Epique E150HE-44 Small Cube Subwoofer Project

[tomzarbo]

I originally purchased two of the Epique E150HE-44 drivers for use in a set of small tower speakers I’m going to be working on at some point in the future. After running some test sweeps through it and taking another good look at just how small this thing is, I started wondering how this would do in a small box. Vent size is going to be an issue for any implementation that would take close to full advantage of this drivers massive Xmax, so I started looking at passive radiators.



The Dayton Designer series PR (8” paper cone) seems to work well with this in theory in a very small box. In fact, this is about as small of a box as you could do… the driver magnet and PR frame are within ½” or so. I'm using two of the PR's on either side with 120 Grams added to each.



I’m hoping to have driver recesses done in a few days and then finish applied after that. This will have no built-in amplifier, there simply isn’t room for one in the enclosure. This is a 10” cube. I used 1/8” HDF panels glued up to make the six ½” panels, and the edges were mitered for the largest surface area glue joint without using splines.



I also added a 7” disc 3/8” thick behind where the driver will go for added depth as that will be recessed – and the Epique subwoofer has a thick flange – around ¼” thick or so.



Here are a few graphs to look at. The F3 is around 37 Hz or so. The BassBox screen is just to show what the size in Liters equals to in inches and the size of the cabinet...



I'm excited to see this finished and here what this little monster of a subwoofer is capable of. It looks promising, at least on paper (or computer screen)
Not revealing everything yet, not that it's any big secret... anyone can model it. I'm just trying to save a bit of impact for the YT video when I get this done in a week or so (hopefully)

For a size comparison, the little black subwoofer in my signature is also a 10" cube.

The feet in the pic are just short pieces of 2" ABS tubing. I kind of like the squat look that it gives with those.

More to come in the next week or so hopefully!

TomZ

[tomzarbo]

Few more pics...

The veneer is a man-made, reconstituted veneer from China (AliExpress believe it or not) that I thought looked cool. It has a fleece backing which I've never heard of or used before, but which made a lot of cotton-looking fluff when I routed the excess veneer off of the box. Looks pretty cool, though, and it seems to take polyurethane just fine in my tests, which is a plus!




Below is the 3/8" disc of hardboard that will give the added thickness to recess the Epique driver for flush-mounting.





Still pondering if I should bother recessing the PR's or not. They are only about 1/8" to 3/16" thick flanges and don't really NEED it.




TomZ

[chrisn]

Idk what reconstituted veneer is, but it looks crazy in a good way Only seen 1/8 and 1/4" hardboard locally :/

[Steve Lee]

That is some wild looking veneer!

Nice project too - Looking forward to the video . . .

[djg]

Thanks for doing and documenting all of your great projects. I have seen manufactured veneer on ebay but not quite like that.

[Ugg10]

Cracking project, looking forward to seeing the end results. I like the “reconstituted veneer”, also marketed as SaiRaiFo, I used the walnut one on a restoration project for my Mackie monitors, came our very well, easy to work with, cuts with a craft knife blade and edges sand well plus went on fine with just Titebond 2 and a little pressure/clamps. I just gave them three coats of danish oil. The SaiRaiFo have some pretty interesting colours/patterns. Oh, and it’s pretty cheap, I paid £36 for a 2.5mx0.3m strip, easily enough to do both speakers.

Also worth noting that the engineered veneer is pretty much the same pattern on every sheet so you can have matching pairs of speakers. There are slight differences but pretty close.


IMG_9717a by A H, on Flickr

[tomzarbo]

Idk what reconstituted veneer is, but it looks crazy in a good way Only seen 1/8 and 1/4" hardboard locally :/

It's basically sliced up and dyed wood that is glued back together and backed to make a non-nature veneer. It does look like some crazy Dr. Seuss type of wood grain, I 'think' I like it, will have to see it with some clear on it though.

I'm not sure if I explained myself well enough up there... but I took 4 layers of 1/8" hardboard 10.5" square and glued them together to make a 1/2" panel to trim down... I did this 6 times and just clamped the whole shebang in the clamps. Messy and a lot of squeeze-out ( I used a bit too much glue) but dead, and solid as a rock. I use this technique for curved cabinets, but not usually for flat panels. Because of this being such a high-excursion driver, I thought I'd go the extra step and just do the layer thing anyway, not that it's really needed.

That is some wild looking veneer!

Nice project too - Looking forward to the video . . .

Thanks! Should be soon I hope.

Thanks for doing and documenting all of your great projects. I have seen manufactured veneer on ebay but not quite like that.

It's my pleasure, and it's fun to do. I enjoy reading everyone else's projects when posted as well from beginner to pro level. I actually ordered a tighter grained veneer, but it came all cracked up due to lousy packing, he resent this instead of what I originally ordered, but it looked cool, so I cut my losses.

Cracking project, looking forward to seeing the end results. I like the “reconstituted veneer”, also marketed as SaiRaiFo, I used the walnut one on a restoration project for my Mackie monitors, came our very well, easy to work with, cuts with a craft knife blade and edges sand well plus went on fine with just Titebond 2 and a little pressure/clamps. I just gave them three coats of danish oil. The SaiRaiFo have some pretty interesting colours/patterns. Oh, and it’s pretty cheap, I paid £36 for a 2.5mx0.3m strip, easily enough to do both speakers.

Also worth noting that the engineered veneer is pretty much the same pattern on every sheet so you can have matching pairs of speakers. There are slight differences but pretty close.


IMG_9717a by A H, on Flickr

Beautiful cabinet! Really nice look there. I usually like to do the "Iron-On" method, but figured veneer this thin would not like that process much, combined with the fact that it is 'fleece-backed' which I didn't know what that was until a few days ago. This is much thinner veneer that I'm used to working with, but combined with using Titebond 2 glue and clamping, it leaves basically no line, so that's nice.

I do prefer the look of natural wood veneer in some ways as some will have a 'light shifting' effect as you look and move your head, and this stuff will never do that on any pattern, at least not in the same way. But... for regular grain woods, it's pretty convincing. It does have the characteristic of the end grain sanding on an 'angle' which I've seen in every batch of engineered wood I've used, but still, I like the stuff too.

Again, beautiful speakers!

Hope to have more in a few days. I ordered a Fostner bit to recess the ABS pipe into the bottom of the cabinet a bit, and I hope to do the driver recess tonight or tomorrow night. I'll post up what I get that far. FUN!

TomZ

[tomzarbo]

Just a few more pics of driver recess and Passive Radiator holes cut out.

You can see the 3/8" disc in there that gives some extra strength for the driver recess of about 1/4" The driver has a fairly dense and thick foam gasket that will need some decent torque to tighten down to fully seated... and this driver only has 4 mounting holes.



After placing the driver and PR in place, there is just enough room to get a pencil between the PR frame and the driver magnet with a little space to spare. That distance will reduce a bit more once the driver gets tightened down and its built-in gasket compressed. I'm glad I measured, and figured this out before cutting! Recessing the PR's would have been really tight, possibly too tight.

Ran out of steam tonight, but I hope to get the four ABS feet recesses drilled out and get this thing sanded up and be applying a finish by this weekend.

These pics are not the best, sorry; they are actually screen shots from video.

TomZ

[johnny5jz]

That is a really cool looking mini sub. I built one with the tang band 6.5 inch once, but this one looks a fair bit smaller, and better looking. I would be curious how it compares. Sent from my SM-G973U using Tapatalk

[tktran]

This driver was tested in the recent Voice Coil Magazine, Test Bench December 2021. It not online (yet), but if you have a digital subscription you can access it immediately.

the Klippel machine was in for a service, so the BL(X)and KMS(X) were supplied by Dayton, and yes does clock in at 13.6mm on the BL(x); the compliance is slight higher.

It’s a very low sensitivity woofer; but also a low distortion one. Yes better than the Tangband. Nice to be able to put it in a 11 inch cube.

but 2 decades ago we could put a Peerless XLS the 10 inch sub into a 12” inch cube; so Peerless really were ahead of the curve…

[Scarface1]

I can't find the test ? Do you know where i can find it?

Edit: didn't read you have special acces to it !

[tomzarbo]

I've got the recesses made for the ABS feet and I'm basically ready to start applying finish, but due to having Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, I'm not going to stink up the joint with un-jolly polly smells in the basement. Hopefully tomorrow for that.




I'm toying with the idea of a straight texture finish on the ABS feet followed up with a low gloss clear finish. I think if I can get rid of all the little hairs on there, it might look pretty snazzy.



Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

TomZ
(Thomas Zarbo)

[Steve Lee]

Nice progress.
Happy Thanksgiving back to you, Tom.

[silverD]

Great work Tom! Looks like your sub has twice the cabinet volume compared to my DXT-MAX. I think you'll be pleased.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Nate

[tomzarbo]

Great work Tom! Looks like your sub has twice the cabinet volume compared to my DXT-MAX. I think you'll be pleased.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Nate

Thanks Nate.

I just took another peek at the DXT-MAX's and they came out really nice.
For cross-reference, here is that speaker project that uses the same sub driver:

https://techtalk.parts-express.com/f...22#post1478622

You didn't ask, but I vote for clear on the existing cabinets by the way, the angled baffles with the layers look super nice.

TomZ

[tomzarbo]

Little bit more done today...

I had to 'enlarge' the recesses for the feet just a bit. The 60 mm hole the Fostner bit makes was just a touch too small. I epoxied some coarse belt sander material to this piece of 1 1/2" ABS to make my own little sander tool. The sandpaper goes right up to the edge of the cylinder, and belt sander paper is really tough, so this should last for several uses of whatever I need it for.





Here is a shot of how I textured the 2" I.D. ABS plastic feet. Basically, I put very coarse sandpaper in the belt sander, and advanced it by hand while 'rolling' the piece of ABS flush with the surface. (So the belt is always parallel to the cylinder) Then I hit the piece with medium grit sandpaper to get the little plastic 'hairs' off from using the coarse grit.




You can still see a few little 'hairs' of plastic on there, but with a little rubbing with a cloth after the Krylon clear coat dries, they basically go away and it looks pretty nice.




I also did a final sanding and put the first coat of Minwax rub-on poly on the cabinet.



I think I'll take it easy for the rest of today... I feel like I just need to do some 'digesting' after Thanksgiving dinner yesterday!

TomZ

[djg]

Nice. I skimmed the thread and didn't find mention of a power source. Have you seen the little single channel sub amps Mr Bezos is selling?