Would there be any benefit using a (mid)bass horn in a car? I have read that LF horns do not make any sense in a car since the car is a pressure chamber. I still believe there will be some gain left from the horn - but maybe the usable frequency is too high to do anything to the bass. The idea is to have a bass horn with a higher cut off that would be filled in by the cabin gain. Does that make any sense? I have some Peavey FH1 clones that fit my trunk - I wonder if it was worthwhile to pull one out, put it into the car and measure with open and closed trunk to see the difference in FR at the front seat. In a sense, the car walls would be a continuation of the horn, or am I wrong? It would be like sitting inside a horn. I am getting enough bass from the door speakers in my current car, so it is more like a theoretical question. I would maybe like to get a bit of the midbass horn "kick" in the car if that was possible.
If you want a high level of midbass, use a speaker that's better suited for that duty. The speaker used in the folded horn, in a small sealed enclosure, with a proper bandpass crossover and sufficient power may do what you want, while taking up much less space.
I would try this as a test if there is still some gain from the horn. There are more practical ways for sure.
The paraflex will be tested as well, I only need to clean the way to get the boxes out of the basement🙂
It's a weird situation-at some low frequency yeah you are IN the box in a car. And a horn, it's like that massive rig in Italy I think, horns cast into the floor driven by multiple 18s. In neither case at the lowest frequency are you radiating into a totally free field. So it's an interesting topic I'm not sure if anyone has investigated much-???
I can tell you a colleague was prototyping horns molded along the vehicle floor powered from 6" or even 5" woofers, with the firewall forming a continuation of the mouth. We were trying to sell the concept to MINI but they never bit on it. Too bad because the amount of good sounding bass was really startling, like using 10s or 12s or something, but much more efficient. Heh I remember being asked one fine morning while in Stuttgart "can you come to Munich and help us with this presentation? We're leaving at 10am" [!!!!!!] Creating PowerPoint while flying down the autobahn, what a recipe for a headache. Especially as I was the one driving! (Just kidding!)
You exactly got my point - horn ending in a box - the crazy horn system built into the room is what I had in mind when thinking about this topic. I am actually buying a "new" car, which is quite used and I will have a chance to to whatever I want with it. I could not really do much with the current one, it was too new to do any irreversible things to it.
Yeah, ignoring any leaks a compression horn in a padded box = a very crude plane wave tube (PWT), so the basics are very well investigated. 😉.
