I have been mulling around an OB project for a long while. I have a good mid that I would like to use, but I have been held back for a long time trying to find some woofers that would work well but will not break the bank.

Today I happened to do some casual modeling of three of the Nuance W10-NS1020-12 10" Woofers (p/n 299-083) connected in parallel on a huge (48"x48") planar open baffle (don't ask!). According to the specs posted, the drivers have a high Q (1.4 ish), high Xmax (9mm) and Re is 9.5 ohms so you could safely do about three in parallel. According to my modeling, these seem to fit the need nicely and are inexpensive.

I have been following with close interest the approach that Martin King has recently espoused, which uses high Q drivers to partly compensate for the open baffle loss. The idea, as far as I can make out, is to find a driver that has a resonance frequency (Fs) just below where you would like the system cutoff to be located (e.g. 40Hz system cutoff, shoot for Fs=30-35Hz) and Qts>1.3 or so. This all seems to make sense to me.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else has thought about using this driver for this purpose (an OB system) or has purchased one or more of these drivers and actually measured the T/S parameters. I would like to know how accurate the parameters listed on the product page are...

So what are your thoughts about using these drivers for OB woofers?

I could post some graphs from the modeling if anyone is really interested...

-Charlie