StabMe

Since the room i am planning to place the MEHs in is kinda big and has very little furniture in it, i was thinkiong about placing diffusers on the walls. As of now, the room is very echoey. I already have 6 Leanfusers prebuilt and i was contemplating on making 4 more. Here is how i am going to place them: The room is about 6 meters wide and 12 meters long. Ceiling height is about 3.1 meters. Listening position is about 3.5 meters from the front wall. I was also thinking about placing filling a 3x3 meters space on the ceiling that is between listening position and front wall with 2D 60x60cm diffusers in a chess fashion. To make them lighter weight, i was thinking about making them out of XPS of maximum density i could find. Of course, i will put a carpet on the floor. What do you think? This is what can be done relatively easy. Should i expect some nice results?

Frankly, i don't even know what process the guy is using. Based on what he said, basically the workflow if as follows: prime the part to be painted, see if anything sticks out, polish 'bad' regions, prime again and if nothing comes up the part is painted. Just can't wait to hear it! I decided to strengthen the box walls as in the pics:

The project is moving very slowly, as i stated earlier in this topic. Managed to paint and polish all the parts of the first speaker. Here is how the horn part looks: Preparing the horn for painting took a lot of time. The second speaker is still in the making. The guy who works on it promises to have it ready in a week or two. Can't wait to give them a listen! Oh, and i bought a locally made clone of the JLH amp which will be used for HF duties.

I discovered that JLH amp realization can be bought here at an affordable price. Small local company produces them here. I can be sure that it is made of quality parts and indeed pure Class A. With Chinese versions this is a lottery. I remember Chris was writing about appropriate type of amps for horns, but it is too complicated for me to understand if JLH fits the requirement.

BTW, can anyone comment on an idea of using JLH amp for HF? There a few versions of this 10W per channel amp available at Chinese stores that can be bought relatively cheap and have good reviews. For the LF i will be buying something separate. Shooting for about 100W per channel. Or will i need more power to be able to boost some lows as well?

I decided to share 3D files i used with the community. If this helps the community as a whole or any person here individually, i am very glad that i can pay back just this little. Files are available at this link. Most of the info (even file names) are in Russian. But the text part of the instructions are somewhat redundant and nobody really going to have problems understanding which parts goes where. And even then there is Google Translate which can handle the text, i believe. Oh, and I am here and can help with translation as well.

Hey! The project is moving, albeit somewhat slowly. The guy at the carpentry is now gluing the parts together. Brought loudspeakers to him yesterday so that he can he if they fit nicely and do amendments if necessary. Some pics:

That is a lot of info to digest Very educational. Thank you, Chris.

Well, you are probably correcting direct speaker response as opposed to a mix of direct and reflected sound. If not, then I am one of those who couldn't and wouldn't tell

After seeing a few builds with detachable second flare, i was contemplating on the idea of making mine like this, but then i decided to make it full range and used double 15", which kinda made the detachable flare impossible. You didn't document this one on the forum, did you? Found your older threads, but not one on this buid. I will first try it without the sub. If I feel that the sub is needed, i will make two of them based on the Kicker driver I have (mentioned earlier in this thread) and will cross them at around 30-40Hz. They are monstrous BTW, Chris, what slope do you use on your subs? LR24?

Well, what's left is the speaker itself. So by measuring from 1m distance we are correcting speakers, not the speaker-room interaction? Or, even while the mic is placed 1m from the speaker, we still have the room effects, only we see less of the room in the measurements. My understanding.

Chris, this is great information and i will definitely use that approach when the time comes and compare the result with correction over the listening position. Lately i've been using a movic mic measurement technique with REW which gave me nice results. It is gonna be very interesting to A/B the results. There is also an old ConEq software and newer software called APL by the same guy who was the main developer behind ConEq. This software also uses a nearfield measurements, although they take about 80-300 measurements per time by playing and recording short sweeps: But when measuring the reverberation and effect of room treatments, do we really need to take the room out? Isn't the room and its behavior in fact what ought to measure? This part is confusing.

@ChrisA, what is the reason for measuring at 1m from the speaker as opposed to at the listening position? Intuitively i would assume that what matter is what's happening at where my ears at.

Will deal with absorption iteratively. Those graphs look great Chris.

BTW, This is how my listening place will look like with speakers installed: Do those windows pose a real problem as far as corner loading goes? Maybe some other problems? Any obvious places to add room treatments?

Thanks! Will definitely share those along with measurements i will be able to take. Correct, the ratio is about 1/10th - as per Chris' experience and recommendation. My plan is to run mids up to about 450-500 or somewhere in the middle. Will decide upon measurements. I like your build! Looks impressive. So you've made curved parts out of XPS, covered them with fiberglass and epoxied them as to make them sturdier and put them inside of the box? Or is curved flare detachable? Those almost fridge sized boxed below speakers - are those subwoofers? There is a guy over at DIYAudio who made a few Synergy builds, who likes to cross them at 100Hz, likes single injection port per driver and likes them not to be offset. Is it you by chance? Can't remember the nickname at that forum.

Sadly I am not a superhuman, so I will go ahead and start designing the SUB for this system. Here is how it looks in SketchUp.

Yeah, those two build were quite inspirational for me so I couldn't resist the temptation and started tinkering with SketchUp which lead to building a pair. I don't mind sharing the plans with the community. There are a few errors in the drawings, I will fix them and then share the whole package. I got so much info from this forum, I hope those plans and drawings bring at least some value. That is good to hear! A question - since MEH will require some boost at the lower end to reach 20Hz and lower, is there a risk or increased distortion? Maybe that would be a good reason to build a pair of tapped horns? I am working on a plan of TH design that reaches to about 20Hz with a flat curve based on a Kicker L7 12" car subwoofer that i have laying around: Although, group delay seems a bit high:

Own? Of course not. I think this design is owned by Klipsch. Well, at least the horn itself. And i just looked what other guys on the forums did with the horn and tried to replicate it by playing in SketchUp. BTW, i used SketchUp just a few times before to design a speaker stand. I hope there is no violation of any law by what I am doing. Well, i guess there shouldn't be, since I am not getting any profit from it. This forum provides a lot of inspiration. Of course I will share all the info here - where else will I find like minded people like pals from this place? All the others are quite sure I am crazy Claude, I've read a lot about your QPie horn. By the graph and looks of it, it must provide great dynamics and slap. How would you compare synergy horns with the Pie? I hope that the horn I am building, having that huge mouth area and being corner loaded, does provide some loading in the midbass, but i am not quite sure if it will provide 'true' midbass horn sound.

Hey there people! So I've been fascinated by the whole idea of Synergy type speakers. Read a lot on DIYAudio forum and even tried to build a few using off the shelf horns. They sounded OK, but i still had that bug inside that made me want more. Then I stumbled upon ChrisA's thread on a synergy type speaker based on K-402 horn. Gone through the whole thread and through many more others, read up benefits of full horn loaded systems, modulation distortion, constant directivity and all that jazz and that made me crave a pair of K-402-MEHs even more. Buying a set of horns was out of my budget, so i started exercising an idea of building the whole system from scratch. I found a thread on an Australian forum, where a guy made a pair of K-402 replicas out of wood and XPS foam. The guy had already made huge part of the job on estimating the size of the horn, expansion rate, where it starts to curve and the curves themselves. So i opened SketchUp and started playing with the model based on images of his horn. After i was satisfied with the model of the horn, I began working on other parts - the box, placement of HF driver and woofers, small parts that help hold the whole thing together. This is how the model looked first: But i knew that i am not an engineer or an experienced woodworker and since i was not going to (or was capable of) assemble the whole thing by myself, i was in need of a help of a professional who would work on the model and made sure that all the elements fit together nicely, that the parts could be machined on a CNC and prepare the drawings necessary for production. Here are some shots of how the model looked after the guy i hired modified it: In the end I had drawings and STL files so those could be used while CNCing the parts. Now all major parts are ready and guys from local woodworking shop are assembling those: I will be using Faital HF204 for HF duties and Beyma SM-115N for LF. Bought them already. As for the amp, i will use an old AV receiver. Beymas are 8Ohm but i will connect them in parallel, so there is enough power in the receiver to drive them. And i will probably not need deafening sound pressure levels. Will consider swapping the receiver for something of higher quality if i am not satisfied. I have a room that is relatively big - 12X6 meters which is about ~40X20Ft. Speakers will be in the corners. If i am not satisfied with LF performance i will build a couple of tapped horns (have a few ideas on those). I want to thank ChrisA for all the help he provided via private messaging and patience to my questions. Without him I would never come up with an idea of building this speaker in the first place and without his help i would build some garbage So i hope this project turns out well. Can't wait to bring those monsters in my house and start the tuning process. -------------------------------- While the project is still in the building stage, I decided to share 3D files i used with the community. Hope this is helpful and somebody will duplicate the whole project or some parts of it. Most of the info is in Russian, but the text isn't really necessary for understanding which parts goes where. This is not a complete clone of Chris's MEH or K-402 clone. This is as close as i could get with the information i had. Files are available at this link.

Hey! Been reading a lot on Klipsch horns and posts by @Chris A got me very intrigued with the MEH aproach. So i am choosing a concept of my next build for a home system i will be using mostly for 2 channel music and some movies. I want to finally get to that crisp and fast sound that horn system provide, especially in the midbass. The room the system will be installed in is 6 by 10 meters with 3m ceilings (19 by 32 feet, ~10 feet ceiling). Listening position is about 3.5-4m from the front wall and the speakers will be placed in the corner. Now, i like the idea of a 2-way MEH, especially based on K402 horn. Unfortunately, i live in a place where those horns are not sold and ordering them from overseas is super expensive, given the currency exchange rate, shipping costs and taxes. So the idea is to make a double flare horn of a comparable size using bwalso's spreadhseet. The question is - am i going to get that fast and crisp sound with a DIY horn the size of K402? According to the spreadsheet, a horn with a size of 100x64x40cm (WxHxD), horizontal pattern control only goes down to 230Hz. However, ChrisA in his earlier posts on MEH says, if i understood him correctly, that A K-402 based MEH controls its polars down to 100Hz when placed into the corners. Am i going to achieve this with the approach i mention? Or, if i am after a speaker system that controls its directivity and provides horn loading down to 100Hz, i should better choose another 2-way system with a separate bass bin (La Scala, FH-1 or Khorn)? P.S. Forgive my ignorance if i am asking stupid things.