Besides building Astronomical Telescopes my other passion has been advancing my Home Theater system through speaker building projects. After a number of years I have come to some conclusions as to what I wanted from my HT and that was full range speakers for each of the 5 channels and good high frequency dispertion from all tweeters involved.Welcome to my Home Theater Projects
Already having a fairly large set of front speakers ( Paradgm 7se ) I found the full range sound more natural ( SUB off mode in reciever ) then crossed over with a subwoofer, this is when I headed in the direction of all 5 speakers being capable of full range sound, I imagined when all bass was directed in to the 5 full range speakers ( LFE included ) this would be the closest to the way the engeners hear the final mix of a movie sound track.I will start with the heart of all HT's the Center channel speaker, knowing it carries the most important info in a surround mix it soon became my first project (rebuilding my existing CC) you see I found early on how high frequency directional my CC was it had absolutalt no horizontal dispersion plus the low frequencies response of the dual 6.5" was sad. With these two problems combined it soon started the ball rolling on a project!
Center Channel Two things had to be accomplished to aquire the desired result, one I had to create an omni directional tweeter that would keep dialog clear no matter where you sat on my coach, and second increase the box size allowing a bigger volume of air for the dual 6.5" drivers to run in, this would make it possible for a ( 35 Hz ) tuned frequency from the original boxes ( 50 Hz ). I used WinISD 0.44 program to figure the tuning frequency for all the following projects.
All I can say to start with about the OmniTweeter is Mirage of Canada one look at there omni speaker systems and I new what they were up to. As usual I lurked around my local high end audio store doing what I like to do best espenois! what angle is that tweeter I thought? what's with the dome over it? does that help dispertion? I soon had a fix for my CC. I proceeded to take an old 1" dome Phillips tweeter apart stripping off it housing I then machiened an aluminum face plate and upper dome just like the mirage one. The tilt was my own I eye bombed the angle from where the tweeter would sit down to my ear level on my coach and that was it cut the 4" plastic pipe scrcrewed the parts on and plugged it in.
Not having the spec's for the 6.5" drivers I had to do some degree of guess work as to box size so what I did was take the average size of a bookshelf speaker that used a 6.5" driver and double it. Looks like .5 cu. ft. was the average for a lot of different brands of bookshelf speakers that used a 6.5" driver, so 2 x .5 gave me a 1.0 cu. ft. enclosure size. Now each driver would work in an appropriate air space rather then the .6 cu. ft. total of the old CC. Well to make a long story short it was imediatly obvious the low end increase it now produced sound simular to my L,R Paradigm front speakers.