My Music

I have had a love for classical music since high school. I took up the flute early on, and by high school standards, I was quite good. Once I got to college, I discovered what professional musicians are, and I am not! It was here that I discovered the Baroque, and started playing the recorder, which I still dabble at.

Rather than say these are my favorite composers, let's just say these guys always get my attention: In the Baroque, I like, probably in order Telemann, Handel, and Vivaldi. I have no great attraction of the elder Bach. The rest of the normal suspects, while often interesting, just don't hold a candle to Handel. In the Gallant/pre-classical, only Christian Bach seems to stand out, and probably because he leads directly to Mozart. In the Classical, there is Mozart, Haydn, and everyone else. Of those "everyone else", I enjoy Michael Haydn, Dittersdorf and Boccherini. Into the early Romantic, there is Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelsohn. The also-rans include Smetna, Hummel, Field, and even Franz Mozart. Beyond that my interest wanes. The thing about the composers listed is that they have a personal style that is unique. There is no question whose music you are listening to. With the rest, it is just amorphous period music.I do listen to other genre. I like acoustic jazz, particularly piano trio. I also listen to some blue grass and Celtic music.

My Designs

I believe in the KISS principle. If possible, I would use a full-range driver in a sealed box and be done with it. That won't work. So what are my requirements?

1. Bass must go down to at least 40hz. This gets all of the normal orchestral instruments, including the double bass. Works for both classical and jazz. It's also usable for HT, unless you are wild about volume levels at the low end. Anything lower goes to a sub.

2. Cross-overs are a bad thing. Minimize where possible. Use a full-ranger that meets 1 above and cross over as high as possible. Series cross-overs are the next best answer to nothing at all.

3. Use as few drivers as possible. A sub, a full-ranger and a super-tweeter seems to be the best case.

My Skills

When I started out in the speaker building hobby, I lived in an apartment and could neither setup or use most power tools. Hence, I did a lot of work with minimum tools. What this means is I spend several times more time on cabinetry than someone with an adequate shop. However, I could do all of the normal things that needed to be done for speaker building. TQWT's with internal partitions were no problem.

Since I have now moved into a house with a large garage, I have acquired a table saw, an arm saw and a decent plunge router. The main difference between using hand tools and using power tools is that I now do in a day what I used to do in a week.

Modeling and Simulation

I do a lot of simulation before I make sawdust. I also get a lot of criticism for being overly dependent on simulation. This is unfortunate, because a lot of people don't realize how close the simulations are to reality. If you will scan through some on my projects, you will see comparisons of simulations to the frequency graphs of the final products. The simulations are amazingly close to reality. Therefore, I get it right the first time without having to build a bunch of prototypes. At the moment I'm using:

• Martin King's model for quarter-wave cabinets.

• Unibox for sealed and bass reflex cabinets

• Speaker Workshop for measurement and cross-over optimization.