Building Resonance Free Subwoofers

@mijostyn,

You have no idea how jealous I am of your workshop! 🤗 It’s beautiful, well equipped and large! Your workmanship is impressive as well. It was a pleasure to look at all the pictures you posted.

Jim

@curiousjim Thank you Jim. I wish to reiterate. There is nothing I can not do with a band saw and hand tools, both powered and not. The big machines just make me faster. For me the fun part is what I call process engineering. How the heck am I going to do that?

@terry9 Ahmen 

@mijostyn --

Looks to be excellent craftsmanship. 

Size is always an issue for aesthetic reasons.

It is, with all that typically entails. However, large size subs (or speakers in general) is not an insurmountable challenge to the minority who wills it, just like you willed it through with great effort via another path from a smaller size factor (in multiples) to keep even minute enclosure resonances at bay, not to mention the magnitude of the added weight of such sturdy built cabs with two woofers per unit. 

The best solution is to cross out at 100 Hz, but you have to use a very steep curve or you wind up with subwoofer in your midrange which is poison. I use a 10th order filter, 48 dB/oct. The test is listening for voice in the subwoofer system, there should not be any or you smear the image. With shallow filters, even 18 dB/oct, you have to cross out below 60 Hz to keep the sub out of the midrange.

I find using 8th order slopes (i.e.: 48dB/octave) to produce a less desirable sonic outcome than 6th order L-R dittos (36dB/octave), but I also prefer using the same slopes throughout the entire frequency range actively, and I cross a bit lower to my subs - just below 85Hz. At the end of the day the ears are the final judges here, and context (incl. personal taste) is a factor as well. 

Another advantage of having your subwoofer system active from below 100 Hz is increasing the gain on this segment between 10 and 100 Hz allows you to get the feel of a live performance without having to resort to ear damaging volume levels. 

Also: the cleaner the bass the more gain can typically be applied without tipping the balance, and this way one can more readily appreciate the physicality of reproduction that's afforded here. Having the reminder of the frequency range configured actively gives you even further options to work with. 

@phusis No argument from me. Dirty bass messes up everything, no bass kills any elusion of a live performance. I might point out that you are doing exactly the same as me. You use a slower crossover but counter by lowering the crossover point to keep the sub out of the midrange. Exactly what slope sounds best I think would depend. on the main speakers you are using. Such steep filters are not good at higher frequencies. I cross from my bass transformer to the treble transformer at 500 Hz 2nd order. I stepped into the twilight zone by bi amping the Sound Lab's transformers using a digital electronic crossover. My initial experience included totally trashing a pair of JC 1s, right into the dumpster. 

I do not think I am adverse to large loudspeakers, but I only have so much room on a 16 foot wall which is mostly taken up by a 113" diagonal screen and two 36" wide loudspeakers. Two of the subwoofers had to go outside the panels to create the line source and I only had 15 " left for each sub. 12" drivers just made it!

The title is just a tad misleading. There is no such structure that’s "Resonance Free". If a structure has mass and stiffness associated with it, there are resonant frequencies. You may have pushed it out of the sub’s operational range or not (test or sim tool could let you know), but, there are some resonances around..

You can either dump your CAD and material properties for the wood (modulus, poisson’s ratio, etc) in some FEA tool and all resonant frequencies can be computed. You will need to know how to work with FEA tools in this case.

Or get a DAQ and a couple of accelerometers... Start sweeping the driver and determine if any resonances can be caught (coarse). You will need to know some basics of signal processing in this case..