So after all that talk of efficiency v extension, I figured I’d actually build something. It worked out that I ended up building on both sides of the coin, as the “Extension” build ended up being pretty gigantic. But the review of both approaches is in and it turns out that in some regards efficiency is more pleasant; I used the Faital Pro 5FE100 in a ~8L enclosure tuned to about 45-50 hz with a 3 inch x 15 inch port which I 3D-printed. It WOMPS. Sounds great, crisp, powerful. Really pushes the “effortless” bass feeling, until you get below resonance and the woofer starts whacking around. It becomes excursion limited quite fast on songs with a lot of low frequency content, and it sounds pretty alarming. This forces my hand in ASP to put in a high pass around 32Hz-20Hz, adding complexity and heartache. But all in all, not a bad design.
As for the extension, which also sounds good, a different set of issues comes into play. I went with the Tang Band W5-1138SMF ~14L tuned to around 40 hz with a PR, and for starters, the thing is fucking gigantic. Despite the apparent size, 40 hz in 14L is pretty damn good, and it definitely has a presence visually and sonically. It sounds large, powerful, and it’s exceedingly hard to push the woofer itself into distortion. However pushing the low efficiency of that driver is it’s ridiculous excursion capability, which brings an unexpected issue into play: high excursion means a lot of acceleration. A lot of acceleration mechanically means all kinds of shit is moving around, including things coupled to the boombox through the surface it’s on; put the boombox on the counter and all of a sudden the beer bottles on the counter start wiggling around too. Additionally, in the electrical domain, a lot of acceleration means a lot of voltage, which means more batteries.
These factors push the design to seem a lot less effortless than the 5FE100, potentially because the 1138 design seems to promote higher THD. It’s not necessarily a fair comparison, because the ASP, amp, and battery management on the 5FE100 design happens to be a lot better (I built it second, learned from previous mistakes). Normalizing for those factors, though, the smaller size is pretty great as it turns out that there is usually very little content from 40 Hz and below, and because larger boxes tend to be less efficient in terms of materials.
MATLABGONEWILD 