Open Baffle Experience

I've long been attracted to Emerald Physics beautiful open baffle speakers but I've never heard them.  If a used pair shows up near me I'll go listen to them.

Jerry

@jaytor , get yourself a measurement microphone and have a look. Yes, you have bass but it is wildly inaccurate. Bass is very deceptive. People will swear they get great bass out of little loudspeakers. What they are getting is the illusion of great bass. Servos on subwoofer drivers seems to make a lot of sense. The problem is that they do not take into account the resonance and movement of the baffle or the cancelation effects of an open baffle. Play something with a really low note like an organ piece and put your hand on your baffle. That vibration you feel is distortion that the servos cannot account for. The other problem with servos is that the best large subwoofer drivers do not have a problem with distortion. Distortion only becomes an issue with smaller drivers trying to make sub bass. They have to move so far to do it that their suspensions become non linear.  To tell you the horrific truth most enclosed subwoofers are not much better. The best subwoofers are going to be balanced force designs with extraordinarily stiff enclosures. The Magico Q series is a good example. Kef Blades use a balanced force design. You should be able to put your hand on a subwoofer while playing and feel absolutely no vibration.  

#carlsbad.  I too was intrigued be the EP features [no box to distort sound]. So at a show I heard them set up in a hotel room.  Hmmm.  Maybe they were not set up properly, but I was not impressed at all.  The sound coming out of the front was OK at best.  Moving around to the back was worse.

I'm really not sure that traditional measurements work well with open baffle designs.  I've never seen anyone claim a tiny OB performs great in the bass.

@mijostyn - I assume you haven't heard the H-frame open baffle sub system developed by Rythmik and GR-Research. I do use REW and a calibrated microphone to set up my subs. There are some minor room modes to contend with, but with a little parametric EQ to knock down the peaks, they play flat to within a couple db to about 22hz at the listening position. 

The amps, of course, adjust the output to compensate for the back wave cancellation, but the H-frame enclosures lowers the frequency where this has to start (compared to a simple flat baffle)  

I don't play my system at levels loud enough to damage my hearing, so generally keep peak SPLs below 90db, which sounds plenty loud to me. At these SPLs, I feel hardly any cabinet vibration. It's hard to feel the baffle directly since it's tucked inside the H-frame and is barely larger than the drivers. 

With six 12" drivers, these produce plenty of clean bass. I've heard Magicos at shows that sounded quite nice, but these were $85k speakers with $40k amps, which is more than I'm willing to spend, and I didn't think the bass was appreciably better than what I already have. The bass from my current subs is certainly far better than any box speaker I've ever owned, although I've never spent more than $20k for speakers. 

I'm sure there are excellent sounding box speakers and subs on the market. I'm not saying that my open baffle subs are better than anything else available, just that they easily hold their own for music reproduction, and blend seamlessly with my open baffle main speakers.