outlawaudio? also a sprker building q

Most of that is over my head, kfr01, but I will make comments on a couple of points.  Ever since the internet access company I was using (and paid a year in advance for services with) disappeared in the middle of the night, I have been leary of the business of doing business by internet ONLY.  Any brick-and-mortar establishment carrying the company name, paying taxes, and belonging to the BBB may further their sales by offering internet sales.  I'm all for it.  But I don't trust the invisible cyber-sellers.  A few quotes follow from the Outlaw web page:

"By offering these products directly to you via the Internet, we can eliminate the additional markup required to support a traditional "bricks and mortar" retail store."  Supporting just one established showroom isn't asking too much. 

"The "Outlaws" are a group of audio/video product designers, engineers, and marketers who have been in the consumer electronics industry for a long time."  Do these rebels have names?

"The term OUTLAW seemed fitting for the name of our new company - a company that would break all the conventional rules of retail commerce."   There are good reasons we have conventional rules of retail commerce:  consumers want it that way. 

On the other topic, I don't like the look of the piggyback system you linked to.  Do you?  Why don't you work out a 3-way crossover for the whole shebang and build one unit?  You can tweak the crossover at any time, and would have the benefit of hearing all the components of the system at once.

Oh, and I would port mid drivers anytime their T/S parameters call for it.  The little JBL mids I used in my rear surrounds called for ported.  Do these high-end drivers you referred to need the porting like my JBL's do?

(Just commenting to keep your thread alive  lol)

With my project, I clearly spent too much on the crossover compared to the end value of the speakers.  Being rears, and dipole design so that they work only as rears,  I don't really have the benefit of listen-testing for the nuances you would find in main speakers.  As far as port opening size, I don't see why you couldn't use as little as a 1" for mids.  Think of the shallow amount of excursion in the mid woofer and it's comparative power output.  What size are those?  And did a check with a vent calculator lead you to go with a larger port?

I used 1" with the 4.5" mids in the rears, but the power going to each rear is all of 20 watts.  And the EBP for those woofers is 190!  You should see the feeble bass response with those things sealed.

Question:  what does the port resonance do?  Does it interfere with the sound at that frequency?  The first port resonance on mine is 1691 Hz.  I'm still not done completely with them, and so haven't listened to them much yet.  I just had them set up for a test run one day while coated in primer grey.  But just from that much, I was impressed by their performance and almost invisible presence.  Next time I work on a crossover, I'll go through the steps DYohn outlined in this post.  It allows testing of the crossover and listening to the results while keeping component leads at full length.  So if something is changed out, the component can just be snipped out and it's still completely usable for the next project.  My method was faith.  Everything was glued and soldered and tucked away, so changing something would give me a component with short leads in most cases....harder to use the component again.  That is, if I could get it unstuck from the gob of hot glue.

Excellent.  Thank you for the advice on the crossover.  The books and other resources kinda tend to skip over the practical stuff. 

The extremis is adire's new 6" midrange.  Thanks for the vent calculator / airspeed link.  Very helpful.  Using that calculator it doesn't seem like I'd be creating too much airspeed with even a very short 1.375" port.

EBP for the Extremis is 190?  WinISD gave me 78.6.  Either way, I think ported is probably the way to go.

To be 100% honest with you I'm not sure what port resonance does.  I assume it boosts the sound at that frequency.  I'll have to crack open the loudspeaker cookbood before bed tonight.

Anyway, thanks again for your help and response!