Barcelona question.

[89-300ce]

They refer to the cabinet as infinite baffle. Is this similar to "acoustic suspension"?

Jorg

[Mr. Widget]

They refer to the cabinet as infinite baffle. Is this similar to "acoustic suspension"?

Jorg

Outwardly yes, but functionally no. They are both sealed boxes. An infinite baffle is where the volume of the box is great enough that the cabinet does not appreciably affect the free air resonance of the driver... it's sole purpose is to prevent the out of phase back wave information from canceling the sound coming from the front of the driver. Typically infinite baffle designs were where you mounted a speaker in a wall using one room as the enclosure while listening to music in the other room.

In an acoustic suspension design you use a woofer with extremely low Fs and use the trapped air in the box as a spring. The system resonance will be significantly higher than the driver's resonance however using a driver with a very low resonance to begin with you end up with a system with a reasonable resonance and typically a decent albeit low sensitivity low end.

In the case of modest sized cabinets like the Barcelona, they are not really being truthful... there is cabinet loading. Most of these so called infinite baffle designs are neither true infinite baffles or acoustic suspension.


Widget

[89-300ce]

Thank you.

Any "guess" as to the real world frequency response of these speakers? 40 -10k? Would you think it possible to run an external supertweeter with these or would that be blasphemy?

Jorg

[robertbartsch]

The 411 woofer is rated to 20hz, I suppose.

Adding a super tweeter to these systems was not uncommon. I did this to a VOTT system 35 years ago with good results. The Altec compression drivers are not known for their UHF response.