Why would anybody... (1 Viewer)

[Rory Buszka]

...Why would anybody with the money use a short-excursion driver in a subwoofer? I'm looking at the Madisound catalog and they carry lots of soofers for subwoofers but they look to have excursion that isn't rally anything to sing about. So I'm wondering why someone might chosoe one of these drivers over, say, a Dayton Titanic?

 

[Ron Shaw]

High efficiency and low IM distortion. Not that the ones from Madisound are high efficiency, but high efficiency drivers do typically have relatively low excursion capability, but used properly, are certainly up to the task.

 

[Cam S]

High excursion doesn't always mean high quality. Focal's and AVI's (both similair) have very little excursion in their subwoofers, maybe 9mm or so, but let me tell you, I have never heard such a sweet sounding subwoofer in my life like the AVI SL-300's, just incredible sound in the form of clean, deep bass.

 

[Wes]

I would say you get a quicker bass response from multiple subs with shorter excursion and still maintain the spl's of a single sub. Jim Fosgate for instance had eight (if I remember correctly) 10" woofers per channel and only running about 30w to power them and the bass was clean, quick and powerful! It seems to me you want less travel and more control, but to do this it will take more woofs to get the same spl's.

Wes

 

[Ryan Schnacke]

Why would anybody ...

use a teaser topic heading? Its much more convenient to actually state the topic of discussion so that members interested in that topic will join the discussion. And besides, I know we've been asked by moderators in the past to refrain from teasers.

I'm not intending to be rude ... please forgive me if it sounds that way.

 

[Dennis XYZ]

Back in the day, when we just called them woofers, I used to love the 15" JBL Pro drivers. They only have about half the Xmax of a Tempest, and a pretty high Fs, but two of them in stereo boxes are plenty to crack the plaster with kick drums and bass guitars. Two things made them work better in that application - efficiency and midbass response. 100 watts was a lot of power back then but the JBL is 10dB more efficient than a Tempest so 100 watts into a JBL is like 1000 watts into a Tempest. With a big enclosure and careful tuning, you could get an in-room F3 below 30 Hz, which is plenty low for rock music. If you wanted to use a little EQ, you could tune them even lower than that. They are rated up to 1000 Hz or so. I crossed them to a horn midrange much lower than that but still well above the clean range of the current long-stroke 15" subs. When it was all said and done, 50-100 watts was enough to make the most hard core rocker's ears bleed. These were not "subtle" speakers.