[sdiy] semi ot: loud speaker for synths

[Peter Grenader]

One, ported cabinets are overrated.  There are far better ways of making
drivers more efficient.

Secondly. Lobbing (driver phase cancellation) is indeed a common occurrence.
Some arrays are better than others at handling this, and you pay dearly for
that technology.  Some arrays are God awful at it, too.  But, there are many
tricks you can play to minimize this in the listening area, including
intentionally connecting a sub out of phase and facing it into the corner of
a room to compensate for acoustic anomalies.

The bottom line, seeing phasing as a problem is a problem in itself -- as
hoping to cancel all of it within an entire listening area is beyond the
technology of any speaker system, and I don't care what in the hell any data
book says otherwise.  The best you can hope for is to minimize it in the
area you will be working through proper tuning.  For some speakers systems,
especially any that are THX approved, this sweet spot is extremely small to
the point that moving ones head a foot either direction will pull you out of
it.

You can set up your monitoring fairly easily to optimize phase alignment in
the true listening area . It requires two people (or one and a balloon that
can be hung where the user's head will be most of the time), a dB meter
(radio Shack makes one that 99% of all U.S. studios use), preferably a
calibrated set up CD (M&K sound makes one) -or- a white noise generator and
a laser leveler.  The key is to aim each satellite at the users forehead
using a laser leveler placed on the speaker's baffle within an inch of the
main driver's surround ring on each monitor with the beam pointing outward.
Once this is done, using either white noise or a dedicated speaker set up
CD, set each speaker's level so that equal SPLs are achieved from each at
the listening area.

I've watched the M&K techs do installations this at some of the largest
studios in LA using this procedure.  It works.