Size of Midrange Drivers

Kijanki,

Do you know who makes good ferrofluid suspended drivers like the ones in you Hyperions - or better yet, the ones found on your speakers? I'd like to learn more for a DIY project.

----

FWIW, back in the "slopped baffle" thread Roy Johnson from Green Mountain Audio made several points about driver size and selection. He mentioned he used a 4.5" midrange driver for his Calypso as it was designed to work in living rooms and audio rooms, but he used larger drivers when designing speakers for vary large rooms. So I wonder how much of a concern is beaming for him, as it would seem the detrimental effect of beaming would be more notorious the larger the room.

Good thread!

As well as bombaywalla tried to explain it, I think dweller is still confused.

Shakey

Have a loudspeaker that I'm working on with 14ft long horn 43x62in bell 4in compression driver used as a mid range.

Johnk..... I betcha that wherever that baby beams it smacks you in the head.
Really though, we're off of the ops topic, but what we have been discussing about cone drivers is the where the driver starts losing dispersion characteristics. I kinda eluted to that in my snide question. Once the width of dispersion starts decreasing, we hear the beaming effect... Yes, I'm sure that is known, but just wanted to clarify for others.
There are ways around the beaming effect.. Ohm fires off the back side of their cone... Bose uses direct reflecting technology... both have their own issues. Mainly, any decent designer will properly work around the individual drivers problems do a fair degree. There are trade off on any speaker... period. Frequency extention capabilities, driver peaks or dips, excursion limits, Impedance/phase dips, etc, etc, etc.

Lewinskih01, I have no idea. Hyperion went bankrupt (poor marketing,
poor dealer base) without any parts sale. I'm not sure why they decided
upon such large midrange driver but I suspect they wanted to reduce
membrane excursion making it more linear. 3kHz xover was probably
selected to stay away from the tweeter's resonance that is around 1.5kHz.
If this xover is single pole 6dB per octave then tweeter helps keeping
dispersion around 2.5-3kHz, as Johnyb53 stated. It is possible to
improve linearity at large excursions by using underhung, instead of
common overhang motor. It is rare, likely because of the increased cost
(large magnet). I've seen this only in Acoustic Zen woofers or Morel
Supreme tweeters. In underhung motor coil is very narrow while
magnetic gap is very wide. Coil is all the time inside opposite to
overhang design where coil is long being mostly outside of very narrow
magnetic gap.