Being inside the horn, listening room as giant bass horn.

dustman

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So I've been dreaming of building a true 20hz bass horn, and had the thought, why not have the horn itself be the listening room, be inside the horn? Any drawbacks to this? The idea is to have the walls and ceiling expand from the sound source(an approximation of a concical horn) at whatever rate determined by loading the drivers to 20 hz, and terminating the horn at whatever size is necessary to give enough room for the listening area, the rear wall being a very deep acoustical absorber/diffuser.
 

Robh3606

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Well any of the corner folded horn systems that extended the bass horn using the room boundaries did essentially the same thing. Think K Horn and JBL Hartsfield.

Rob :)
 
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dustman

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Well any of the corner folded horn systems that extended the bass horn using the room boundaries did essentially the same thing. Think K Horn and JBL Hartsfield.

Rob :)
The reason I like this idea is that there would be no perturbations from the room, or distortions from a truncated horn, and almost all the energy would be absorbed at the back wall, so no reflections. At least that's how I'm envisioning it.
 

Robh3606

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The reason I like this idea is that there would be no perturbations from the room, or distortions from a truncated horn, and almost all the energy would be absorbed at the back wall, so no reflections. At least that's how I'm envisioning it.

You are going to need some serious absorbers/baffling to go all the way down!

Rob :)
 

schlager

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You don't have reflections per say in the bass. You have standing waves and/or room modes. These are very hard to suppress with acoustic absorption. Active bass cancellation works much better.

Would the horn itself protrude outside the room and then the horn mouth will be the room? Guess I can't make a clear image in my head, on how you will make this bass horn.

I have a rather big bass horn 3000 liters (around 115 ft3), with 4 x 15" drivers. It goes straight to 25 hz, with some room gain only -6 dB at 20hz.
 

PeterA

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I own a pair of vintage corner horns in the bass presentation in my room has never been better. I only get to the mid to low 30s, but the quality sounds very natural to me. Of course it has to do with aspects of the rest of the system as well, but with the folded horn and corner placement loading, that 15 inch driver does wonders. The bass is also very well integrated with the mid and upper horn unit.
 
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MarcelNL

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So I've been dreaming of building a true 20hz bass horn, and had the thought, why not have the horn itself be the listening room, be inside the horn? Any drawbacks to this? The idea is to have the walls and ceiling expand from the sound source(an approximation of a concical horn) at whatever rate determined by loading the drivers to 20 hz, and terminating the horn at whatever size is necessary to give enough room for the listening area, the rear wall being a very deep acoustical absorber/diffuser.
there are some folks doing this, I've seen pics of a guy in Japan with horns coming in from outside his house ending in the corners of his living room, someone I recall in France with two Huge folded horns entering his living and someone in the UK with horns in the basement entering his living also...
problematic with 20Hz might be that you need some distance to accomodate it.

some can be found in this thread I believe:
https://www.whatsbestforum.com/thre...-how-they-sound-and-issues-with-sonics.25071/
 
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