Speaker crossovers

Thanks to you all pointing me in the right direction, I've spent some time doing due diligence. I now have Lii Crystal 10 full range drivers burning in (almost 200 hours) on open baffles and am expecting a pair of Acoustic Elegance dipole 15 woofers within the next week or so. These speakers are recommended specifically for OB. Slowly but surely learning about and how to build crossovers specific to my speakers. Hopefully, @millercarbon, when this old gal (who knows less than kenjit) is done, I'll let you know how they sound and post a picture or 2  :)

Mewsickbuff, the open baffle speaker I first encountered as a teen were the ones in the musical instrument amplifiers. Many lower priced ones are open back. Some of the more pricey ones have sealed boxes, or ported cabinets (bass-reflex).

In theory, the infinite baffle would be ideal - the back wave never meets the front wave of the driver. But typical open-back cabinets are finite in size, and the back wave comes around and cancels the front wave, cutting off the low bass at a frequency determined by how large the baffle is. 

I built an open baffle cabinet with two 12" guitar speakers (drivers). Each driver had a low frequency resonance of around 80 Hz. The driver surround was stiff enough not to respond to very low bass, so "safe" for open baffle. For guitar, 80 Hz was O.K. For wide-band music reproduction, not so.

Then I tried to make an music speaker using guitar drivers. That's when I really had to read about the interplay between tradeoffs of extended bass vs. efficiency, vs. cabinet size.

Eventually, I switched to a better quality 12" driver for the bass, and split the outputs to mid-range and tweeter through a crossover. Then the speaker went through upgrades and improvements as I learned more. Currently the sealed, bass cabinet is about 1.5 cubic feet internal volume, has a Q of about 0.8, and low frequency cutoff around 41 Hz. The tweeter and mid-range drivers are in a separate enclosure, sitting on top of the bass enclosure with vibration isolation between the two. Learned even more since then. 

Let us know how it turns out for you.

 

Here's my system with DIY open baffles (Yes, I made them). Not saying they're the best, but they're the most open, detailed speakers I've ever owned.