New designs

[Yellow]

Hey. The new 10" system on offer here looks great. It really does, but I fear that the aperiodic design might scare off beginners.
With this kind of bass loading, the BAF wadding has to be filled very carefully into the cabinet.

I suggest a more simple approach to get WD off the ground. What sort of speakers out there are selling well? There's no point in launching a speaker that has no interest to the market!

Maybe WD should go back to basics, and look at a couple of 6-7" driver 2-way designs in stand and floor-mount configurations. Better tweeters can be made an "XL" design as in this first one....I like that.

Crossovers must be simple affairs and the build process simple.

After that, once the business is running, lets get clever with high-order crossovers, transmission-lines and fancy cabinets/driver configuarations.

Neil.

[alnewall]

While I agree with much of what you say. The world might just be waiting for a new aperiodic design. If its a good product, then I'm fairly sure that beginners will take a chance on their cabinet stuffing abilities.
I would be more concerned about being able to listen to it prior to purchase. As the final link in the chain I would like to make sure it was going to be right for my system, personal preferences etc.

Originally Posted by Yellow

Hey. The new 10" system on offer here looks great. It really does, but I fear that the aperiodic design might scare off beginners.
With this kind of bass loading, the BAF wadding has to be filled very carefully into the cabinet.

I'm sure that the build instructions will be very comprehensive if the 1st part (of 3) in the Feb 2006 issue of HFW is anything to go by! It is also good to see that WD are offering a flat-pack cabinet option with the kit as the lack of that would have done far more to scare off any buyers.

Originally Posted by Yellow

I suggest a more simple approach to get WD off the ground. What sort of speakers out there are selling well? There's no point in launching a speaker that has no interest to the market!
Maybe WD should go back to basics, and look at a couple of 6-7" driver 2-way designs in stand and floor-mount configurations. Better tweeters can be made an "XL" design as in this first one....I like that. Crossovers must be simple affairs and the build process simple.
After that, once the business is running, lets get clever with high-order crossovers, transmission-lines and fancy cabinets/driver configuarations.
Neil.

A bit late for suggestions as to how to get off the ground, given that SEAS and Peter Comeau have already designed and developed a kit ready to go and two websites and a forum (and a magazine article) to support it!

I agree with your 'simple crossovers and building' suggestions but any specific designs are being put to the vote in the 'Wish List' threads.

A popular request seems to be for high efficiency 'speakers. But given that SEAS don't seem to produce a woofer over 91dB/w/m and Peter's comments elsewhere about the baffle-step/domestic-acceptability/bass-depth/sensitivity tradeoffs this may be some time coming...

[Ianm2]

yes its interesting, its basically a 3 way tradeoff between bass, sensitivity and cabinet size.

which explains why small boxes with reasonable bass are insensitive.

and big boxes/woofers of yesteryear that are sensitive are suspect in the bass

there is also a sort of tradeoff between excursion and cone size, you can have a massive 15 incher or more that only has a tiny excursion, hence you will only move a little air, as amount of air is cone size times cone movement,(as cone sizes are fairly fixed, the only way to increase air is increase cone movement(excursion, without distorting) then we get into magnets, voice coils, wire turns, diameters and damping all that, too big a magnet to give a strong 'push' and bass will suffer, its all a big mix and I suspect there are only a very limited range of parameter variations, hence why most speakers are coming out pretty similar, and I thought transformers were hard to get your head around, speakers, too are multi dimensional and its nigh impossible for mortals to get a grip of all the factors involved