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When Wolf decided to do a Rat Rocker build theme at InDIYana 2012, it inspired me to use some of my stockpiled and now NLA drivers and other surplus parts and whip something together for the show.
Once I got started however, it turned into more of serious build and my younger son (17 years) took an immediate interest in the towers and wanted them for his room. This is the largest speaker in the house, so there's sort of a "wow" factor in it for my son.
Anyway, the original plan was to repurpose some old shelving material and make the cabinets sort of shabby-looking. I had the mill near us plane this rather thick poplar board down to 1" and rough cut it for me. They did an excellent job and the wood actually looks really good. Yes, it's an all-hardwood speaker cabinet, but it's a rat rocker, so it's ok. ;)
I decided to go with a MTMWW design utilizing (2) 6.5" buyout subs + Aura NS35-255-4a + Vifa bc25sc15-04.
I tried modeling a 3-way XO and not only is that an impossible task for me, but it was really expensive. I have several SA240's sitting around doing nothing, so these speakers quickly became partially active. I am powering all 4 subs with one SA240. So that leaves me with designing a 2-way XO on the top portion. I went pretty much textbook with the XO. Second order at 2k for the NS35's and 2.5k third order on the BC25 with 4db of padding. The NS35 is an underrated driver IMO. It's fairly flattish from 150Hz to 4k but then it gets wonky really fast. It has a nice natural rolloff below 100Hz, but to play it safe, I added a first order 100Hz high pass filter via 2 paralleled 100uF NPE's. The BC25 is useless anywhere near 1k and it has a slight suckout (2db-ish) at 6k which I did not address. Otherwise, it's fine. I picked the XO points really just based on analyzing the respective FR graphs and using online calculators. I was able to use a ton of my surplus XO parts for this and I did a lot of component coupling to get to the values I needed for the slopes.
Since I had only heard them in my garage the week of the show, I really had no clue how they'd fare in a more normal environment. I thought I really lucked out after hearing them at the show. Even better, I was pleasantly surprised to have received positive feedback from InDIYana attendees. Wolf even bumped me out of the Rat Rocker category...hehe.
So for yucks, here's how it went down......I'm calling them "Sean's NLA Towers"
Once I got started however, it turned into more of serious build and my younger son (17 years) took an immediate interest in the towers and wanted them for his room. This is the largest speaker in the house, so there's sort of a "wow" factor in it for my son.
Anyway, the original plan was to repurpose some old shelving material and make the cabinets sort of shabby-looking. I had the mill near us plane this rather thick poplar board down to 1" and rough cut it for me. They did an excellent job and the wood actually looks really good. Yes, it's an all-hardwood speaker cabinet, but it's a rat rocker, so it's ok. ;)
I decided to go with a MTMWW design utilizing (2) 6.5" buyout subs + Aura NS35-255-4a + Vifa bc25sc15-04.
I tried modeling a 3-way XO and not only is that an impossible task for me, but it was really expensive. I have several SA240's sitting around doing nothing, so these speakers quickly became partially active. I am powering all 4 subs with one SA240. So that leaves me with designing a 2-way XO on the top portion. I went pretty much textbook with the XO. Second order at 2k for the NS35's and 2.5k third order on the BC25 with 4db of padding. The NS35 is an underrated driver IMO. It's fairly flattish from 150Hz to 4k but then it gets wonky really fast. It has a nice natural rolloff below 100Hz, but to play it safe, I added a first order 100Hz high pass filter via 2 paralleled 100uF NPE's. The BC25 is useless anywhere near 1k and it has a slight suckout (2db-ish) at 6k which I did not address. Otherwise, it's fine. I picked the XO points really just based on analyzing the respective FR graphs and using online calculators. I was able to use a ton of my surplus XO parts for this and I did a lot of component coupling to get to the values I needed for the slopes.
Since I had only heard them in my garage the week of the show, I really had no clue how they'd fare in a more normal environment. I thought I really lucked out after hearing them at the show. Even better, I was pleasantly surprised to have received positive feedback from InDIYana attendees. Wolf even bumped me out of the Rat Rocker category...hehe.
So for yucks, here's how it went down......I'm calling them "Sean's NLA Towers"
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