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Objective.
To build a slim, small, high-WAF speaker not easily affected by room acoustics.
I've wanted to build an open baffle / dipole speaker for quite some time, but size considerations and driver price kept me away from them. Due to solutions like the MiniDSP, and efforts like John K's NaO speakers, I decided to build a hybrid speaker in every way.
It's not fully active - the x-over between the woofers and the mid / tweeter panel is active, but the mid / tweeter X-O is passive. The active x-over does some response shaping and time alignment too - plus I'll eventually use it to add basic loudness contours (since my equipment does not have tone controls). (The MiniDSP is simply incredible).
And it's not fully dipolar - from 120 Hz and up, the mid / tweeter panel crosses over with 4th order L-R slopes; below that, from 30 Hz to 120 Hz, a bandpass filter allows the bass enclosure to deliver solid bass without overloading the little woofers.
It's fully fun, though. And a revelation to listen to, coming from boxed speakers.
The name.
The original name was Valkyries. I don't know why. For a while, they were going to be the Elyseums. Neither name stuck. Then I listened to them and one word came to mind: "truth". Unfortunately, Veritas, and Verita are already taken.
So I looked at the glossy finish, and the way the drivers interact with their surroundings, and one name came to mind: Reflections.
"Reflexos" is portuguese for that word. Why portuguese? Because that's the language the word looked the nicest.
The hardware.
Living abroad, buying big drivers is sometimes out of the question. The last time I tried I spent close to $500 for 4 RS270s. I'm not doing that again anytime soon.
Besides, I wanted a slim design. True, I could use the woofers in a side-firing configuration, but this being my first OB, I didn't want to add too much complexity to an already unknown design. Plus, once I decided on a Vented Box bass alignment, I could use smaller drivers.
The RS-150 drivers fit the bill. I could use 4 of them - 2 on the mid panel, 2 on the vented box. They are small. They can be used in slim speakers. They sound great - I've already tried them and liked them. They can go up to 1.8 KHz or so using a 4th order filter. And I already had 8 of them.
Allright, so the whole design was born because I had 8 RS-150s.
(Yep. I used the old ones, with the bucking magnet).
The tweeter was a bit more complex. At first I wanted to use the Seas DXT tweeter - then I decided I wanted a full dipole from 180 Hz or so on up, so I'd need two DXT's - expensive. I figured I had a pair of Neo3 PDRs from a box speaker I wasn't using anymore, so I decided to take them out of their enclosures and use them on my new design, with a round flushmount faceplate.
(I sanded them, removed the B&G logo and painted them gloss black. No free advertisements here!).
The MiniDSP was sort of a given - I already had it because I used it to integrate a set of small bookshelfs with a 15" woofer succesfully. And I needed it to shape the response, in order to counteract the dipole bass loss and whatever FR abherrations I could find, and the baffle step for the vented woofers.
(Yeah, it's the balanced one. No way I'm using the non-balanced unit - with a 1V output, I'd be wasting a lot of amplifier power).
For amplification, I wanted to go fancy and use a McIntosh MC-250 for the bass units, and two McIntosh MC-30 amps for the dipole panel. Realistically, though - tube amps are a coin toss when it comes to mating with a particular set of speakers. So I took out my Rotel RB-1070 pair of amps.
To build a slim, small, high-WAF speaker not easily affected by room acoustics.
I've wanted to build an open baffle / dipole speaker for quite some time, but size considerations and driver price kept me away from them. Due to solutions like the MiniDSP, and efforts like John K's NaO speakers, I decided to build a hybrid speaker in every way.
It's not fully active - the x-over between the woofers and the mid / tweeter panel is active, but the mid / tweeter X-O is passive. The active x-over does some response shaping and time alignment too - plus I'll eventually use it to add basic loudness contours (since my equipment does not have tone controls). (The MiniDSP is simply incredible).
And it's not fully dipolar - from 120 Hz and up, the mid / tweeter panel crosses over with 4th order L-R slopes; below that, from 30 Hz to 120 Hz, a bandpass filter allows the bass enclosure to deliver solid bass without overloading the little woofers.
It's fully fun, though. And a revelation to listen to, coming from boxed speakers.
The name.
The original name was Valkyries. I don't know why. For a while, they were going to be the Elyseums. Neither name stuck. Then I listened to them and one word came to mind: "truth". Unfortunately, Veritas, and Verita are already taken.
So I looked at the glossy finish, and the way the drivers interact with their surroundings, and one name came to mind: Reflections.
"Reflexos" is portuguese for that word. Why portuguese? Because that's the language the word looked the nicest.
The hardware.
Living abroad, buying big drivers is sometimes out of the question. The last time I tried I spent close to $500 for 4 RS270s. I'm not doing that again anytime soon.
Besides, I wanted a slim design. True, I could use the woofers in a side-firing configuration, but this being my first OB, I didn't want to add too much complexity to an already unknown design. Plus, once I decided on a Vented Box bass alignment, I could use smaller drivers.
The RS-150 drivers fit the bill. I could use 4 of them - 2 on the mid panel, 2 on the vented box. They are small. They can be used in slim speakers. They sound great - I've already tried them and liked them. They can go up to 1.8 KHz or so using a 4th order filter. And I already had 8 of them.
Allright, so the whole design was born because I had 8 RS-150s.
(Yep. I used the old ones, with the bucking magnet).
The tweeter was a bit more complex. At first I wanted to use the Seas DXT tweeter - then I decided I wanted a full dipole from 180 Hz or so on up, so I'd need two DXT's - expensive. I figured I had a pair of Neo3 PDRs from a box speaker I wasn't using anymore, so I decided to take them out of their enclosures and use them on my new design, with a round flushmount faceplate.
(I sanded them, removed the B&G logo and painted them gloss black. No free advertisements here!).
The MiniDSP was sort of a given - I already had it because I used it to integrate a set of small bookshelfs with a 15" woofer succesfully. And I needed it to shape the response, in order to counteract the dipole bass loss and whatever FR abherrations I could find, and the baffle step for the vented woofers.
(Yeah, it's the balanced one. No way I'm using the non-balanced unit - with a 1V output, I'd be wasting a lot of amplifier power).
For amplification, I wanted to go fancy and use a McIntosh MC-250 for the bass units, and two McIntosh MC-30 amps for the dipole panel. Realistically, though - tube amps are a coin toss when it comes to mating with a particular set of speakers. So I took out my Rotel RB-1070 pair of amps.
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