The “baffle” is the front of the cabinet. The part that the drivers sit in.
“Disappearing” is generally defined as sounds coming from an imaginary soundstage rather than the speaker. If you close your eyes and point to the sounds and what you’re pointing to is the speaker, it hasn’t disappeared. If it’s done really well, you don’t even need to close your eyes. The soundstage goes beyond the boundaries of the speakers and it’s as if the music didn’t originate from them.
The larger the baffle, the more diffraction. The more diffraction, the more loss of fidelity and, the easier it is to localize the speaker. Diffraction is when the sound wave wraps from the driver cone back and bounces off the baffle and comes forward towards you (sort of like an echo of the original wave). It looks like this (this image splits what I call diffraction into two - reflection and diffraction):
The main advantage of a 3 (or more) way speaker is that all the drivers play a narrower frequency band. This takes a lot of stress off them and reduces distortion. You get a dedicated driver for bass, midrange and, tweeter.
Speakers are not like cans where a single driver can handle the entire spectrum. Mainly because to reproduce bass frequencies in a room vs the tiny space between the headphone and your ear, you need to move a lot of air. If you put your headphones in the middle of the room, you’ll hear all the highs, most of the mids and, none of the bass - the driver simply can’t move enough air.
So, to move a lot of air, you need a big driver. Big drivers are heavy and therefore can’t move fast enough to play high frequencies. So you need more drivers.
Compromises are all encompassing. Each company and/or their speaker designer(s) have their own idea of what attributes are most important to them and what compromises they’re willing to make.
As mentioned above, find a speaker that matches your preferences (just like with a headphone) and don’t worry about the rest. It’s like being in love with a dynamic headphone but worrying that it’s not a planar - there’s no point.
Don’t worry if they’re ported or not. If you want low frequencies, the main thing is large drivers (low frequency reproduction requires moving large volumes of air). Don’t buy a 6" “sub”. That’s not a sub. Go 10" or larger.
Didnt sit with full attention though zeos review of a add on super tweeter. But wouldnt a 3-way be needed for HI-res recordings that feed signal past the 20khz and from what i gather humans cant hear.
If you going for something like Bryston Mini T speakers or any other more in good realm speakers, i personally would NOT mix super tweeters with them.
They more for the DIY nation listeners and tweakers imo. Horn load everything and so on. lol
Yes, good speakers with a sound you like. DSP to aid and add sub for flavor if needed.
This is a great image posted by @A_Jedi it also is a perfect example of how there’s answer and engineering solutions for every problem, they then negate or lessen an issue but perhaps introduce another issue of their own.
With the super wide front baffle you don’t allow for diffraction to occur anywhere near the listening area. Obviously the baffle can’t go on forever but this technique moves refraction to where it won’t be heard by the listener. Again, for every decision there’s a negative aspect that will impact so decision and will have to be addressed.
Speaker design is the prototypical example of many ways to solve a problem, but you have to decide which problem you want to solve/which is important.
In high end speakers you still see
Horns
Ribbons
Single driver designs
Line Arrays
Dipoles
Open Baffle Designs
Ported Designs
Sealed Designs
Passive Radiators
Designs where cabinet resonance is intentional.
Omni directional’s (though rare now)
etc etc.
You can point to strengths and weaknesses of all of these designs, the fact there isn’t really an agreement in the price not a consideration range really suggests it’s more about how well implemented something is and what particular aspect you find important.
A good speaker will play well past 20 KHz. Adding a super tweeter is like adding a racing stripe to a car expecting it to go faster.
As @MadGman mentioned, they’re usually used in the DIY world to augment non-standard designs. The DIY world (and to a much lesser degree the standard hi-fi consumer biz) likes to play with weird, interesting designs just because it’s fun to see what you can get out of them.
Wide baffle designs that sound good are also possible as @db_Cooper mentioned. They are generally used to augment speakers who’s drivers are not large enough to reproduce low frequencies well.
What happens is, as the frequency decreases the waves become larger (wider) so instead if bouncing off the baffle and coming back at you, they wrap around the front baffle. The result at the listening position is a drop in low frequencies. This is known as “baffle step”. If you make the baffle large, those lower frequencies don’t have the opportunity to wrap around - they bounce off the baffle and come forward towards you. It’s basically a low frequency gain. The speaker shown above requires this because the driver is relatively small. It’s small on purpose though - it’s meant to be a single driver speaker for the benefits that gives you - namely eradicating phase issues since there’s no crossover and you’re not dealing with multiple driver acoustic centers. It’s size (relatively small) is dictated by the fact that we’re most sensitive to midrange frequencies so the driver used should be of optimal size to reproduce them.
Interestingly, THAT specific speaker is a prime candidate for a super tweeter. It uses a paper wizzer cone (in the center of mid) to reproduce high frequencies. The wizzer cones are not exceptional at very high frequencies.
But again, it’s all a series of tradeoffs. The large baffle creates a lot of reflections which produce smearing and distortion.
My personal philosophy is I want the smallest baffle possible. I want to hear only what the driver has to say - it’s the most capable of reproducing musical information properly. I don’t want to hear the cabinet. The cabinet is a passenger that’s doing it’s own thing.
In another “however”, you may prefer to hear the cabinet. There are plenty of large cabinet, large baffle designs that people enjoy. The distortion they produce gives a more “live” feeling to the presentation (if you go to a live music event, the sounds you hear are not pristine, super clear, super detailed, with a black background).
The large Klipsch speakers and the Davore Audio speakers are examples and of large baffle, “live” cabinet designs. “Live” in this case referring to the fact that they add audible artifacts, not that they sound like live music.
All very interesting stuff. So i guess there isnt a hard fast rule when it comes to what is the better bookshelf design. The variable that does come into play is non instrumental LFE ?
Bookshelfs cant push enough air to reproduce sub-bass low frequency effects, learned that on hifi guides. My cheap $200 10in subs struggle to play daft punk “doing it right” or the opening scene in “edge of tomorrow”.
A good 10" should enough. Unless you want a lot of really low end rumble…like movie theater type stuff. Then get 4 15" subs lol. What kind of sub is it?
Whatever goes on sale. First one was a klipsch R100 . then i got a jbl stage 10in, the $200 one. Picked up a 2nd jbl for symmetry. All my stuff is cheap, the shallow end of the pool is where i play.
Glad you mention 4 15s was thinking adding a pair of 12s for my rear corners in the HT. Whats the skinny on a sub with passive radiators vs a ported one. I use the hometheater 50/50 movies/music.
Circling back to monitors did we cover MTM ? I got 2 pairs of center ch as stereo.
They sound pretty good.
A passive radiator does the exact same thing as port. It has two advantages the biggest of which is that the cabinet required is smaller. The second advantage is that there is no chance of port chuff (port turbulence causing farting type noises). A well designed port should not have this issue.
MTM has two main advantages. First, the speaker efficiency goes up, second, the vertical dispersion pattern is controlled (it’s narrower vertically than a typical speaker). This is useful if you’re concerned about floor or ceiling reflections.
