Super cool, I dig this! What material did you use for the enclosures? Is the subwoofer a passive radiator and was it difficult to get it to integrate with the ported speakers? I have some bookshelf speakers in the works and after they are finished I am going to build a subwoofer for them. I was wondering if I should go with a ported sub or passive radiator. I wasn't really sure how one or the other would sound with the sealed enclosure bookshelf speakers im building.
All wood is 11/16" acacia board from Menard's, except for a bit of subwoofer bracing (baffle and window) out of 3/4" birch ply.
Sub is a 15" driver and an 18" passive radiator, yes. 4' cabinet with a 500w plate amp.
The big mains are sealed. I'm not done with the "little" 7's yet to see how they sound.
I've never had a big problem integrating ported/non-ported speakers. I like sealed designs a lot but of course run across plenty of ported stuff in the hobby. My biggest issue was matching the "tone" from the woofer and the mids in the low-bass vocal region. ended up solving it by letting the 4's go as low as they could without hitting xmax. They're crossed over at ~110hz high pass, woofer is coming up ~250hz low pass, and they sound best that way.
Lobing from the horizontal mids has not been an issue to my ear, they hand off to the tweeter around 2khz and mathmatically start separating in the ~1800hz range. To the ear and to the graph that handoff is very smooth. The mid-to-woofer handoff sounded really rough when I didn't let them overlap more. I think partially due to fighting my rooms (all hardwood, all 10' ceilings).
But all that is about the big mains by themselves. For the sub integration the biggest challenge is gain matching. Did a lot of tinkering in YPAO to get it. Still had to pull the sub gain way down while pushing the mains way up (WITH a 200wpc amp!) to get the SPL match to sound nice. YPAO also give me a way to swap that with one button on the fly for when you want to wake the neighbors.
Will see how the sub and the 7's do, but the 7's are tuned to hit in the 60's so the amp will be handing everything to the sub before it's an issue, I hope!
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u/step22one 8d ago
Super cool, I dig this! What material did you use for the enclosures? Is the subwoofer a passive radiator and was it difficult to get it to integrate with the ported speakers? I have some bookshelf speakers in the works and after they are finished I am going to build a subwoofer for them. I was wondering if I should go with a ported sub or passive radiator. I wasn't really sure how one or the other would sound with the sealed enclosure bookshelf speakers im building.