sealed 3-ways

Willmac wrote:  "Room gain can work v well with sealed designs, giving a more natural bass response." 

More natural in-room bass response is generally, but not exclusively, an advantage of sealed boxes. 

According to Martin Collums and Dan Wiggins, "typical" room gain is ballpark +3 dB per octave below 100 Hz or so.  Obviously this depends on a lot of specifics.  

The 6 dB per octave rolloff of a low-Q sealed box works well in most rooms, but arguably a room-gain-complementary 3 dB per octave rolloff across the bass region would often work better.  

A 3 dB per octave rolloff isn't practical for an unequalized sealed box.  But a 3 dB per octave rolloff across most of the bass region (accelerating to 24 dB per octave below the tuning frequency) is feasible for a vented box design. 

The devils are in the details. 

Duke

Not sure the comparison between TL, sealed and aperiodic is correct. 

One big advantage of a sealed enclosure is that the woofer is controlled at all bass frequencies. With a ported box this is not the case below box tuning. Also room gain can work v well with sealed designs, givibg a more natural bass response. 

I have one grill for Alon V MKII speakers that I no longer need and want to sell if anyone is interested. Contact me.

thanx for all the responses! a dedicated midrange unit is of primary import. sealed box prefered for integ. purposes w/sub. plus i feel the physics of sealed is appealing!

>Brian what is your budget? if you can afford go for the bigger ATC speakers, they work basically as closed box speakers, the openings do not act as your typical bass reflex, they are only there to take some pressure off the woofers.
i got SCM35s and am very pleased with them, great value, solid engineering and performance. one thing - you would need a good strong amp for them.

Viridian, true but that "Passive radiator" is active at lower frequency's and not passive at that point. It is a very unique design with an overall "Q" of .7 A rather smart piece of engineering.

TLs, Sealed and Aperiodic enclosures all share similar characteristics in reducing the impedance peak of the enclosure at its resonance, which also lowers the overall Q of the box. They also share a 12dB per octave roll off in the bass region. You should get similar results from the other designs as you do with a sealed enclosure. The TL and Aperiodic are more efficient however.

PMC are not sealed speakers. It uses transmission line design which is ported on the bottom. They're just using ATC mid drivers and that's about it. They do sound nice but totally different philosophy as ATC.

all the above....hales,vandy,dunlavy....as jond said, hales are at incrdibly low prices....they were a deal at the new prices

One man one goal one mission. One heart one soul just one solution. One real decision: find the right speaker!

Since ATC is on your list, you might want to check out PMC IB1. PMC speakers are designed in a very similar way (3 " dome mid range) and are also used professionally in studios.

BTW - they didn't have one vision when it came to speakers; Roger Taylor is a customer of ATC and Brian May is a customer of PMC.

One of my favorite speaker of all time, Dynaudio Confidence 5.

The Vandersteen 3a Signatures are sealed as are the Quattro's. 5's and 5a's along with the 2ce Signatures.

Though it has 5 drivers I would still consider it a 3 way, the Dunlavy SC IVA's.

Agree with Hales - also used Alon V's can be had cheap.

Look for used speakers from Hales, now out of business. Paul Hales was a strong proponent of sealed boxes and his speakers often go for absurdly low prices on here. Also I think that almost all of his models are three ways, do a search under Hales and see what you see. Happy listening!