Open Baffle Experience

Hi Erik, I would think that you have the experience to do this well. I’ve built a few and they can be very enjoyable.

In general, for bass, the larger woofers work better... I used a 15 at one time and 2 12’s once and 2 10’s another....

Try to keep your QTS between .5 and .8, My experience says look for a .6 and keep it under .8 if you can. VAS and XMax matters. It all depends on the room, stay mindful of response curves, remember that you are now firing from the rear also and room boundaries come into play more easily. If you use a mid, still look at QTS. It is less critical as you move up in frequency, but I would still try to find .5 to .6 QTS.

If you get them built, pull them out in the room listen and slowly move them back toward the walls little by little until you find the boundry reinforcement that fits your taste. Initially, you may find that you don’t have much taste. If you like, don’t hesitate to add another woofer, even a 15, air movement is the key to get bass moving, but stay aware of your room and boundaries that you may have to deal with. I have no doubt that you can pull this off. Use your experience and your ears, you’ll be fine.

Best sound I’ve ever heard, bar none, was the Nola Concert Grand four-tower speakers powered by top ARC electronics and a front end I can’t remember at a NYC audio show. This told me two things — an open-baffle, dynamic driver design is extremely intriguing, and a line array is just superior at conveying the scale and effortless sheer dynamics of a live performance.  Genesis and Pipedreams line arrays impacted me similarly, and I’m forever wrecked until I have a room and budget that can get me there.  Ugh. 

i tried a set of clayton’s m3 sapphires, i felt the open baffle design is a real winner, providing great sense of space and realism in the bass - very very impressive in that regard

as much as i wanted to love them, keep them, i could not get accustomed to their rather forward treble (despite much much effort expended to ameliorate) and relatively recessed midrange, but those issues are ones of tonal balance, related to driver selection/mating, and not related to the wonderful open baffle nature of the design

i think many other users have had really great results using good tube amps with spatials (which i did not want to do in this case for my own reasons)

Kenjit burped: "Do not listen to folks who claim open baffles are better than box speakers. They probably cant afford state of the art box speakers which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Don’t forget rule #1, never listen to kenjit for anything.

I have heard many, many speakers in my lifetime and the S2 open baffle speakers below are among the top.

BTW, I recently heard Spatial Audio speakers for the first time with Linear Tube Audio electronics at the NYC show and thought they were one of the top 3 I heard at the show.  Very impressed.