Now that I’ve now sold my pair of B&W 801 Matrix Series 3 and matching Matrix HTM centre speakers and while I'm waiting to expedite my XPL-200A's from the U.S, I thought I might get some suggestions on starting a project to design and make 2 centre channel speakers to match the XPL-200A's for home theatre use, one for the front and the other for the rear to cater for 5.1 EX DTS 6.1 ES formats.
I thought an easy way to start would be to follow a cut-down version of the 200’s using a vented (single or dual flow-ports) design utilizing an XPL-200A crossover, single 046Ti-1 tweeter, single 093Ti midrange and dual 115H-1 mid-bass drivers.
I have included a picture of what I think an XPL-200 centre may look like, facing front on. As you can see the tweeter and midrange are counter sunk and the mid-bass drivers brought forward using the time arrival corrective baffle step, much like the 200 but chopped off just passed the mid-bass driver and mirror imaged and the tweeter and midrange up-righted. The only problem I see as Giskard pointed out is that the 093Ti (and 046Ti) pretty much demand a stepped baffle such as found in the XPL series so trying to implement a baffle design in a shortened space in a centre speakers design may not be possible/feasible.
Some suggestions for driver replacements would be to use 112H in place of the 115H-1. I’m not sure whether or not using a DX-1 would be an overkill, having a bi-amped centre may seem too much or is it?
I have a guy over here in OZ that builds his own speakers and crossovers and he can also get the cabinets made up and finished in Piano Black Lacquer which would match the 200's.
Apart from that, I could save myself time and tearing my hair out and by a pair of centres and be done with it. Having said that, are there any current or aftermarket centres out there that would make a very good match for the 200’s?
Any suggestions would be much appeciated.
Cheers
Pasadena.
Reply With Quote
