Mark Hobbs wrote on Sun, 15 February 2009 17:11 |
Phillip Graham wrote on Wed, 11 February 2009 22:14 |
Jeff is almost assuredly not speaking about the drivers' input power capacity.
He is likely speaking of 1 of two things: 1. A driver with a higher BL product for the motor 2. A driver with more usable XMAX.
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Well, by wanting to increase the sensitivity by 3db and double the power handling of the standard growler with the 15 inch version it would appear that he is almost assuredly talking about input power capacity and that you were wrong.
Either that or am I missing something.
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Mark, you are indeed missing something.
The vast majority of modern drivers, in almost all speaker alignments, have more power handling capability than they do excursion capability.
Practically, in most loading situations, the way you add power handling is by adding XMAX! A few very good horn-loaded systems, the best of the tapped horns, and some 6th order bandpass systems have enough driver loading to provide excursion control sufficient to render them voice coil heating limited, rather than XMAX limited. A short horn like the growler is almost assuredly going to need as much XMAX help as it can get.
Increasing the sensitivity 3dB would require a driver whose parameters are more compatible with the horns' acoustic impedance, to improve the power transfer. Depending on the nature of the horn that is going to lead a specific BL product target, hence my note 1.
Edit: I figured out the driver used in the Growler, and it only has a moderate BL product, so perhaps a higher BL product will not be needed.