Oddball Speaker Find and speaker building questions.

rallyshark

I was up way to late last night and goofing around at PE's site and found these weird little speakers and before I could stop myself, I ordered 10 of them:o
http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?Partnumber=269-484
They just looked like they would be fun to play with, and since they are so cheap, I figured it couldn't hurt. Now I just have to figure out what I want to do with 'em.
On a side note, I have some questions about speaker "projects". I know when you build a line array the sound will be very narrowed without some sort of xover. My question is how does that work? I think that the speakers basically cancels each other out and that's what eliminates off axis sound. I know that can be changed with a xover that keeps all the speakers from playing the same frequency. I'm just curious I guess. Could someone enlighten me please:D

I'm well aware that most "projects", especially mine, are going to end up sounding like crap and probably never used for anything. I guess I just think it's fun, and I learn a lot more when I build things myself, and I never make the same mistake twice:D Anyone else have a bad habit of wasting money on hair brained schemes and ideas when it comes to speakers? I await your wisdom and smart **** comments as well.:D

danz1906

Thats a great price.

CoolJazz

You should start by reading Jim Griffin's Line array paper....

http://www.audioroundtable.com/misc/nflawp.pdf

If you run them as an array, then you can use a lower crossover point than you would otherwise. Based on the posted values, it sounds like response on those would get ragged as it gets too much lower than that 2K. An array won't change that I don't think.

You may want to consider getting an array of some other cone driver to cover midrange. Some kind of reasonable priced 3" or 4" driver. You might be building it in this way as two lines, the HF with those JVC's and then the second line as the mid's getting down low enough (75-125hz?) to crossover to woofers for LF. If you follow the advice given in Griffin's paper about keeping them close together, an array works very well. I've heard one of his builds and it was pretty good!

Using multiple crossovers up in HF won't get you anything that I can think of other than lots of issues and expense. Won't really help any sonic properties I don't think either. Think of it as either a 3-way with two line array's, or as a two-way LA with LF augementation by seperate woofers...maybe with an adjustable freq. crossover plate amps.

My person thought would be do an array of cone drivers in a open baffle configuration. Temporarily could be mounted on a pair of 1X2 boards and see how an OB array sounds to you. Could be a really fun project! Good luck!

CoolJazz

rallyshark

That was an educational read! I especially liked the part about power taper as I had not considered or heard of that before. I've also wondered what would the effect be if the drivers were "staggered" I mean multiple drivers, but not a line array per say. Think if a line were drawn from driver to driver on a center channel, it would look like a "heart beat". I would kind of like to try and build some sort of low profile center channel with them, but a line array would not work for that, because only the people directly in front would reap the benefits. That is, unless they were made into a vertical configuration that would be directly on the sides of the TV, I think

Do you guys have any variations of this or other ideas for a project I could use these weird little speakers for? Thanks for the input so far:)