavebourn"]balls may be the way to go.[/quote]


but I don't have any balls.
[/quote]

Globe + epoxy + fiber glass fabric

However, it does not look like a fallic symbol, but sounds better.

Merry xmas! :grin:

[quote author="buttachunk"]my next speaker project;

http://www.partsexpress.com/projectshowcase/tubular/index.html

...but with different components...[/quote]

Probably looks better than it works. Seems like a Heimholz resonator with driver attached... Might make some interesting "one note bass" if tuned properly.

WRT round geometric shapes for speakers there was an early experimental Bose octet of a sphere using 22 drivers or something like that to approximate a spherical driver when mounted in a corner.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Corporation

Symmetry is probably not that useful in speaker cabinets.

JR

It looks very boyish, military-like...

"Stradivari built violins for looosers only, for real boys he built drums!" (C) :grin:

[quote author="JohnRoberts"]...

Symmetry is probably not that useful in speaker cabinets.

JR[/quote]

At an AES panel discussion in LA a few years back a man who used to work for Pierre Boulez at IRCAM (L'Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) talked about some speakers they developed. They were for placement among musicians on stage, as part of the new music's live-performance real-time processing and playback, interactive blah-blah and so forth. For examples: Boulez's Repons, or one I was really blown away by clarinetist Alain Damiens on, his Dialogue pour l'ombre double. Talk about leaping among registers without seemingly breaking a sweat---truly amazing.

Anyway, Boulez had complained bitterly about how standard box speakers didn't sound at all like instruments, at least when placed among the musicians. The new experimental speakers were dodecahedrons IIRC with drivers on all but one of the pentagonal faces (the bottom one, as they were on stands). This pleased lucky Pierre (certainly lucky for getting the French gov't to fund IRCAM!).


If symmetry isn't broken, don't fixe it?

Speakers are far from perfect and as such there needs to be great compromises made when designing and building.

A speaker pair made for stereo music re-production in the average living room is going to be very different to a speaker made to sound like a musician amongst a group of musicians.

Yet for a specific task like the re-production of electric guitar amongst a group of musicians could well be the original speaker and cabinet ... yes there is that word again. (sorry John C.) :wink:

BUT
to produce that clarinetist leaping among registers and convince the surrounding musicians that it is the real thing is quite difficult and perhaps impossible.

I want the kind of speaker that can make a non-musician sound like a musician amongst musicians. :grin:

[quote author="BYacey"]I want the kind of speaker that can make a non-musician sound like a musician amongst musicians. :grin:[/quote]

I thought that's wny wankers buy expensive tube guitar amps?

JR

non-musician sound like a musician amongst musicians

:grin:

[quote author="Kev"]BUT
to produce that clarinetist leaping among registers and convince the surrounding musicians that it is the real thing is quite difficult and perhaps impossible.[/quote]

Kev, if I hadn't heard it in performance (UCLA Pauley Pavilion, of all places; they also did Repons) I almost wouldn't have believed it. The guy is phenomenal.

It's been recorded too. I played it for my single-reeds teacher, the late Frank Chase, and he was similarly impressed. And Frank was not easily impressed. A difficult man to know, but a helluva teacher and before that, a player's player, an ultimate technician on tenor (Johnny Hodges referred to him simply as "God"). He wasn't a terribly spontaneous improviser, apparently; when you read old (1930's) jazz magazines, reporting on afterhours jam sessions, he is mentioned usually as "Frank Chase, saxophone virtuoso".

Now whether the musical content of the Boulez Dialogue justifies the level of difficulty is...errr...another matter :razz:

[quote author="JohnRoberts"][quote author="BYacey"]I want the kind of speaker that can make a non-musician sound like a musician amongst musicians. :grin:[/quote]

I thought that's wny wankers buy expensive tube guitar amps?

JR[/quote]

Hmmm... I have one unfinished. :grin:

[quote author="bcarso"]
Anyway, Boulez had complained bitterly about how standard box speakers didn't sound at all like instruments, at least when placed among the musicians. The new experimental speakers were dodecahedrons IIRC with drivers on all but one of the pentagonal faces (the bottom one, as they were on stands). This pleased lucky Pierre (certainly lucky for getting the French gov't to fund IRCAM!).
[/quote]

Something like this?
http://pcfarina.eng.unipr.it/Public/Papers/224-ASA2006.pdf
(look at page 5).

Uniform directivity speaker arrays ,like that one, are used for
"perfect excitation" room measurments (and all are one-of
custom made).

With some makeup that speaker would be perfect
lets-impress-the-guests tool for average audiophoolian home.

cheerz
ypow

[quote author="recnsci"]
Something like this?
http://pcfarina.eng.unipr.it/Public/Papers/224-ASA2006.pdf
(look at page 5).

Uniform directivity speaker arrays ,like that one, are used for
"perfect excitation" room measurments (and all are one-of
custom made).

With some makeup that speaker would be perfect
lets-impress-the-guests tool for average audiophoolian home.

cheerz
ypow[/quote]

Yep, that's the baby (or the same design anyway).

I wonder if this is the same Farina that gave the inspiration for Audio Precision's latest multichannel analyzer, which does an astonishing number of measurements in a few seconds of acquisition and processing. Most likely so I would guess.

[quote author="bcarso"]
Yep, that's the baby (or the same design anyway).
[/quote]

I've seen few on net and they all looked the same (maybe
with slight variation in dimensions). Bunch of full range
speakers on dodecahedron. All custom work.

[quote author="bcarso"]
I wonder if this is the same Farina that gave the inspiration for Audio Precision's latest multichannel analyzer, which does an astonishing number of measurements in a few seconds of acquisition and processing. Most likely so I would guess.[/quote]

Probably, Angelo is smart guy. AFAIK He first developed swept-sine
technique for IR measurment, and than showed how to directly calculate
Volterra kernel for nonlinear part of response. And, if Stephen Boyd
(here: http://www.stanford.edu/~boyd/research.html) is correct in
his assumption that almost all* electrical networks of importance are
fading memory and describable by Volterra series, than one swept-sine
measurment would give amplitude-phase response, spectrum of
each distortion component and any desired type of IMD performance

cheerz
ypow

*: this "almost all" covers weakly nonlinear systems. And put that if
in capital letters.

Yeah that is him for sure. It took Bruce Hofer at AP, another very smart guy btw, a while to realize the power of Farina's exponential sweep techniques, and then AP did a little implementation twist so they could patent aspects of their new instruments.

It would be interesting to see if a marriage with Bendat and others' (fairly) recent shift from emphasis on Volterra methods to direct and reverse MI/SO techniques would be helpful here as well (Bendat, Nonlinear Systems, Techniques and Applications, 1998 for examples). Probably someone's already doing this.

It's about time the fading memory got attention---I think there's a link here with the persistent perception of sonic differences among active devices, among other things.

And my own fading memory needs attention too...