Minitower Speakers (1 Viewer)

[Rory Buszka]

Idea: A pair of "minitower" speakers with a nice Dayton 1-1/8" silk dome tweeter, a Peerless CSX 5" midbass, and a MCM 8" subwoofer driver in the same mintower but a separate chamber with a side-firing Stryke 10" PR

Good starting speaker design project. In each tower speaker there will be a MCM 100-watt plate amp (or maybe a Parts Express 120-watt model) for the subwoofers. The top enclosure is a bass-reflex box with twin ports just above the tweeter. Entire minitower is no more than 11" wide and 30" tall.

Design to be featured on "Biamp" (that's going to be a website I plan to make with all sorts of speaker design concepts)

 

[Brian Bunge]

Rory,

I've got the MCM 8" in a 12" internal enclosure with the PE 300-792 amp and a Stryke 12" PR. It mates very well with a pair of monitors so building towers similar to this might be pretty cool.

 

[Rory Buszka]

I'lll design it, and you can build it if you want. It will be a public-domain design. The upper part could conceivably be set up so you can angle it upwards if you will be very close to the speakers.

Or you could design it with influence from your own knowledge and experience. It's just a concept, to get the ideas flowing.

Does the MCM 8" give out pretty tight bass with that 12" passive radiator? Would it be bad to try and use the 10" passive radiator?

 

[Brian Bunge]

It is possible that you could exceed Xmax with the 10" PR and the smaller PE amp. The 12" PR has greater displacement and exceeding it's Xmax isn't an issue. At least not according to Unibox.

 

[Hank Frankenberg]

That's similar to an idea rolling around in the back of my head, but I'm thinking a slimmer tower with MTM arrangement using TB 4" or 5" and a TB or better tweet. I was thinking a side-firing 8" TB (but lately switched to the new MCM 8") sub. I've never done or even studied PR designs, so I've asked for advice on the Madisound forum because I noticed their very inexpensive PR's. They're basically an 8", 10" and 12" Madisound Sledgehammer base drivers without the magnet and voice coil. Someone said that the 20" probably wouldn't do the job. There are no specs posted and I called Madisound and they couldn't tell me anything except to say the PR's are like the drivers. So, I guess I'll buy a couple and blindly experiment. I do like the way you add mass to them. There's no bolt/washer/nut provision. There's a very small dust cap and you place silicone caulk on it until you've got your mass, then you glue on a supplied larger dust cap over the pile of caulk.
Can't beat the price, though.

 

[Rory Buszka]

I recently had an idea using the 4" TB's with the paper cones and the aluminum phase plug and the Dayton ribbon tweeter (both from Parts Express) in a ported enclosure with a bass module with 4 5.25" woofers in it. You could do the 4-tangband 4" mains (minus the bass module) quite easily, and the MCM would be good to make a slim subwoofer to fit underneath. The subwoofer cabinet would only need to be 10" across and 15" tall and deep to use a 12" passive radiator from Stryke. The 4 tangbands respond down to 65 Hz, and the sub could take over from there. You can build stereo subs and put a Parts Express 120-watt (156 watts into 4-ohms) plate amp in the back of each for a home theater Powered Tower setup. You gould do the Minitower speakers this way as well. For the midwoofer you could use the Tangband 5" with the dual surround suspension (looks like the Vega-Flex setup on CV car subs) or the TB 6" with the honey-come structured santoprene surround. Both of these can be had from Nuera Acoustics in Canada for a nice price.