I recently bought a pair of Jordan Eikona 2s. The last three FR speakers that I've built have had Tang Band and Alpair 7.1's in columns. The results were excellent and I like the concept of simplicity and using them with an eight inch sub fulfilled a mission. I am thinking about fabricating a rear loaded horn for the Eikona's and wondered if anyone has done it or if someone could point me in the direction of a design?
Happy christmas - John L. - Rossland
Happy christmas - John L. - Rossland
I can attest that they sound great in that horn because I have the only copy in the world so far. They are pretty big though. And they were a difficult build. I built a MLTL with the same dimensions as the VTL for my JX92S after I upgraded to Eikonas that I was pretty impressed with. The didn't have quite the base extension or punch but plenty of bass, and nice and compact, sounded great. Bruce over around Ars Harmonia the US dealer for Jordan Eikonas, gave me the design.
PJN, that certainly does look like the most complicated and time consuming design posted on the Jordan blog - it might well be possible to blast out several of those most frequently seen there in the same time.
I’ll have to admit that my experience with Jordan drivers is limited to the old JX92 in a triangular MLTL, and the Eikona2 in a Planet10 wide baffle design, but I have built quite a few other designs for Fostex, Mark Audio, TangBands and others.
John, if you think you’d be up to the challenge of negotiating the curved side panels and 5 degree angles, and have the floorspace to accommodate the rear mouth design, I’d put my money on the FHXL. Next to that in terms of complexity but still offering pretty decent performance in compact footprints would be the general class of floorstanding “MLTLs” such as the Pensils, Jordan’s own MLTL38. Then of course there’s the BIB, although I must say that the two drivers shown on several builds on the blog would be a pretty serious investment.
I’ll have to admit that my experience with Jordan drivers is limited to the old JX92 in a triangular MLTL, and the Eikona2 in a Planet10 wide baffle design, but I have built quite a few other designs for Fostex, Mark Audio, TangBands and others.
John, if you think you’d be up to the challenge of negotiating the curved side panels and 5 degree angles, and have the floorspace to accommodate the rear mouth design, I’d put my money on the FHXL. Next to that in terms of complexity but still offering pretty decent performance in compact footprints would be the general class of floorstanding “MLTLs” such as the Pensils, Jordan’s own MLTL38. Then of course there’s the BIB, although I must say that the two drivers shown on several builds on the blog would be a pretty serious investment.
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I will second Chris’ suggestion of FHXL. proven design, simple, elegant.
While i haven’t heard PJN’s horn, it looks to be similar to the many times built Hedlund Horn.
I would only comment that the smooth curves, while pretty are actually counter to the function of a rear-horn and i would worry about excess midrange leakage out the mouth. Also the small front-mouth will limit the “horn” LF extension, it is probably acting as a quarter-wave line below some point (ie a TL) — something the Eikona is know to like (our enclosure is a 2001 obelisk shape ML-TL). A rear mouth’s effective size is increased by 4 times if placed near a wall/floor or 8 x if in the corner.
If one wanted to do a swoopy horn, you might consider a variation of the Dalek. It adds an extra fold and a rear horn to allow for more extended bass. The Dalek -- Fostex FE166e Horn
But if i wanted something larger than the FHXL i would talk to Dr. Scott Lindgren about a Vulcan-like horn optimized for the Jordan.
Our ML-TL
Post#104 15th Annual Vancouver Island diyFEST-2018 has pictures of the shoot-out we did.
dave
While i haven’t heard PJN’s horn, it looks to be similar to the many times built Hedlund Horn.
I would only comment that the smooth curves, while pretty are actually counter to the function of a rear-horn and i would worry about excess midrange leakage out the mouth. Also the small front-mouth will limit the “horn” LF extension, it is probably acting as a quarter-wave line below some point (ie a TL) — something the Eikona is know to like (our enclosure is a 2001 obelisk shape ML-TL). A rear mouth’s effective size is increased by 4 times if placed near a wall/floor or 8 x if in the corner.
If one wanted to do a swoopy horn, you might consider a variation of the Dalek. It adds an extra fold and a rear horn to allow for more extended bass. The Dalek -- Fostex FE166e Horn
But if i wanted something larger than the FHXL i would talk to Dr. Scott Lindgren about a Vulcan-like horn optimized for the Jordan.
Our ML-TL
Post#104 15th Annual Vancouver Island diyFEST-2018 has pictures of the shoot-out we did.
dave
I still have issues with both that description of such subjective comparisons - it’s hard for most DIY builders to approach them not preloaded with subconscious expectation bias - as well the quite disparate design of the several enclosures involved in this case.
The Pensils in photo are my personal daily drivers, with several years of use they are certainly well “conditioned”, while the Eikonas were, I think, still on the front end of that curve.
That aside, I’d concur with most of the above.
John, you mentioned your towers as being a tricky build. Could you refresh our collective memory as to the details? After several years of some elaborate/ time consuming builds - some measuring well over a hundred hours from start to finish, and now residing in archival storage at Finlayson Arm Rd - I was drawn to the simpler and more domesticated, albeit perhaps compromised designs.
The Pensils in photo are my personal daily drivers, with several years of use they are certainly well “conditioned”, while the Eikonas were, I think, still on the front end of that curve.
That aside, I’d concur with most of the above.
John, you mentioned your towers as being a tricky build. Could you refresh our collective memory as to the details? After several years of some elaborate/ time consuming builds - some measuring well over a hundred hours from start to finish, and now residing in archival storage at Finlayson Arm Rd - I was drawn to the simpler and more domesticated, albeit perhaps compromised designs.
Chris, I'm sorry but I totally missed your post and I've been away a bit lately.
So, the columns I had made for the Alpairs 7.3 were like a Grecian column. Dave designed a holey brace that allowed rear porting with rectangular vents.
The columns were made from 1" MDF about 1-1/2" wide with 11.5 degree sides
so that they formed a 16 sided column. They sound quite beautiful and I use my pair with an 8" Sinclair sub. The folks who bought the other two pairs that I built have them stand alone. I've attached a pic to jog your memory.
I still haven't made enclosures for the Jordans yet as I've been busy building turntables, but it's getting closer.
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I ran a quick sim for an ML-TL with that driver. Looks pretty impressive. 200cm^2 cross-section, basically floor-to-ceiling (200cm tall), driver at around 1.2m off the floor. Port is 44cm^2, 11cm long (it's one of the cheap plastic ports).
Adding some filling along the line smooths the response and the LF rolloff is around 30Hz.
Mechanical power handling isn't great, but it's a small driver going low. It's not going to be a party speaker, but will produce satisfying bass at sensible levels.
BLHs aren't my forte (still lots to learn there), so hopefully Scott will chime in with some ideas.
Chris
Adding some filling along the line smooths the response and the LF rolloff is around 30Hz.
Mechanical power handling isn't great, but it's a small driver going low. It's not going to be a party speaker, but will produce satisfying bass at sensible levels.
BLHs aren't my forte (still lots to learn there), so hopefully Scott will chime in with some ideas.
Chris
The MLTLs on our website are proven designs and can't easily be beaten for performance/construction simplicity
loudspeaker plans - E J Jordan Designs
loudspeaker plans - E J Jordan Designs
Straight into FHXL, no major issues there, but it was meant to be flexible. I've one of my Woden enclosures worked out for Eikona II, along with a tall MLTL but have held off drawing them up (well, sending to Dave for drawing up as my CAD skills are somewhere south of nill) as I think Colin prefers to have a reasonably close handle on what designs are out there for his drivers, which is fair enough.
Hi Scott - I'm happy to have as many designs out there as possible. We try to differentiate on the site between ones we've generated and those designed elsewhere and, where possible, ask for permission to link or post contributed designs. This is how Jim Griffin's MLTL30 is on our site and it's proved very popular.
As far as I'm aware, we haven't lured anyone into building an Eikona BIB yet
If you have a design you'd like drawing up, I'm happy to have a look at it and see if I have time to do it if you're happy for us to put it on the site (and we'll credit you, of course).
As far as I'm aware, we haven't lured anyone into building an Eikona BIB yet
If you have a design you'd like drawing up, I'm happy to have a look at it and see if I have time to do it if you're happy for us to put it on the site (and we'll credit you, of course).
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Looks like a 12L box tuned in the 30s would be a good start. You could also go down to 8L and tune for mid-40s.
I'd like to see a variation on the PR arrangement used by Bose on their MusicMonitor speakers here:
They get force cancellation without having to put a PR on opposite sides of the enclosure (which I think looks messy).
A variant would be to rotate the PRs 90 degrees so they're firing out of a slot at the back of the cabinet. Just a thought.
It'd be a cute little desktop speaker capable of a surprising amount of low-end grunt. I'm almost tempted.
Chris
I'd like to see a variation on the PR arrangement used by Bose on their MusicMonitor speakers here:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
They get force cancellation without having to put a PR on opposite sides of the enclosure (which I think looks messy).
A variant would be to rotate the PRs 90 degrees so they're firing out of a slot at the back of the cabinet. Just a thought.
It'd be a cute little desktop speaker capable of a surprising amount of low-end grunt. I'm almost tempted.
Chris
With regards to the PR, I'd see about using the Eikona cone/surround/basket for a visual match - I'd expect that to sell pretty well.
PR choice itself isn't hugely critical IME. So long as the volume displacement is around 2x the capability of the driver itself, you'll be fine. I'd expect one with a high Qm to be better, since you don't want it to be losing much energy itself. Lower Qm will produce a damped PR output, meaning less output around tuning.
Bose do something nice where they've mounted for force cancellation, but with the PRs mounted with one (effectively) reversed, so they're working in push-pull. That means you're cancelling out some non-linearities in the passive radiators, free of charge.
Thanks for having a look at the website. I've been meaning to add a "Design Consult" page as I'm now doing designs for two pro audio manufacturers. Feel free to get in touch about some speaker designs for these drivers - I think they'd be very interesting to work with.
Cheers,
Chris
PR choice itself isn't hugely critical IME. So long as the volume displacement is around 2x the capability of the driver itself, you'll be fine. I'd expect one with a high Qm to be better, since you don't want it to be losing much energy itself. Lower Qm will produce a damped PR output, meaning less output around tuning.
Bose do something nice where they've mounted for force cancellation, but with the PRs mounted with one (effectively) reversed, so they're working in push-pull. That means you're cancelling out some non-linearities in the passive radiators, free of charge.
Thanks for having a look at the website. I've been meaning to add a "Design Consult" page as I'm now doing designs for two pro audio manufacturers. Feel free to get in touch about some speaker designs for these drivers - I think they'd be very interesting to work with.
Cheers,
Chris
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