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Hey all, hope everyone is enjoying a nice Memorial Day weekend. Thought I would share my latest sub project that just got underway (after sitting in the design stage for way too long). I finally committed and started cutting wood and made some good progress just yesterday. The genesis for this sub idea started maybe late last year, been seeing lots of hype for really small-form factor subs and thought it would be fun to build a smaller sub and see what kind of performance can be had when you ditch the big boxes for something a bit more petite. The idea of an ~11" cube that could bump was suddenly appealing and I started throwing ideas together. I modeled a bunch of the smaller subwoofer drivers from PE, starting with the new Epique drivers and Ultimax to Peerless and Tang Band and eventually landed on the classic Dayton RSS sub series. I bounced around between the 8" RSS210's and the 10" RS265's and after a little consideration with the box volume, decided to go for the 10" HF-4 driver and upping the cube dimensions to just over 13".
Clearly there are a thousand ways to get bass from a small box and this is by no means the best way, but cost being a consideration too, I opted to go with a sealed cabinet and planned to use active EQ to boost the lower end to get better extension. And by active EQ, I mean using a sleazy bass boost circuit found in most of the plate amps here on PE. Fundamentally I think bass boost gets a bad rap because it's arbitrary and in most cases ill-suited to the design application. The proper way to provide low-end correction to a sealed sub would normally be with some kind of DSP, by measuring the sub response and designing a filter to counter it to achieve the desired final response. No disagreement there. But when can a basic +6 dB of boost at 30 Hz be the perfect filter? Especially if the driver and box volume were designed around that exact bass boost? Well, we're about to find out.
Then just when I was about to pull the trigger on either one of the Yung or Bash 300W plate amps "with bass boost" I was checking out what's new at PE and ran across the Dayton Audio SPA300-D. This amp hit all the high points and best of all the built-in bass boost was defeatable with the flip of a switch. Thank you Dayton Audio! This was all it took for me, that one feature missing from all the other plate amps, not to mention 300W Class D, adjustable low-pass filter, phase switch, on/off/auto and no speaker-level inputs or heat sinks to clutter up the rear panel. Just a nice and clean look. I hit the pre-order button and waited. I had no idea when it would be in stock, but about 3 weeks later, it showed up and shipped. Then quickly went out of stock again. Curious if anyone else picked up one of these while they were in stock? It was supposed to arrive yesterday (hence the sudden jump to get started on the box) but is now delayed until Wednesday. I'm excited to check it out. I've got some simple measurement gear (REW, load box, soundcard, the usual) so I'm hoping to get some raw power measurements, frequency response measurements, bass boost response measurements, etc. as soon as this thing arrives. So stay tuned for that.
Anyway, so that's where this project sits as of right now. The box is half done and the amp is somewhere between Dayton and Tucson. I had purchased the HF driver a few months back so that's just been sitting waiting for me to get my act together. I'm actually glad I waited as long as I did because that new plate amp looks like it could be a sweet little gem, balancing performance and price, without the exotic DSP but just some good old fashioned analog bass boost to take any small sub project to the next level.
Clearly there are a thousand ways to get bass from a small box and this is by no means the best way, but cost being a consideration too, I opted to go with a sealed cabinet and planned to use active EQ to boost the lower end to get better extension. And by active EQ, I mean using a sleazy bass boost circuit found in most of the plate amps here on PE. Fundamentally I think bass boost gets a bad rap because it's arbitrary and in most cases ill-suited to the design application. The proper way to provide low-end correction to a sealed sub would normally be with some kind of DSP, by measuring the sub response and designing a filter to counter it to achieve the desired final response. No disagreement there. But when can a basic +6 dB of boost at 30 Hz be the perfect filter? Especially if the driver and box volume were designed around that exact bass boost? Well, we're about to find out.
Then just when I was about to pull the trigger on either one of the Yung or Bash 300W plate amps "with bass boost" I was checking out what's new at PE and ran across the Dayton Audio SPA300-D. This amp hit all the high points and best of all the built-in bass boost was defeatable with the flip of a switch. Thank you Dayton Audio! This was all it took for me, that one feature missing from all the other plate amps, not to mention 300W Class D, adjustable low-pass filter, phase switch, on/off/auto and no speaker-level inputs or heat sinks to clutter up the rear panel. Just a nice and clean look. I hit the pre-order button and waited. I had no idea when it would be in stock, but about 3 weeks later, it showed up and shipped. Then quickly went out of stock again. Curious if anyone else picked up one of these while they were in stock? It was supposed to arrive yesterday (hence the sudden jump to get started on the box) but is now delayed until Wednesday. I'm excited to check it out. I've got some simple measurement gear (REW, load box, soundcard, the usual) so I'm hoping to get some raw power measurements, frequency response measurements, bass boost response measurements, etc. as soon as this thing arrives. So stay tuned for that.
Anyway, so that's where this project sits as of right now. The box is half done and the amp is somewhere between Dayton and Tucson. I had purchased the HF driver a few months back so that's just been sitting waiting for me to get my act together. I'm actually glad I waited as long as I did because that new plate amp looks like it could be a sweet little gem, balancing performance and price, without the exotic DSP but just some good old fashioned analog bass boost to take any small sub project to the next level.
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