Okay, got the drivers through today and have set them up but they sound awful.
The audax drivers i was criticising earlier sound like heaven in comparison.
I read the visatons benefit from some burn in time and improve.
I hope they do improve but it needs to be a massive improvement just to bring them up to the audax's
What do you think, if the burn gives a slight improvement only i am in trouble just spent over £400 for nothing.
Burn in is a myth. You have what you've got. I warned you earlier about this simplistic plan.
If it was that easy to build a speaker by putting drivers on a flat board we would all do it.
The fact is that building a speaker is a complex mix of science and art.
However, you have to build with some principles and concepts in mind. The first is that the cone of a moving coil loudspeaker is a terribly inefficient coupling to an acoustic space in the lower frequencies. When you put it in open baffle you have the added problem of additions and cancellations from the front and rear radiation. To deal with the latter complex electronic equalization is required. This has to be active and NOT passive.
As far as bass, even closed box designs require equalization to get deep bass. Moving coil transducers ideally do require acoustic transformers to aid them to output decent bass. This can be reflex (ported), TL, or horn.
The next issue is full range drivers. There are practically none, and none suitable for open baffle. You may have posted a picture of Nelson Pass with a Lowther driver on a flat baffle. However that is just daft.
The Lowthers are very efficient high sensitivity drivers. This makes them low Q drivers. So the cut off very high without the proper loading. They are designed to be loaded by very efficient horns to give acceptable bass response. I'm very familiar with these drivers. I grew up in the Medway Towns in Kent, not too far from Bromley. The late Donald Chave who took the company over form Paul Voigt, was one of my close group of mentors those many years ago.
The next problem is that single full range drivers have to cope with the problem of cone break up. They all do. This results all too often are an irregular frequency response and beaming. Even the famed Lowthers are not immune form this, but way better than most.
The only full range driver I have know to sound good is this one and its close relatives. However this is the one I like the best, the Jordan Watts module.
The major secret is in the design and manufacture of the cone. It break up in a highly controlled fashion with radiation area decreasing linearly with frequency.
However you could not load this speaker on an open baffle. It would destruct pronto. Properly loaded they have a remarkably good bass response.
Unfortunately for you the result you have got, is exactly what I predicted.
So you will have to chalk this one up to experience and move on. Those of us that build speakers have all built some dogs. Remember you almost always learn more from what goes wrong, then goes right. However you must first learn why your project failed before moving on to the next.
One last point, don't blame the driver, blame your application primarily. I don't know that driver, but may be with the right design and application it could be part of a good speaker system.
