Speaker enclosure design for begginers

There is a very helpful  guide here: http://www.hometheatershack.com/forums/diy-subwoofers-general-discussion/36532-hornresp-dum-hmm-everyone.html

Have a look at Brian Steele's spreadheets here
http://www.diysubwoofers.org/sheets/
These mostly relate to Tapped horn style folds- but might help get you started.

What kind of horn do you want to make anyway?
I often find it is easier to start with the folded box and then unfold it to find the horn path.
I use Solidworks CAD to do the unfolding process. This is a parametric CAD system. I draw a centre line sketch in the folded plan and use that to drive the unfolded sketch. I can then adjust the dimensions of the box and that changes the size of the unfolded horn.

To find out the sort of stuff I do just google
Xoc1
Or
Xoc1 TH18




Edited by Xoc1 - 04 January 2018 at 9:00pm

The area of the throat is just the area of the throat be it round or rectangular.

The length of the path what you referred to as the neck, is down the centre line.
I tend to prefer a method Known as the advanced centre line method
Google
Speaker horn advanced centre line method
and that should bring up a couple of links.

The width of the horn mouth for a certain frequency is a theoretical dimension that almost no one uses. It relates to pure horns and is the reason why almost everyone who builds proper horns with a chamber makes multiple cabinets.
A Turbosound style Bandpass horn uses bass chamber loading to boost the lower end to make up for the small mouth size and short horn path - like a Speaker plans HD15.
Tapped horns use a diiferent method again, and will go lower with a smaller mouth or louder with a bigger mouth.
You have got to experiment untill you come up with something that suits you!

Do try to get to grips with Hornresp it is an extremely powerful program now and has filter simulations that are extremely useful to see how a cabinet will perform.

The path length of a tapped horn sets up the delay- But the actual width of the tapped horn also has an effect. A lot of older designs have less path and more width - Like a MTH30 or a J Bell Stadium horn - But more modern designs tend to have a longer path like a Othorn for instance.
Again Hornresp is your friend here - You can use the Loudspeaker wizard to dynamically change the size and shape of a horn and see the differences all the parameters make. The only problem with that is you tend to come up with something that seems to work really well, and then you notice how big it is!
I think my next design - build might be a TPQWR like a Martinson Roar15. I want to build a real budget cab for a 12Volt rig and I think that design should work well with some budget drivers that don't perform well in a conventional tapped horn.

I think the Roar type design has some promise.

I am learning that more and more as I go through this.
However I finally feel like I have made some real progress today and yesterday.
Feel like I have a good understanding of the theory and characteristics to aim for for a succesful horn speaker.
My maths is good, all be it a little rusty, and have just spent the past 5 hours learning the fields in hornresp and the theory behind them. Iv still got a very long way to go but am seeing a clearer picture now. Just going to go through my notes and then install hornresp and have a go putting it into action. Exciting times.
If anyone could reccomend the first thing to do using hornresp for the first time that would be great. Should I draw a design on sketchup then enter parameters on hornresp? Should i enter values into horn resp then try design a cab around it?
Its this point I am very confused about, i know what to enter in each box on hornresp but how do i go from there to actually designing something.
Any help massively appreciated