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Woofer-Assisted Wide Band

In the old days of dynamic speaker drivers everything was done with a single driver. Now multi-way speakers with multiple drivers covering different ranges are the most common.  With this of course come some issues, and all sorts of ways to fix them.

But even today in the 21st century there are some interesting varietals of single-driver speakers attempting to claim a spot on the high-end though. Some use little paper "whizzer" cones and transmission lines. Some use mechanical crossovers (no caps).  Others like Kef and Thiel attempt to solve some of the issues by using a coaxial arrangement.

One of the cool ideas I have seen lately is "woofer assisted wide-band." The idea is that the main speaker is a single driver that covers from around 400 Hz on up. This keeps the crossover well out of the midrange and treble. An additional woofer is used to cover the lower octaves.

What about you? Are you a firm believer that multi-way speakers are the wrong way to go?


erik_squires
tomic601's avatar
tomic601
12,911 posts
 
Mozart ; your use of we suggests you had a date with Einstein ….

Not sure when you got a jones for Vandersteen but if you and your creation make it up to Seattle, we ( as in you, me and ? ) can listen to the clash, cosmic hippo and of course your namesake on the world acclaimed model 7. IF you desire more neutral ground, haul them to Munich.

of course, we can use the venerable ESL-63, Apogee Stage, Thiel 2.3+, even my hot rod Dynaco A-25…..

I am betting your driver pukes on Cosmic Hippo…

carry on
kingharold
304 posts
 
My fully horn loaded, triamplified, DIY  speakers use AER BD3 wide range drivers loaded into BD Design Oris 150 front horns to cover the range of 200Hz to 8kHz.  Folded corner horns provide the bass and Fostex T900a super tweeters cover the range above 8kHz.  A DEQX HDP3 preamp-DSP provides digital crossovers, with all slopes being set at 96 dB/octave, as well as time and phase correction, speaker correction, room correction, etc.  I came up with the idea for this system in 1999, but it was 2004 before I found a DSP unit available that met all my needs. 
The SQ of this system is in the opinion of my audiophile friends including one audio professional very good, lifelike, detailed and exiting.  I am convinced that the absence of any crossovers between 200Hz and 8 kHz is vital to the SQ. 
erik_squires OP
16,056 posts
 
Having crossovers set so high and low makes it a very forgiving system as well. You could easily screw up the inter-driver alignment and probably very few people would ever hear it. :)
bache's avatar
bache
520 posts
 
Woofer assistant set 600-700 Hz, low pass, wide band set same, and only one very small value  capacitor i use for high pass supertweeter 
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