Big BenD Bass Horn: Performance Measurements

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 With one horn finished, I took it outside to do some frequency response measurements. First thing to do is to measure the horn under conditions similar conditions to the simulations. This is a very important part of designing speakers, if you want to use simulation tools in the process. You need to verify that your simulation is correct, and if not, in what way. It is especially important if you are writing your own simulation software. I think people are getting better at it, but there have been many cases on DIYaudio of people complaining about their simulations being wrong, when the actual problem is that they have not simulated what they have actually built. 

Corner

The actual condition of a horn built into an "infinite corner" (3 infinite baffles perpendicular to each other) isn't easy to achieve in practice. The best I could do was to use the walls of my house and garage:

And then put some extra sheets of plywood between the buildings to try to close the gap.

So, finally the first measurements, with and without baffles. The difference isn't huge, This may be because the garage is still close enough in terms of wavelengths to contribute to the baffle effect. (I'm not sure if the levels are actually correct, trying to do the calibration in ARTA gave some confusing results.)

So how well does this fit with the simulations? Actually pretty good, see below. The Response below 200Hz is almost spot on, the  response at higher frequencies deviates, probably because of the simple model used for simulating the curving, and because I used a different driver than in the measurements. 

What I'm quite happy with is that the curving approach worked as intended: there are no sharp dips and peaks or suckouts in the response, and it doesn't roll off until about 500Hz. This creates a nice overlap with the midrange horn. At the lower end, the response starts to fall off rapidly below 30Hz, which was the intended lower limit. The response is a bit uneven, but we'll see that this changes with a different driver.

Wall

The second test condition is in front of a wall. Neither of the two are fully representative of the operation conditions in actual use, but it will show the effect of placing the horn in front of, instead of flush with, a wall.

The effect of one missing side wall and the increased distance to the back wall is evident: a loss of level at low frequencies that was predicted by both the simulations and scale model measurements. 

Driver Tests

The next measurements were done with REW as I found it easier to do a level calibration there than when using ARTA. Four different drivers were tested:

Altec 515-8G, a 15" driver built in a Celestion FTR-3070 chassis, A 12" guitar speaker, and a 12" high efficiency woofer built using various parts available. The results are shown below. 

There is a clear difference between the drivers; the guitar speaker clearly fails and has a very peaky response (not all musical instrument drivers are suitable for bass horn use, even if Dr. Bruce Edgar had good results with EVM-12). The 15" drivers perform about the same. The best results comes from the 12" driver I built. This isn't actually very surprising, since it has the best impedance match with the horn of all the drivers. 

The dips in the response at 483Hz and 870Hz are from standing waves in the empty rear chamber.

Distortion

Following is some distortion meausrements of the drivers tested. I measured at 95, 105 and 115dB SPL at a 2m distance. Only the results for 115dB (114dB for the 12" prototype) are shown.

The 15" drivers are quite similar in response, but the Altec clearly has lower distortion. The guitar driver has very high distortion (not surprisingly, since it has a stiff paper surround and only 1mm overhang on the voice coil), and is best left to what it was designed to do: create distortion for electric guitars. 

The 12" DIY driver has the smoothest response, and while the distortion is slightly higher than the Altec, they are both quite at "sane" listening levels.  

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