Was the Snell Secret a Wide Baffle?

There is definitely debate between wide baffle vs narrow baffle.  Objectively, wide baffle has diffraction issue at low frequency whereas the narrow baffle diffraction happens at higher frequency.  Subjectively, wide baffle does not quite have the image detail of narrow baffle but on the other hands, people have comment that wide baffle such as the Sonus Faber has more of live sound.  When you listen to live music, you don't really see "image" as from a stereo reproduction, but more like a bubble of sound coming from the musical instrument, and wide baffle tends to have these type of sound.  But I think the weakness of wide baffle is that the image could get phasey especially at low frequencies.  The speaker baffle does affect the phase of the driver and the wider the baffle, the more it will affect, and hence the image phase in general.  

Personally I prefer narrow baffle mostly for it has better image localization.  As for having image size as in real life, I don't think it has to do with wide or narrow baffle.  It's more about overall implementation.  

Erik, your other thread about “this being a great time to build a speaker” got me thinking about the A26.  Not to derail this thread, but if I do build them, I’ll pm you for some tips 👍

Erik, your other thread about “this being a great time to build a speaker” got me thinking about the A26.

I would recommend www.diyaudio.com

Hi @b_limo
Glad I could help. I second the suggestion to go to diyaudio for help instead of Audiogon. It's more of a builder's forum.
Best,
E

Imo there are MANY things right about the Snell Type A. The wide baffle is one of them. When placed as intended (back against the wall), I think the extremely large radius round-over made a relatively smooth transition from baffle to wall. So you came close to getting the benefits of flush-mounting the speakers (studio main monitor style).

The Snell Type A implemented Roy Allison’s ideas about boundary interaction, placing the woofer close enough to the floor to be close-coupled across its frequency range, and then elevating the midrange driver high enough to (barely) avoid the floor bounce notch. The crossover frequency matters of course.

There were some interesting things going on in the high frequencies. First, there was a little ball of acoustically absorptive fuzz suspended just in front of the tweeter, presumably to reduce the on-axis "hot spot" and thereby make the speaker’s radiation pattern more uniform as we went up in frequency. Second, there was a rear-firing supertweeter (at least on the A/III), which presumably was to fill in the reverberant field a bit in the top octave where the front tweeter was starting to beam.

I think there MAY have been room for minor improvement in the woofer section. Perhaps the woofer could have been rear-firing instead of down-firing, so that it wouldn’t sag over time. This is assuming the greater path length would not have caused a problem in the crossover region; it might have, and that’s why Peter Snell went with down-firing. Not only was there an over-abundance of great ideas in the Type A, these ideas were extremely well executed.  

Duke