ceharden scrie:
Here's another one I've come up with.
following reading about edge difractions etc i also came to the conclusion that having a floating mid and high section could result in problems, so i also considered baffle mounting the mid and high horns, side by side.
not surprisingly then my current thinking looks exactly like what ceharden has just drawn. issues arising include the difficulties encountered in building the throat for the 12" drivers (getting the front chamber down to ~3l and making a nice transition from compression chamber to horn proper is tricky with inverted drivers, but the possible benefits have meant that i haven't abandoned this layout) and the fact that the hf horn can not be dragged back to align with the high mid driver.
of course, we could still do this and stick the hf into the top 12" flare, facilitating the use of a passive crossover, in my mind still a
very worthwhile goal. on another positive note, the whole bifurcation argument goes out of the window with this layout so we can be fairly sure we will be modelling the horn(s) correctly.
i'm glad we are wandering back into the realms of hornloaded mid bass. i totally see your point ceharden that a proper beastly 135 dB narrow dispersion array cab will be complete overkill for most of the events that you do, for that reason a dr mid bass suddenly seems not just attractive but it becomes the obvious choice. casting back to the design objectives though, wasn't the reason for starting this project the lack of an arrayable all horn top box to complement the awesome array of bass cabinets on offer?
that eaw cabinet is a triumph of layout and component density and it throws up some very interesting ideas. sadly, i think the prorietary mouldings on the high mid and hf waveguides are fairly essential for the correct operation of the box and also let us not forget that will have an exceedingly wide horizontal and very narrow vertical dispersion pattern, not quite what we are after. the mid bass element is fascinating isn't it, there appears to be a slot entry horn for the first part, but then the remaining length of the chambers are parallel walled and full of obstructions, very odd. still, quite an inspiring sight.
james.