Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater No Cabinet?

If I were to build a center speaker and used only tweeters and mid-drivers with closed backs, why would I need a cabinet. There is no backwave to cancel and I am not trying to reproduce significant bass. I am picturing a front panel with a support only. Bet I get beat on this one!

There is such a thing, often called open baffle speakers...

However, there is alot more to designing a speaker than throwing some drivers together, open baffle or not, and calling it a day.

It's too complex for a beating

You don't need a cabinet if all the drivers have sealed backs, but you still might want a baffle of some sort to deal with diffraction effects (either off the sides of the speakers or the baffle). I know almost nothing about that aspect of speaker design however, my main challenge was making sure the cabinet didn't fall apart when playing DSOTM.

What, like AV123's x-Static Open Baffle ?



Note the back..


Those don't look like they have any sort of baffle on the back. Cosmetically, I like this open-baffle look. But I just don't know what they'd sound like. Considering that 99% of all speakers are enclosed cabinet designs, there's got to be a reason for that.

I'd say the reason is: if one is going to include woofers which need more room to breathe, it makes sense to use the entire area of the baffle form one of the sides of the enclosure.

My x-statiks seem to have a much different soundstage than my M80s. More depth maybe? Sound reflecting from the wall behind the speaker I presume.

Plenty of punch.

I like it.

I think you are correct. Check out DIY in the audiocircle forum.

I could be wrong here... if you use an open baffle, a woofer would radiate sound waves from the front-side and also opposite waves from behind the baffle , consequently it will create cancelling waves. That's the reason why a woofer out of a cabinet doesn't sound as loud. Some speakers run 2 out-of-phase woofers on an open baffle to compensate for wave cancellation.

The woofer creating back-pressure waves is a known issue. But it isn't what is being discussed here. On most (well designed) speakers the tweeter and mid-range actually have solid backs, so the pressure of the woofer doesn't push out on them. So it is proposed that a speaker which only has tweets and mids doesn't need to be enclosed in a box, because they are self enclosed.

Having a cabinet behind a sealed tweeter gives you more design flexibility in building a slim tower. I believe the M80 woofer cabinet includes the space behind the tweeter.