Speakers

AngusMcDoon

AngusMcDoon

Well-Known Member
Joined
20 Oct 2004
Messages
9,049
Location
Up some Hebridean loch
Visit site
I have an existing pair of speakers connected to my radio/CD in the main cabin, which are mounted with their backs inside cupboards. These sound fine. I've just mounted a second pair in the forward cabin which have their backs open. The new open ones sound tinny and horrible compared to the existing ones. Is that because they are not mounted so that they back into an enclosed space? Will any speakers sound half reasonable when mounted in the open?

Not looking for hifi, just soething that doesn't sound like a £2.99 radio.
 
How have you mounted them? Most car type speakers are designed to use the resonance of the board they are mounted in to give the bass performance.....
During test our 29.99 speakers sounded tinny, then I mounted them and they are great ... just as expected...
 
Most speakers need a " cabinet " to power up the bass and channel the energy from the speaker cone. In cars, the doors or the boot act as the cabinets. If you don't want to get too scientific, just mount them in some sort of boxing so the air at the front can't communicate with the air at the back easily. A lot of hifi speaker have tuned ports on their cabinets, but all you need for the boat is a box. This is why they sound fairly good when mounted in sides of the cockpit the cockpit.
 
You do need some sort of enclosure or baffle. What you have got is sound cancellation. The low pressure wave created on one side of the speaker comes round the sides of the cone and meets the high pressure wave created on the other side. The nett result is no pressure wave at all ie no sound. This happens in the lower frequency range of the sound spectrum ie the Bass.
 
If it is normal car speakers that you are looking for, try finding some shelf mounted ones with their own back box, split them apart and mount the box behind the speakers (if you have the room) with the wall sandwiched in between. They probably won`t sound as nice as the original ones, but they should sound better than the way they are set up now.
 
A speaker is an air pump. The compression when the cone moves forward increases air pressure which can leak to the back of the cone. At higher frequencies the air does not have time to leak before it is being pumped the other way but at low frequencies the air can leak and cancell the compression.
Hence a bare speaker sounds tinny. The classic obvious answer is to mount a speaker in a wall (or bulkhead) such that there is a very long path or none at all from front to back. Contrary to what you might imagine you get the same sound out of the back of a speaker as the front. The cone shape is not like a light reflector simply a convenient shape for coupling the energy.
Fancy high fi cabinets, baffles and bass ports are all a compromise to get the same sound as a wall (infinite baffle it is called) without having to have a wall with a hole in it.
So if you can use a bulkhead it will sound very good but if you don't want to cut a hole to mounnt the speaker you are stuck with using an enclosure of some sort. (a box) The bigger the box the better the sound.
Larger speakers tend to be more efficient and have a lower bass resonant frequency say 33 hertz for a 12 inch versus 60 hertz for a smaller speaker. This means a smoother low bass sound but the difference is for the fanatics.
To some up get a hole saw and start cutting. regards olewill
 
Thanks for the replies everyone. Seems I need to rethink the mounting. I'm not going to cut holes in the boat, so some sort of box is needed.

I may just buy some speakers already in a box. The current ones were whipped out of an old nuclear criticality alarm system I found hanging around in the shed. Very radiation proof, but perhaps not the best sound quality.
 
In addition to the comments by William_H, speakers can be manufactured with a more water resistant membrane (& other components too) to counter adverse conditions. However, this can come at a slight cost to fidelity.
 
QUAD ESL speakers will be fine mounted in open air, that's how they're designed.

I don't know how a 10,000 volt electrostatic grid will get on with salt water though.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Share this page

Top