Cogito wrote:
Vintage Altec cabinets are flimsy by design. They are not used in sub bass region. Those flimsy cabinets produced glorious systems. You should look at One of the most revered vintage system, Altec A7.
Those were the days of high efficiency, high compliance and low Xmas drivers. Now, the drivers are low efficiency, low compliance and high-Xmas which require rigid enclosures.
Shashi,
No real argument here. Although the drivers I'm using I wouldn't characterize as "low" efficiency at 90+dB/W/M, but certainly lower than the Altecs and other drivers from the 50s-60s.
Since the plan wasn't to build a vintage-type system with low XMAX drivers, using an enclosure "gloriously" vibrating due to the back wave of the driver, was not in the plans. The path chosen here might not be right for anyone else, but my preference is to have as little box wall contribution to the sound in the room as practical.
In my advanced years I've had several opportunities to sit and listen to a few Altec systems, including the VOT (A7, right?). Not my cup of tea.
Tom P pointed out to me the rigors of getting a ported enclosure right, and after having tried a few times, I'm agreeing with his approach of building a sealed enclosure and using digital equalization to extend the low end. Bass watts are cheap, unlike in years gone by (where equalization was a lot more difficult also).
I have a another pair of enclosures, 5 cubic feet each, whose resonant point is allegedly out of the driver's operating range. That may be, but the bass from those boxes is so muddy that this project was undertaken.
So, for me, a rigid enclosure is needed.
Thanks for the input, you should drop by sometime!
Stuart