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Subwoofer damping

I didn't no whether to post this in the speaker or tech forum, but I'll ask my query.

I have a very large subwoofer which has 2 16 inch drivers. I fired this baby up today after having it in storage for many years. I played a reference recording of Frederick Fennell's Pomp & Pipes. Well I set the crossover pots at 10:00, 6 being the lowest and 5 highest. Everthing was ok till there was some low and I mean low frequency with plenty of dynamics. I could hear the drivers make a girgle sound that came out the 4 vents in the cabinet.

I can't recall if I've heard this before and I'm thinking that I need to add additional damping material. Doe's anybody supply speaker wool anymore? I can't imagine overdriving this thing....I think my house would collapse...so adding more material seems might help. Any speaker tech's with answers would be appreciated.

Roger
wavetrader
shadorne's avatar
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shadorne
7,477 posts
 
If this is the case, then you have a band-pass enclosure. And if it uses Scan-Speak drivers . . . the vast majority of which have a pretty low Qes . . . that means that this is probably a sixth-order bandpass enclosure. Also, a 6th-order bandpass box, with two 16" drivers, tuned to low frequencies, could easily be as freaking huge as what you have.

Kirkus - you are thinking the same way I am...surely this has got to be bandpass...
wavetrader OP
260 posts
 
Ok let me point out that...and I am sorry I didn't earlier that these drivers are mounted on a thick plate that secures to the bottom of the box. They fire downward and are completely visible if you had the box on it's side. It's been a long time since I actually had it apart...but I seem to remember 2 chambers and corner bracing and so on. The box is made of HDF I recall and weighs about 200 lbs. The plate with drivers is probably 100 lbs+. If I was really industrius I'd pull it apart and check but it is a bear to handle.

Roger
wavetrader OP
260 posts
 
Kirkus, Power is not a problem....you can weld with these amps.
speedbump
2 posts
 
Wavetrader, I was thinking of "Skanning", which I believe was a fore-runner of Scan-Speak (which I'm not sure was in existence back then). Does that name ring a bell?

If so, those are probably fairly high Qts woofers (like some of the older Dynaudio drivers), and the large aperiodic box size makes more sense.

Shadorne, back in the early 90's when those drivers were made nothing even remotely approaching the TC Sounds woofer was in production, and probably not even on the drawing board. In those days, 10 mm linear peak-to-peak was considered high excursion.

Duke
audiokinesis
2,737 posts
 
Ooops - I was logged in on an sick friend's account (at his request - he has trouble typing now and wanted me to post an ad for him) and forgot to log off before posting. The post just above should have been under username "Audiokinesis".

Duke
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