Don Keele, Jr. writes, Thomas Perazella’s audioXpress article “True Bass in a Small Space” described a $900 very high-performance subwoofer system using a low-efficiency high-excursion 18” driver mounted in a 4 ft3 closed box driven by a 1,200 W DSP plate amplifier, with a total weight of only 115 lbs. The system was capable of radiating several acoustic watts down to 30 Hz.
After reading that article, I was reminded of my time at Electro-Voice (EV) in the early 1970s when I designed the EV TL bass box line and specifically a very-large vented-box design called the TL303 for the EV 30W 30” driver. This article describes an equivalent solution from 1975 that provides about the same response and acoustic output, but used a high-efficiency low-excursion 30” driver mounted in a massive 76 ft3 vented-box driven by a 60 W amplifier, with a total system weight that exceeded 800 lb!At the time, the direct-radiator enclosure design theories of Neville Thiele and Richard Small were new and Ray Newman and I and many others at Electro-Voice were at the forefront of encouraging the industry to use the then-new Thiele-Small (T-S) driver parameters for designing vented-box (bass reflex) loudspeaker enclosures.
After reading Perazella’s description of the low-efficiency high-output subwoofer system, I wondered how the vintage 1970s 76 ft3 vented box design with the low-excursion 60 W EV 30” driver might stack up against this latest competition. This article compares the two units using detailed simulations and analysis and comes to a somewhat surprising conclusion.
Read the Full Article Now Available Here.
This article was originally published in audioXpress, September 2017
