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Zilch's AK Design Collaborative - Econowave Speaker

truth seeker said:
The Doug Mockett Co. provides specialty hardware for furniture. There are others besides posted below:

http://www.mockett.com/furniture-hardware/furniture-legs-casters/small-lil?p=1

FL1-100_03A-259px.jpg
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Thanks Truth, I really like the one on the far right top row. Very sexy.
 
One DQ-10 Ewave under way

Here's one semi-finished Ewaved DQ-10.

Old woofer removed
Crossover removed
Old upper drivers removed
Cabinet cleaned, repaired and painted
Cabinet drilled for #10-32 T-nuts for woofer
Woofer frame painted
Terminals installed for woofer on top
Woofer installed with foam gasket tape

There was a ridiculous amount of horsing around to fill the terminal cup holes and the wire hole in the top of the cab.

The WG, DE250 and XO are still sitting on top. I have to decide how to position the WG and how to attach it.

The grille frame will be disassembled, the black repainted and the walnut refinished. It will get new cloth, probably brown Jersey.

The stands need some work as well.

After I'm done fooling with the XO, which will probably involve lowering the LP frequency as discussed, I'll make up permanent XO boards and lash everything down.

Right now I'm playing Meeting By the River, Kavi Alexander's excellent Water Lily Acoustics recording of Ry Cooder and V. M. Bhatt. This recording is 16 years old and sounds awesome in mono. The amp is my Make Magazine Squelette chip amp prototype.
 

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Zilch said:
Someone clever'd hook 'em up to move QSCs back and forth for optimize time alignment and not have to kerfutz with the eWave filters.... :thmbsp:
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There's only so much room behind the grille but I can re-drill the grille attachment holes to give about another 2 - 3" of forward movement. Doing that means you lose the back screen. I still have to change the filter to flatten the crossover region. There's about 3 dBs of excess energy there.
 
The X-overs are complete (thanks Zilch for sme great looking boards!!!!), and all parts are in minus the waveguides. They should show up Thursday.

The HD-77 boxes are almost ready for the woofer and waveguide cutouts.

I'm sooooo pumped up. I've waited for this for a long time. I'm trying to get these finished before my 2nd son is born - t-minus 21 days!!!

I've taken pics along the way. I'll post a montage when they are complete.
 
Bauhausler said:
There's only so much room behind the grille but I can re-drill the grille attachment holes to give about another 2 - 3" of forward movement. Doing that means you lose the back screen.
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Just kidding, actually. You'll be able to make it work in the same plane as the woofer, is my guess. :thmbsp:

1scienceguy said:
I'm sooooo pumped up. I've waited for this for a long time. I'm trying to get these finished before my 2nd son is born - t-minus 21 days!!!
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This'd better work.... ;)
 
djnagle said:
Thanks Truth, I really like the one on the far right top row. Very sexy.
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That's my favorite as well. The one truth seeker posted is similar to ones I've seen on ebay for less $$. You also need mounting plates for the FL1 legs so that brings the price very close to used JBL legs on ebay.
 
over on another forum

there has been some talk about the need to "optimize" the junction between the CD driver and horn...for what it's worth, maybe I've been sucked into an area of diminishing returns...along with that, YMMV

Working with the B&C DE250 & QSC waveguide, this is what I've found today:

I removed the bug screen from the cd to determine the exit angle and allow a better fit to the horn. I found the exit angle to be 14 degrees (7 degrees from axis), the throat includes 2 ridges roughly (how appropriate...) located @ the third points along its length. The ridges go all the way around the throat...they look like mold joints. The throat shows some scratch/sanding marks. I'm guessing these are the result of some QC(?) to smooth the ridges. I'll get back to them later. ...no sense fiddlin' with them before the concept has been proven, eh?

The studs provided with the DE250 are too short to extend through the QSC horn to allow nuts and lockwashers any purchase. They need to be at least 3/8" longer.

The throat of the QSC horn is (very)slightly oversize. In spite of this, I'm considering making a mandrel to sand/shape/refine the QSC profile to improve the match with the cd. Along with this, a spacer between the cd & horn may be necessary to ease/replace the loss of material.

You also need mounting plates for the FL1 legs so that brings the price very close to used JBL legs on ebay.
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The legs are already tapped, you would only need a suitable stud to attach them to...maybe an internal hurricane nut w/ threaded rod? Though that would only work with straight legs...
 
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Some notes on the sound of the DQ-10wave

I've been listening to these hybrids a bit and the sound has started to make sense to me. This is not an audiophile speaker. There's no 'air peak' or 'detail bump' in the treble. Audiophile speakers, especially ambitious ones, often have a rising treble response so when they're briefly auditioned they have lots of 'air' and 'detail'. The detail bump is often achieved with the underdamped metal dome tweeters popular in the '80s. This extra detail briefly sounds like the speaker is giving you more information but over the long term sounds grainy and causes fatigue. I used to notice this more before I spent a lot of hours at Techno clubs and prematurely wore out my ears' response above 14K. Working in a machine shop had a similar effect.
The DE250/QSC combo with the Ewave compensation sounds and measures like it has a fairly linear response up top. I'm using a lot of attenuation on the horn. The Lpad is turned down about 70% to match the level of the woofer. This may change as the freshly re-foamed woofer gets some hours on it and loosens up.
The woofer sounds like an Advent woofer. The cabinet is different from an Advent. GordonW says the internal volume is smaller. It has a central chamber and 2 trapezoid shaped sides that open to the center through 1" slots at the back. It's moderately damped with fiberglass.
Before I rebuild the other DQ-10 I'll put the matching woofer into an Advent cabinet and try them side by side to see if there's a difference in perceived bass extension. The DQ-10 cabinet seems to be a little cleaner sounding and less 'chesty'. This may be due to being heavier and much better braced than the Advent cab, especially the Utility, which has large unbraced panels with the potential for resonances.
I haven't given them a complete workout on the bottom end. That would involve some '90s Big Beat Techno and a little more drive than my 11 WPC chip amp prototype will provide, although the sound is amazingly solid for an amp that weighs less than the woofer it's driving.
It's tempting to say if the bass isn't good enough I'll just add subs. Easily said, but here that means doubling the amplification, adding a line level LP crossover for the sub and endless fiddling. After going through that numerous times with indeterminate results I'd rather just build a pair of 2-ways that play with decent bass balance and can be run from a single amp.
 
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I asked Ken Kantor about the triple-chamber DQ-10 woofer box, and his first reaction was that the dividers were invisible at those frequencies.

As to whether they are different with respect to performance, he gave me a generous dose of my own medicine: "Measure...." :tongue:
 
Zilch said:
I asked Ken Kantor about the triple-chamber DQ-10 woofer box, and his first reaction was that the dividers were invisible at those frequencies.

As to whether they are different with respect to performance, he gave me a generous dose of my own medicine: "Measure...." :tongue:
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I'll bet in-box impedance measurements would tell a lot about the loading. I'll have to try that and see. I really don't have a setup for accurate acoustic testing of low frequencies. He's right about the partitions being irrelevant to bass. The longer wavelengths are unaffected by the slot unless the velocity gets really high and maybe not even then.
Interestingly, the DQ-10's crossover has 8 Ohms of resistance across the woofer, which flattens and lowers the impedance seen by the amp (and wastes half of the power).
 
djnagle said:
Hey Ross, those will be very sharp looking eWaves.
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I have a long way to go before they're done. Gotta refinish the frames & recover them, figure out the crossover, etc.
Predictable, I'm already catching some mild flack from DQ-10 fans.
 
Bauhausler said:
I have a long way to go before they're done. Gotta refinish the frames & recover them, figure out the crossover, etc.
Predictable, I'm already catching some mild flack from DQ-10 fans.
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Not sure why anyone would give you flack for improving the DQ:D
 
djnagle said:
Not sure why anyone would give you flack for improving the DQ:D
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That's because you're a modder who has never met the world's most perfect product that it's heresy to alter.
No crowd has appeared yet with pitchforks and torches so I may get away with it. Gotta be careful with these Hi Fi icons after the abuse I took for my updated Heath W5m amps. You'd have thought I'd turned a Bugatti Royale into a chopped, slammed and flamed hot rod.

I'll have to leave this project, and possibly this thread alone for a while. Way behind on the magazine article with 15 days to go. Must keep the editors happy if I want future writing work.
 
I assembled standard high eff.XOs yesterday, went pretty smooth never having soldered. Thought I would wait to finish next weekend when I get wood to make boxes. Not! I temporarily hooked them up today & WOW! Kudos to Zilch & all involved with this thread.! I have Altec Madrid cabs with Model 14 woofer.Used the Selenium D220Ti drivers on the Pyle PH714 horn(Altec 811b knockoff).Sound is awesome so far with a couple hrs listening, no more need to eq the heck out of them.Dialed back the l-pad just a tad-wonderful. $200 was almost as much as I have paid for any speakers, well worth the investment!!! Center channel will be a future project.
Thanks!!! Robert
 
Bauhausler said:
That's because you're a modder who has never met the world's most perfect product that it's heresy to alter.
No crowd has appeared yet with pitchforks and torches so I may get away with it. Gotta be careful with these Hi Fi icons after the abuse I took for my updated Heath W5m amps. You'd have thought I'd turned a Bugatti Royale into a chopped, slammed and flamed hot rod.
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The ultimate truth in life is that virtually everything becomes garbage eventually.

A couple months ago I showed my brother the video clip of the Advents getting eWaved. It was quite comical and a little scary to see to see a 53 year old man get visibly upset and angry over someone hacking up thrift store speakers. Maybe they looked to much like the ones in his garage...a $10 yard sale find.

I'm sure he would go ape sh*t over the DQ10s. I think that was his favorite from his 70's hi-fi retail gig.
 
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