3d printers recommendations for printing horns and waveguides

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#25
After the Bambu controversy, I went with the Flashforge Adventurer 5M. They are easily available for $279, but a 15% coupon was offered on ebay that brought it down even further. I'm quite happy with it. It has a bigger print volume than the Bambu A1, and being a core xy style the footprint is quite compact. It's not enclosed, but Flashforge sells a kit of panels and hardware than can be used to enclose it with the remainder of the parts to be printed on the machine. Not really needed for PLA or PETG, which is all I think I will need to use. Here it is having just finished printing one of Augerpro's dome tweeter waveguides. Not bad for using generic (cheap) PLA and OOTB settings.

PXL_20250128_215303311[1].jpg


PXL_20250128_215316058[1].jpg
 
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#29
I had some idea taken from another thread , with the lightning infill there is no closed space like for example circles , or triangles , I don’t know for gyroid, but the point is with a lighting style pattern you could like leave an hole on the back of the horn or waveguide , and fill it , with like epoxy resin or something like that
 
#36
@ciobi69

IMO, it's pretty easy and direct to start with the idea of infill changes are creating a spring + dampener filter. Every hard / structural material has predominantly spring characteristics. Infill just connects 2 spring walls with springs which now enclose air which becomes your dampener. In this way, I think it is pretty intuitive that various amounts and styles of infill will be better than solid printed as you just made a very large array of harmonic dampeners / filters rather than a single high mass spring.

From the start of that video though, I was thinking, wrong approach and not useful due to methods. Issues with the test:
  • Use of a well braced, anti-resonant design. Most of the 3d printed speakers in the community are (crappy) boxes.
  • The air leaks in the impedance graph were certainly at the driver and baffle interface.
    • Gaskets are not effective with FDM printed plastic due to surface texture.
    • The way screws deform plastic is not good for sealing either. Speakers with the typical 4/6/8 screws is way too few for the way clamping works with plastic compared to wood or metal.
    • Plastic will stretch and twist under screws.
    • I stopped watching the video after this as I had a lot of trouble trusting anything which followed.
      • Every YouTuber trying to monetize a channel appears to do this Cunningham's law masturbation towards driving engagement.
  • Contact microphone used was cheap, uncalibrated, and invalid IMO. An accelerometer and hammer strike test would have been more informative.
    • Having to re-equalize the levels is also further invalidation of the method. Just say you had zero repeatability with a $5 mic and toss the results.
  • Microphone placement was a mess, print a set of jigs to positively locate the mic and speakers relative to each other. More Cunningham's law.
A better set of tests:
  • Standard cube and rectangular prism speakers of appropriate tuned volume.
  • Piecewise construction (e.g. baffle printed and glued to box, 6 separate walls with some clever interlocking joint, top/bottom shells, etc)
  • "Good" anti-resonant geometry of same tuning to regular box.
    • Comparing this against rectangular boxes and piecewise construction would be the way to shift the community design methods -- prove the ease and utility of superior layouts by direct results
  • Properly tuned sealed vs ported designs. (how much do the above construction methods matter BR vs sealed???)
  • A couple bracing methods (window vs plate used vs beams).
Extreme / Advanced later tests:
  • Can multi-nozzle / multi-material print effective CLD?
  • Different infill geometry types.
  • Infill designed for a post print fill (i.e. the plaster fill methods)
    • Different bulk fillers, plaster, versus loose sand, urethane spray foam / Great Stuf, etc.
  • Printing Helmholtz resonators in the walls (i.e. the chassis is meta for a midrange or woofer).
 
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#40
Nissep said:
Printing Helmholtz resonators in the walls (i.e. the chassis is meta for a midrange or woofer).
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pretty neat idea... also i imagine infill amount has a certain amount of influation on resonance behaivour, so its probably possibly to tune it to "perfection", tho probably needs some prototypes and measurements and/or careful listening

while infill has an effect, even the standard 10/20% infill already provide great support, take to this some non-standard infill patterns to distribute vibration better and im pretty sure you can build a great little speaker

planning to start off with some wideband driver application soon(tm)
 
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