Distance between compression driver / horn and mid

the way I would do this is to get the horn as close as possible to the mid driver to minimise problems in the crossover region. I would also use a 2.5 way crossover and just use the lower 10" from ~250Hz down to compensate for the baffle step response. this way the acoustic centre of the mid is in the middle of the upper cone rather than between the two drivers. you could then stick the logo between the two 10" as they will still couple below 250Hz where they need to.

Make the prototype without even thinking about the logo, and then make a simple logo work with the speaker you have designed to be lean and as scientific as practical. If you make the box taller to make room for the logo, the whole speaker gets bigger. The logo does not need to be so fancy that it affects the design at all. If you need a sweet wood working project logo, make a separate logo unit with lights and flashy stuff and no incorporated sound. If you choose the brand logo and make the speaker weigh 40 extra pounds and sound worse, you will eventually regret it. Make it lean. Make sacrifices for practical reasons. The look is important, but speaker designers (people who will be your peers in the speaker hobby) like sleek, effective, efficient and reasonably sized. A big logo on the front with a visible cosmetic sacrifice of audio quality is a design black eye, right on the front of your box. You will be explaining it to other designers who are scratching chins and thinking it would have been better without the logo sacrifice. I promise, it will irritate you.

Edited by b grade - 05 October 2016 at 6:32pm

b grade wrote: Make the prototype without even thinking about the logo, and then make a simple logo work with the speaker you have designed to be lean and as scientific as practical. If you make the box taller to make room for the logo, the whole speaker gets bigger. The logo does not need to be so fancy that it affects the design at all. If you need a sweet wood working project logo, make a separate logo unit with lights and flashy stuff and no incorporated sound. If you choose the brand logo and make the speaker weigh 40 extra pounds and sound worse, you will eventually regret it. Make it lean. Make sacrifices for practical reasons. The look is important, but speaker designers (people who will be your peers in the speaker hobby) like sleek, effective, efficient and reasonably sized. A big logo on the front with a visible cosmetic sacrifice of audio quality is a design black eye, right on the front of your box. You will be explaining it to other designers who are scratching chins and thinking it would have been better without the logo sacrifice. I promise, it will irritate you.

Yeah the idea was to make them look appealing to party go'ers, im sure there will be different opinions but them being front radiating reflex boxes with round grilles (looking like recognizable 'speakers' to the average person), having a high profile colour scheme etc, my goal was / is to make the average party person wonder what they sound like just by seeing a picture of them (to the uk bass heavy underground dance music scene im into, not folk music fans for example).

Ill probably put a logo under the 12s but make it smaller so it looks right, along with making a black grill out of a wood frame and cloth type matieral that can be dry fit to the front at anytime for a low profile config.

Again thanks for the advice everyone

Post pics of the build 

b grade wrote: FWIW, I have never designed a speaker and then not had some kind of regret built in. Something I did awkwardly or maybe a slight tweak that could have been better. It kind of haunts you. It is the great disadvantage of DIY vs R&D equipped speaker companies. You don't get to build 30 different variations and test them, so you have to just stick to the guidelines of audio when you can. The educated guess has to become your superpower.

Good point. Particularly when you're making compromises for space during the design process. For eg, reduce the size of given horn whilst maintaining pattern control etc, and/or getting drive units as close as possible to one another.

Something else im unsure about is splaying, faital say the lth142 a 60 degree dispersion horn but its also a tractrix, is there anything else i need to consider because of this?

the cabs im going to design will be trap and i cant get my head around what the angles will be from the front to the sides of each cab, so that when the cabs are standing together in a horizontal array with the sides of the cabs touching, they will always be at the correct angle from each other for the best coverage

http://www.faitalpro.com/products/files/LTH142/LTH142_hor-beamwidth.jpg