THE DIY SUBWOOFER NETWORK

An 8" Passive Radiator on the Back Side of a Small BoomBox   What exactly is a passive radiator, when and why would you use one? I remember my first encounter with a passive radiator.  I was in high school and I was browsing a catalog (way back in the stone age before we had the internet).  I was smitten with some very sexy tower speakers that had multiple 6.5" drivers.  Reading through the stats I noticed that 2 of the 3 drivers were passive radiators.  That same catalog had pre-loaded car audio subwoofer enclosures designed to fit under the front seat of a car, these designs used passive radiators, also called drone cones.  Several manufactures have made these over the years.  The modern version is the JBL Fuse , pictured below.  My initial gut reaction was that this was a rip-off.  A speaker with no magnet or voice coil that gave the illusion of multiple drivers.  I could not have been more wrong. JBL Fuse Subwoofer (Click on Image to View on Amazon) It turns out that t

Dayton Audio Max-X 10" Subwoofer in a 1.5 cuft Ported Enclosure   Josef Anton Hofmann was a physicist, audio expert and entrepreneur.   In addition to earning  Ph.D. in physics from Harvard and working on the Manhattan Project he was a co-founder or partner in no less then three groundbreaking audio companies; KLH (the H stood for Hofmann), Advent, and Acoustic Research.  These companies, which today are all shells of their former selves, were the giants in hi-fidelity home audio back in their heyday.  Acoustic Research, for example, was the first company to produce an acoustic suspension (i.e. sealed) loudspeaker.  Interestingly enough a simple sealed speaker enclosure was not invented until the 1950's by Edgar Villchur, the founder and president of Acoustic Research, while the vented enclosure was patented by a scientist Bell Labs in the 1930's.   Kicker Comp R 12 in a 2.5 cuft Ported Enclosure   We would not have the field of acoustics, much less the market for hi-e