Well, I broke down and bought the Dayton 295-130 for my Imperial SO.  I installed it this past weekend, and everyone who was betting on the problem being the speaker just lost their shirts!  The new speaker makes little or no difference.  It is still performing reasonable well with the front boarded up, but down right pathetic when in it's intended configuration.  An SPL meter right in the horn reads an average of over 18 db lower across the entire range of 30-100 hz (measured at 8 points) when the SO is "normal" vs boarded up.  The only other thing I can think of is that I don't have the football shape cutout in the front panel yet, but Steve's worked well enough without that at Decfeast 2005 so I'm not sure that will make that hugh a difference.  I'm about ready to hang this one up, maybe I'll plan on throwing it in the truck and take it to DecFest 2006 unless someone can come up with something else to try.

Dank

Dank,

My SO's that were at Decfest 05 had the football shaped cutout.  From looking at your original pictures the obvious thing I saw was the spacing between the baffle and the front panel followed by other small details that were all just a bit off.  I e-mailed you a high res image of the plans so you could compare them to yours and see if anything could be easily adjusted closer to spec.  That was months ago.  Did you ever get it, and if not, would that help?

Also, on mine, installing a solid front baffle without the cutouts has almost the opposite effect in that it kills efficiency of the low bass.  What you have now is probably close to a giant sized WO32 cabinet where the horn flare shrinks to a point with minimal air space in front of the woofer.

Dank

I gotta know, did you get things worked out?

I gave up on this quite some time ago.  I have no idea what's wrong.  My interests have shifted, so I'm working on other things, and the SO is just sitting in the storage room (along with my pair of dual 18 Imperials).  It has to be almost perfect cancellation between the front wave of the speaker and the wave out of the horn.  It's still VERY impressive if you board up the front and send all the energy into the horn, so I know the speaker and the amp are all working fine.  That gives me an idea...if that scenario is true I should see increased output if I board up the horn mouth instead of  the front...maybe I'll try that this weekend.  But the way things have been going lately, I'll just generate more questions...that seems to be my motto lately:  looking for answers,  finding only questions.


Dan K

any updates?

where are these beasts?


dank wrote on 03/23/07 at 23:31:50:

 :'(           :'(