P 19 Open Baffle
a project of ultimate simplicity
This was the first project made for other people
to copy because I
believed this is the best speaker that anyone can copy at home and
enjoy
a 20 000 Euro sound for 1000 Euro. But life is life, after some time I
decided to give the P17 my seal of approval for cloners. P19 seems to
have a touch too light bass, the back-pack box solves this problem in
P17 and also P18 and P21. So please copy P17.
April 2007
This system is pushing the limits of simplicity to the edge.
Although it is a three-way, the whole speaker is as simple to build as
it gets.
The boxless baffle consists of only 4 pieces of mdf (it will be 5 in
the final version.
The drivers are carefully selected for no compromise sound at
reasonable price. Each driver can be substituted with a similar one at
any time without major consequence.
The XO consists of only 5 parts in total, and of course it is
resistor-less.
The enclosure concept can be called an open baffle with folded wings.
The driver choice is: 18 inch generic Alphard RW1800 woofer with 96 dB
sensitivity, 30 Hz resonance and a sonic signature of kinda JBL Pro
series paper cone, Qts around 0,5, Z around 6,5 Ohm, and very very nice
bass sound.
I will instantly answer the most frequent question: "Is my amplifier able to drive such a huge woofer???"
Answer is - the bigger the woofer - the easier it is to drive. I drive these with my 2 wpc amps to thrilling levels.
The mid and tweeter is a antique radio set, a 20 cm midbass and a 10 cm
paper
tweeter - both by SABA, with all characteristic of superb sound .
Magnets are of
course Dortmund Magnetfabrik. In the early prototypes the oval driver
was a no name DM drivers with red cup magnets, but I am not sure they
are alnico. They
look like ferrites.
XO: tweeter : 3,3 uF series
Mid: 100 uF series, 0,3 mH series
Bass: 3,9 mH series, 40 uF paralell.
What is innovative in this design compared to the Endorphines - 17 and 18, is that
the bass driver "sees" directly the floor. No wheels, no spikes -
everything is coupled to the floor as tightly as possible.
Contrary to popular believe, aass should be resting against the floor,
not be isolated with stands and spikes. Floor becomes the baffle
extension. This way bass sounds very very deep and clean IMHO.
Listening straight after Audionote Type E was like ... well, I can't
tell.... Maybe like paragliding in the mountains compared to a walk in
the park.
The open baffles - in my opinion - absolutely thrashed the Audionotes.
As well as they should. With proper bass driver, better midrange, and
no boxy honky boom boom - these speakers take us to totally another league.
During the second test at Hubi's, and mated with a good tubed amp (PP EL34) and lampized Kenwood 5090 it is
one of the finest systems I know of. Especially in a dedicated and well
isolated listening room of Hubert.
PROTOTYPE TESTING
AND NOW COMES THE REFINED AND BEST ENDORPHINE SPEAKER !!!!
Wih the help of a professional carpenter I created the simplest baffle
I could imagine : with just two triangle shaped wings and that's all.
The midbass drivers are no more oval because the oval holes are a nightmare to make, and this project is about simplicity.
The Volks-lautspreher.
So a round opening is doable with either a router or a jigsaw. Or it
can be ordered from a shop by just giwing them the diameter, without
having to make a oval router guide template.
The volks-endorphiners - read popular - can use a generic bass of
15 or 18 inches and any paper 20 cm midbass or widerange driver. Ther
tweeter should have open b ack basket.
The Ultimate Endorphine should have a 15 inch alnico magnet, alnico
paper driver (can be Lowther for example) and Raven2 ribbon
tweeter. All depends on ther budget really.
Straight from the carpenter's the structures have a protective foil to
save the beautiful veneers. As you can see, despite being a NO
COMPROMISE ULRTIMATE SPEAKERS, these babies are nowhere near as
obtrusive as Grande Utopia or Wilson Grand Slamm. They are actually
quite small and WAF positive.
On the back side there is NOTHING. No rocket science is required.
Super materials, advanced box calculations, stiffening, lead-clad
dampening, matrix systems, sneil like nautilus shells - all can
be left for the HIFI rags to rave about. We don't need that and this is
the best news I am bringing to you.
What can I say - the 18 inch bass dominates the design visually. Love it or loathe it.
This one on the top is a fullrange siemens alnico speaker, same basket size as the SABA, but MUCH worse sound. Rejected.
The XO after fine tuning will be presented shortly. These speakers will
be transported to 5 different homes for the different opinions before I
will endorse my seal of approval to copy them and go ahead.
The final issues are:
time alignment
bass arrangement (box or no box and how much of the wings)
Tweeter capacitor
XO- Click to enlarge
This schematics will be very good for the full SABA system as on the picture above.
Click on thee image to enlarge it or just save it.
Bass driver is in oposite polarity.