altoncustomtech

That's a fine way to phrase the question. The simplest way to describe it would be that it's a 50/50 mix of both. You get the low end extension and tuneability of a ported enclosure but with the "quality" of a sealed enclosure. Trust me I really HATE to say it that way, but that's the basic description you'll find when you read on PR systems. What that statement really means is that the PR setup has a better overall transient response than a ported alignment, very close to that of a sealed enclosure most of the time. The PR's give the same basic response as you would hear from a ported alignment, a reinforcement of frequencies near the tuning frequency, which is where the low end extension comes from. They're just about as close to the best of both worlds as one can get to the best of my knowledge. The two biggest cons of the PR setup is that it falls between ported and sealed enclosure alignments for the same given driver in output. It's louder than the same driver in a sealed enclosure but it's not as loud as that driver in a ported. They're also more expensive because you have to buy the PR's along with the active driver. I paid about $80 for each of the PR's to match the XCON. All that being said, I love the response I'm getting from the XCON in this setup. It has solid output down to around 25hz. I've played tones on it down to 18hz at which point the sub and PR's are trying to exceed their mechanical limits at a relatively low volume. Even at higher volumes the sub and PR's are fairly well composed at 25hz and up. I had originally tuned the PR's for 30hz but I believe that with the sub and PR's both breaking in have lowered it a bit. I've considered pulling the PR's to remove a little weight and put the tuning back where it belongs however I'm hesitant to do so because of the seal I have on the box. You can push in on one of the PR's and hold it as long as you like and the sub/other PR won't move back in. It's pretty much a perfect seal and I'm afraid I'll have problems with it if I open it up.

I just noticed the Minecraft comment. My kids are consuming almost 65GB out of the 250GB HDD on theirs with Minecraft junk. I don't know how they do it......

I have a friend who had the same issue with GTA V. A USB flash drive, or external HDD will work fine. I gave him an old 120GB external drive I had from the good 'ol days of computer playing and he's not had one issue with it, besides a little lag from time to time.

I hear ya!!! If the opportunity ever works out I'd be glad to demo it to both of you. I don't think it's very impressive on output, as a matter of fact the XCON in a standard ported enclosure would be louder than it is with the PR's. I would be very surprised if it gets anywhere near 140dB in output, though I'll be finding out for sure around the first of the year. It does sound pretty good though, I think it might get your attention in that respect.

Thank you, I appreciate it! All I need to do is build the fiberglass pods for the sail panels and stuff the SLS 8's into the doors to finish the drivers in it out. Then a little reworking on the amp rack to hold a Crescendo BC2000 for the sub, PPI 900.4 or IA 6.4, and a Boston GT2125. Then it will all be done.

Look at the "ignore" preferences in your settings. Posts, signatures, messages, and chats can be disabled there. Make sure you don't have a check in the boxes you want to work.

Hmmm..... Perhaps a user setting in your account is messed up. I know that users have the ability to disable instant messaging, maybe there's one for the chat rooms too?

What browser and OS are you using? I've talked to a few people who, when they use the big chat room find it opens in a separate window and gets lost behind other windows. Even with Chrome in Win7 I right click the chat button and have it open in a new tab so it doesn't open in a new window. It's just easier to deal with that way.

I dunno.... The main one at the top of the page is pretty easy though.

Here are pictures too.

I have a BNIB Zapco i5100.7 sitting here collecting dust, not sure if that would fit your application or not.

Happy Birthday!!

Mark was gracious enough to renew the license for the chat room software on the site so lets show our support and utilize it! It's a feature I enjoy, as do a few others, so lets chat about audio, cars, life, family or whatever else. Thank you Mark and Aaron for giving us this great site to spend our time at and to learn from!!

I'm heading in there now.... in case anyone is on and interested....

Yes they need a crossover, but no separates like that would require a custom made passive crossover that the design of and build of such crossover would likely be out of your comfort zone. Separates really need an active crossover, either built into a HU like the Pioneer 80PRS or the Clarion CZ702 or as a stand alone unit like the miniDSP or a Soundstream Harmony/PPI DSP-88R. The stand alones are more expensive than the HU options but offer MUCH better control of the signal. The cost will throw your budget out the window though and you would also need more amplifier channels free as everything would need to be on separate channels. Look into the Pioneer TS-D1720C components or the Crescendo CZ 6.5's or the SoundQubed QC-HF6.5's in the store to support the site. All are in your price range and decent speakers to use on that amp.

Okay, so I played them at full tilt on 100, 80, 60, 40, and 20hz tones. The bad one with the high Re didn't move as much as the good one at lower frequencies. There was no audible differences in the sound/noise from full excursion movement in one from the other though. So after that I took them apart, wanting to see if there was any noticeable physical difference between them that I could see. Visually the coils look great with nothing unusual to note about them. I'm thinking there's an issue of some sort with the connection of the tinsel leads to the coil causing the high Re on the bad one. It looks as though the coil leads are wound around the tinsel with some sort of compression/crimp on sleeve that attaches them to the tinsel lead itself, then glued down into the joint where the spider meets the coil former. As best I can tell the coil heights are identical and I can't imagine that just one or two extra or lost windings around the former could account for so much of a difference in the dc resistance. I also can't visually see a difference in the gaps, pole height, top plate thickness, or anything else that would have an effect on the measurements. At least visually I not noticing anything but at this point I'm super curious as to what's going on so I'm going to go over it all with a fine tooth comb. I'm going to grab a set of feeler gauges and a micrometer and see what, if any, differences there are in things and go from there. Here's some pics of the disassembled drivers (marked good and bad) just for giggles.

Anyone who's read through my build log knows I had a set of Bravox CS60K components in there for awhile before going to the FR/MB setup. I tried a lot, and I do mean A LOT of things to get the speakers in the component set to sound right and was never able to succeed. In my pursuit of having all the handier tools at my fingertips to use and play with I have been trying to get a DATS V2 from PE for most of the summer and it was finally back in stock this past weekend so I finally got it ordered. It showed up yesterday and to play around with it I connected one of the old midwoofers from the Bravox components just to give it a shot. I got a weird result on the numbers but wasn't able to play with it anymore. Last night before going to bed I tossed the numbers it pulled from the woofer into WinISD and it couldn't even calculate for it. It couldn't show a useful alignment and tried to automatically calculate a -1.606 cuft enclosure (apparently the driver needs to be ran in a wormhole??) so I knew something was up. So today I throw the other one on the DATS and get a perfectly normal looking, very nice set of numbers and when I plugged them into WinISD everything looks pretty damn good and normal there as well. Figuring it was probably a fluke anomaly I threw the first driver back on it and got very consistent results with the first time I tested it after running it five times. So I threw the second driver back on and did the same thing with it. Attached are the numbers it pulled and you'll see what I'm referring to, there appears to be some sort of issue with the first driver. At this point it has me curious as to whether or not the issue with the sound I had was either partly, or entirely due to some sort of problem with the driver itself. Here's the 2nd, more normal looking driver results. Here's the 1st, funny resulting driver results. Look at the differences between the Re, Qts, and Qes. Would love to be able to figure out if it happened during use or if the differences existed from manufacturing.

What table saw is that?

I was scrolling through PE's website last night and ran across a driver that I found interesting. The Fountek FR135EX 5" Full Range driver. First of all, I'm surprised that anyone could get the upper extension to consider it a full range with a cone that large and I'm sure beaming would be a major issue if used off axis. When I look at them though I see one thing they could do that a 3" couldn't which is lower end extension. The only real problem I have with the 3" full ranges that I'm using now is the fact that lower/deeper vocals and other such information is pretty anemic. That requires the midbass drivers to reach up a little more than is optimal to bridge the gap keeping things sounding natural but also causing a small shift in the sound stage/image due to the distance between their placements. My thoughts are that if the FR135EX was placed properly on axis to prevent beaming and it could ACTUALLY (being the key factor) reach the upper registers without any more issue than the 3" drivers can do then it would/should have a little more body and realism to the lower end that the 3" lack and make a nearly perfect point source driver. Perhaps? I just don't have the experience with a great number of drivers on the market be it DIY/raw drivers or commercial/retail brands to even have a clue how to compare this driver and it's perspective performance in such an application. So, anyone got any opinions, experience with it, etc? If they weren't $99 a piece I'd have done bought them to find out for myself, but at that price that's REALLY hard to justify doing.

Something is definitely wonky with the one, I also grabbed my DMM to verify the Re measurements, which happened to be spot on. The voice coil on the one definitely has a DC resistance that's over 10 ohms. I'm about half tempted to tear them both apart and compare the coils, gaps, suspensions and everything else I possibly can to try to find the cause of the wonkiness of the screwy one. The voice coils, visually through the vents on the frame, look like they're both good so I believe it's going to come down to a closer inspection. It could be my eyes playing tricks on me, but it appears that there may be a slightly larger gap between the point where the cone glues to the coil former and where the spider glues to the coil former on one over the other. If there is any difference between the two its super slight, perhaps a millimeter or two. Not sure how much of a difference that would make on response/measurements, surely not that much and it sure wouldn't affect the DC resistance. I did notice I got CONSIDERABLY more consistent results with the DATS v2 when I tested a driver with it in a super quiet environment with no air moving and no background noise. It's definitely no Klippel, or even the LMS LX500, but for getting some numbers for drivers that I would otherwise never be able to know the T/S of without spending thousands on at least the LMS system it's got to be better than nothing. I have a pair of old ten and twelve in woofers that came out of some old console cabinet stereos, along with a fair number of other miscellaneous drivers that either the manufacturer is no longer in business or the data was never publicly available, and many other reasons like that a device like the DATS could come in handy for. I figured as long as it's consistent then it's good enough for some of that old crap or even other stuff that I can't find/get data for, or at least better than just shooting in the dark.

It's no Klippel by any means, but I figured for messing around it's not completely horrible. Well, I would have agreed it's not possible except that I've tried it now on nine other drivers, pulling numbers on each one 5 times. Each of those five times the numbers are very close. Also on eight of those tested, half were the same types of drivers (four Bravox marine speakers, and four Fountek FR83's) and they too are also all pretty damn close to each other. I do believe this one Bravox mid driver has some kind of defect. What it is, I have no clue, but everything else so far has been pretty consistent except for it.

Thanks Aaron. Yeah I'm in the same position right now with the FR88's, MLI65's, and XCON. Quite honestly the FR's give me all the output I ask of them without an ounce of distortion. If anything I can find the output limitations of the Focal Solid 2 that's powering them before they run out of steam themselves. I don't find them the least bit output challenged, at least not for my ears. I'm also with you on the bright highs, the FR's do an excellent job of covering the far end of the spectrum to my ears as well. AA Carbons are something I would love to play with for sure though, lol. I started the thread though looking for anyone who had heard the FR135EX's specifically to get an understanding of exactly what their response was like in real world use. If they were only say $30 or $40 a piece, or close, I'd have bought them to see for myself. I'm trying to broaden my horizons and get some experience with more drivers to get a better understanding of how their T/S parameters, FR graphs, and other data translate into the real world. It's a damn slow process though, lol. I do like the discussion so far though, both sides of the topics at hand are enlightening.

I certainly don't have the knowledge or experience you do Impious so I don't feel I have any ground to stand on to debate. It know may not be ideal, or perfect, but it's been easier to setup and tweak than anything else I've played with over the years. Very little EQ work to get them sounding smooth as glass, at least in my opinion. Of course it's all about perspective as well, and I'll again readily admit I don't have the experience and ear time with anything better than cheap/average component sets in factory locaitons. I'd love to start experimenting with trying different DIY/raw drivers ran active to build my own 2 and 3 way speaker systems but I just don't have the knowledge for looking at specifications on drivers and knowing if/how they will work well with one another. I also don't have the money to just throw at drivers to really do that much experimentation either. The full ranges have been a simple and, at least to me, successful experiment though, and cheap.

Yeah, I've wondered on more than one occasion if the old Logitech pods were hurting response or not. I figured I would get my answer when I get the fiberglass sail panel pods built. I have to remember that since these aren't permanently installed, nor the final drivers I planned on using/trying that my results will change in the future anyway. Again, the most fun I've had playing with speakers in quite some time. I'm not surprised that the 5" would have issues with the high end. The spec sheet graph shows a fairly level response out to 20khz, but I know it doesn't work that way in use. How much more critical than the three inches is it really, at least in my application? Sitting in the drivers seat with the drivers directly on axis with me there's not typically any situations where I wouldn't be inside the sweet spot.

Okay, but I thought the purpose of using the full range/dedicated midbass combo was to alleviate issues that can be associated to using separate tweeter/mid on the high side by essentially having a point source driver for the majority of the musical information we hear. To me, and in my own opinion, the full ranges are giving me pretty much exactly what I wanted in my truck. A nice, wide, and stable sound stage and image that sounds great on pretty much everything I play on it. I don't have a loss of "sizzle" on the top end that bothers many others, at least not enough to bother me or to miss it. The midrange is spot on for my listening tastes and the output is more than adequate for my listening needs/habits. Like I said the only issue I have is that on the occasional song that focuses on it, the blend between the midbass and the full range can be noticed. Otherwise, on the rest of the music I play on it, I don't notice anything. I'm having more fun playing with this setup than I have any other so it's no big deal.