It was intended to be a 2 way design, the 8" driver at the top, including wizzer cone, being assigned mid and hi’s ‘full range’ but I found it a little too rolled off in the Hi’s for my taste, so I added the tweeter mounted on an acrylic extension and increased the crossover and amplification for 3 way. The tweeters are mounted a little bit high.
I did manage to get them well away from the walls in my previous place, I didn’t find them particularly sensitive to placement, even shoving them up against the walls on each side. Where ever I put them they sounded very similar, if ever I had a pair of speakers that from an audio perspective ‘disappeared’ they were them. The sound seemed to come from nowhere in particular, all around, like an evenly distributed mono system might sound! Perhaps some might like that, I am just very used to my directional box speakers I guess.
I quite like the look of the big Jamo open baffle speakers in the image below, but they represent a lot of work and expense to replicate as a project. I also have no idea how they sound anyway.
Hello Roog. My brother runs a pair of LX 521.4s. In his listening room, about 13 x 16 feet, with the speakers about 3 feet from the front and side walls, the bass was solid down to 32 Hz when measured using test tones.
Oh yes I have read more or less all of linkwitz’s stuff, I like that having developed his amazing analogue filter he ultimately resorted to DSP and he was more than happy to use a multichannel AV amplifier to demo his designs.
I am not convinced that the LX is strictly an open baffle speaker, it doesn’t really have a baffle.
As for my set up, I was able to change more of less every parameter in each section of the crossover including time alignment between bass, mid and hi frequency drivers. I tried all manner of overall frequency response profiles during my trials. As I said in an earlier post it was quite possible to reproduce copious amounts of bass when fed with powerful test signals, it just didn’t sound bassy with a sensible crossover profile playing music.
If I remember correctly, he more or less accepted that a simple bass baffle was not effective and in his design, he resorted to a ‘H’ form and ‘sledge hammers’. The bass driver excursion required from his two large woofers is huge, certainly way more than most woofers suspension would deliver and especially not the efficient 15" drivers that I selected. Excellent though it may be, (I haven’t heard them), I don’t think that Linkwitz’s 3 way design is typical of any ‘open baffle’ speaker that I have seen.
