Free air resonance

Op,

Diyaudio is for builders, audiogon is for buyers and tweakers.

Ask your questions in the Diyadio multi way forum

@hsbrock  Really you need a cabinet simulator and to spend more time at DIYaudio. :)

I forgot to mention this but honestly DIYaudio is a much better place for speaker building questions than Audiogon.  Lots of builders with first hand experience into all sorts of designs. 

Best of luck,

Erik

@mijostyn

There’s no argument about wide vs. limited dispersion in my writing, so I’m not really sure if you are replying to anything I wrote, except obliquely. That paragraph was in response to the idea of an anechoic room being ideal.

Acoustics and room treatments do go hand in hand though. The more controllable the dispersion the less room treatments are needed, but I know of no case outside of a measurement lab where a truly anechoic experience is a good thing.

I used to be a rep for Roger Sander’s speakers, and so I know the head-in-vise experience of a flat ESL very well. My statements as I made them, not as interpreted, stand.

While tight dispersion may give you the feeling of having your ear right up against the speaker they also do a poor job of communicating the illusion of space behind and to the sides of speakers, but a good solution when you have zero control over the room.  OTOH, if this is your ideal maybe headphones are a better solution for you. Far cheaper and requiring less fuss.

A room with controlled bass modes, a good mix of dispersion and absorption (including the ceiling) will outperform any attempt of recreating even the old Live-End, Dead-End experience, let alone anything approaching fully anechoic.

I think you are really getting confused about how the resonant frequency of a speaker driver (a good thing) works and mixing it up with how cabinet panels resonate (which is completely undesirable). The resonant frequency of a driver is used to model the bass performance in a cabinet in terms of the -3dB point as well as the slope and optimal flatness (Q) of the low end. It has nothing to do with distortion introduced due to imperfect cabinet materials. Along with Qts, and equivalent air mass and other parameters the resonant frequency is something you plug into your cabinet design software.

Driver resonance frequency has zero to do with the materials used or bracing methods used to construct the cabinet itself. The driver resonant frequency also has zero to do with driver value or quality but it is an indicator of the type of driver you have on your hands. A driver with a resonant frequency of 300 Hz is probably not going to go lower than a midrange for instance.

Also, you want diffusion between and directly to the sides and often behind the speakers and listening area. Anything truly anechoic is going to sound too dead, and lack imaging and space.

Hah, thanks @mahgister - the free air resonance is not, by itself, the most important thing in determining the use of a ported enclosure or not, and certainly nearly useless in determining in-room performance.

The questions of whether this is best as a ported or sealed cabinet is a different question than "what would work well in my room."

I’m thinking that a speaker with lower resonant frequency will sound better than the one with a higher resonant frequency.

I think this is not the right way to think about it. The question is driver to cabinet matching and then matching the total speaker (driver in a specific cabinet) to the room. There’s no best answer based on resonant frequency alone.

These questions are best asked in DIYaudio but you can also read the last paragraph here:

https://eminence.com/blogs/blog/sealed-vs-ported-enclosures