Audiophool Excesses? Using your house as an infinite baffled subwoofer...

[W1AEX]

I don't know, just seemed like an interesting but excessive pursuit of new lows. I'd love to hear the "lowest - kia rio team" mp3 clip from the Audio Vault through some of those setups. The first embedded picture is just one example, showing a closet (jackets and other clothing still hanging in there) with two massive woofers. The second seems a bit over the top. Others are quite interesting with manifolds, holding many large woofers in a column, mounted through the floor and suspended between the basement joists. Real house shakers, but some very nice workmanship is evident with some of the projects. At any rate, I know what my wife would say...

http://home.comcast.net/~infinitelybaffled/page4IB-Gallery3.html

[w1vtp]

My now departed (SK) friend Bob, W1SET was a genius for this kind of stuff.  He once demonstrated a system where he use the space between two floor joists (and some reinforcement) with tuned ports going into the basement and the bass coming out upstairs where the sound was phenomenal.  He did a similar approach in his church.  I walked into the church auditorium where I thought someone was playing the pipe organ only to find out that he was testing an infinite baffle system he had just installed.

Al

[W2XR]

Actually, the use of the walls of a home as an infinite baffle was relatively common in the 1950s, the nascent period of hi-fidelity in the home.

I have a classic book about hi-fi from that time period and there are numerous photos of monaural and stereophonic systems where very high-end and highly efficient drivers (eg. Altec-Lansing, Stephens Tru-Sonic, James B. Lansing, etc.) are shown mounted within a wall between an exotic stone fireplace, etc.

I would be concerned about potential room and wall resonance issues in this type of baffle arrangement, but I'll bet with a good tube amplifier and those type of quality drivers, it may have sounded quite good when properly implemented.

I'll take a good horn-loaded bass enclosure anyday to a room-type infinite baffle. Better efficiency and the placement of the speaker system in relation to the listener is not quite as critical as wall-mounted drivers.

73,

Bruce

[K6JEK]

Altec Lansing made a woofer that was normally installed with an adjacent room as the speaker cabinet.  It was a 36" woofer.  I missed grabbing one of these at the De Anza swapmeet last year, thank goodness.

[W2XR]

Altec Lansing made a woofer that was normally installed with an adjacent room as the speaker cabinet.  It was a 36" woofer.  I missed grabbing one of these at the De Anza swapmeet last year, thank goodness.

Was it an Altec-Lansing or Electro-Voice driver you found?

I know that E-V made one of those monster bass drivers, but I never heard of A-L making one. I think the E-V unit was a 30" diameter driver. I have a number of the older (1940s thru 1970s) Altec catalogs, and for the life of me, I've never seen this type of driver in any of their product literature. The largest bass driver I can recall that Altec made was a 15".

73,

Bruce

[nq5t]

If you really want lows, you need this.

http://www.rotarywoofer.com

[KB1OKL]

I have a book considered a classic called Speaker Enclosures from 1966 by Alexis Badmaieff and Don Davis.Among the many speaker enclosures detailed or shown in this book is a house specifically designed for the following speaker enclosures. The huge living room has on either side of a large fireplace two 25 ton 300 cubic ft enclosures built into the walls, each has two 15" Altec woofers and one Altec horn, it crosses over at 500 cycles. The living room is beautiful.
It also has plans for the old K-horns in it, a Bozak infinite baffle enclosure with 4 12" woofers, 2 8" midranges and 8 splayed tweeters. It has a variety of big Altec cabs including Voice of the Theater home speakers, very large bass reflex speakers. The hard part of these would be in finding the correct drivers nowadays. Most drivers nowadays are made for high power and are not very efficient. It was the opposite back then. The smallest speakers I saw in the book were 2 cubic ft infinite baffles enclosures with 12" woofers. I use 4 large Advent loudspeakers, two on each side with an old Marantz 2385 receiver. I don't need subs with this system. I also have a Thorens Turntable that I use frequently. I'm not an audiophool as I don't have gold wiring and didn't spend a fortune on the system but it sounds great.

[Opcom]

I believe I know where one of those 30" EV speakers is. but it aint cheap, if he still has it. Does the speaker in question have a massive basket and a white cone?

[WBear2GCR]

You may be thinking of a Hartley-Luth speaker - white cone. Very large diameter.

The EV driver was also used in the Servostatic speaker system, iirc. Very big, went low and had crap damping, so it sounded like mud.

Gary, the advantage over an IB vs a horn (unless the horn is room sized) is that the IB will go flat down to Fs for the driver - an impossibility for anything with an enclosure, and given the T/S specs for 50s and 60s drivers the only way to get really low bass back then.

for a room sized bass horns:

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/attachment.php?s=&postid=1770740&stamp=1236807427

http://img383.imageshack.us/img383/6513/dsc30511280x768ac0.jpg

           
I'll take one... 

               _-_-bear

[flintstone mop]

I would not want to be closer than 3 blocks from a house that had a system like that, ecpecially if they are playing today's bass heavy music, EXPECIALLY RAP CRAP:

Fred

[WBear2GCR]

Ya old fart!

Darn kidz, TURN DOWN THAT NOISE!!!


             

                         _-_-bear

[flintstone mop]

YEA turn up the real music!! And boogie

Fred

[WBear2GCR]

I've got some Jackie Gleason records, the gals really love that stuff!!

                _-_-bear

[flintstone mop]

WOW you're gpoing back too far for me. My music nitch is from the early middle 60's and skips over the disco and rap.

Fred

[Ed-VA3ES]

Way back in 1970, when I was... uh... doing certain psychotropic chemicals...  after a previous evening of doing some blotter, I was recuperating at home.  I had a nice 12" woofer, mounted on a board, which I placed in a window, and closed the window down on the board, with the speaker facing inside.  The back of the speaker was open to the outside. 

So I put on Santana Abraxas.     WOW!  I siimply could not believe the bass!!!   Obviously I had  constructed the  ultimate infinite baffle!    

[WBear2GCR]

yes you did! 

I can hear it even now...

btw, there is some good Santana, old and new on Youtoobe.