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What's the LARGEST possible speaker? I'm talking about what's possible.

EV did have a 30” driver, it was VERY low power and IIRC used a paper over thin styrofoam cone (like foam core board).

It’s one of the few drivers I have never reconed for even seen in person. They were targeted at the high end hi-fi industry primarily.
I saw one in an electronics store in the mid 60s when I bought my first microphone.
It had a sign that said "Custom rear speaker for VW". :roflmao:
 
I know there are 18"speakers. Prolly a lot bigger. I imagine humanity could build a speaker that is a LOT larger using special materials.
Which got me thinking... What's the largest functional speaker ever built?
Based on what I've read, a black hole is the largest speaker: Strange but True: Black Holes Sing
 
It seems like all the very large speakers have low power handling ratings. Is this related to the structural problems of such a large driver that were mentioned earlier?

Part of it was mechanical/structural, and part of it was the need for a large motor to move the larger mass. As voice coils get larger in diameter and the gap height gets taller (and wider), the flux is spread out over a larger area thus the motor's total flux must grow. With Neo motors, this is much less of an issue because the (stronger per unit volume) magnetic material can be used both inside and outside the coil. Large coils and ceramic motors can be very limiting in this regard, which is why most ceramic voice coils are limited to around 4" in diameter... the point of diminishing returns.

Out of curiosity, what does MI mean in this context? I assume it's not "Military Intelligence", but I don't know enough to know otherwise, either;)

Musical Instrument (market)

I remember these... we had a speaker reconing biz in Cincinnati in the 70's and one of the older downtown theaters had them. My partner actually did the reconing however.

Very few ended up in the cinema market, they simply did not have the necessary output (sensitivity x power bandwidth). The sensitivity is fairly high at ~103dB/1W/1M (they used the old EIA standard of 1 mW at 30' so a conversion is needed to get to the current 1W/1M), but the RMS power handling is only 60 watts. That translates to about 118dB. Since theatres of the day typically used roughly 600 watts (total) into speakers that were (coupled) 106dB/1W/1M, that would require an equivalent of 20 of these drivers and 1200 watts installed. Both the speaker and the amplifier power was very expensive, and currently in cinemas there is an additional gain differential of at least 6dB out of the subs.

5'.

View attachment 4129150

Note the Bozak 302 in the fireplace; it was installed there in the late '50s and still works just fine.

Don't all these big speakers need a tweeter , maybe like a piezo , to sound full range ?

The father of one of my high school buddies was a designer (I believe he was a mechanical engineer) at Bozak, he was also one of the designers of the optical lens system for the Cinerama process. Bozak was a well established company that simply disappeared as the market evolved.

Oh wow, that's something I should have figured out. Thanks.

Sorry, I should have been more clear.
 
Does it work best in a ported, or sealed, cabinet?
That's an excellent analogy for the Universe. The question is whether it's a closed system, in which case energy is finite and we're in a sealed cabinet, or whether the notion of a quantum mechanical multiverse holds true, where it's hypothetically possible to pull energy from one universe to another, in which case it's ported.
 
In this video talking about why Phil Jones uses smaller drivers(around the 8:30 mark), he references a time he grabbed the speakers from an old movie theater that was closing down. They may not be the biggest, but I'm certain they weren't small...


That was a very informative video. I own some of PJ's gear, and I think it's excellent. The science he goes through in this video should be a good read for anyone trying to do their own speaker/cab builds. Not that everyone might agree with him on all things. Thanks for that post.
 
I know you guys are tired of hearing me say it.

But has anyone ever executed a production-run Bass Amp/Cab unit ( and in this case, powered CAB - who had those back then? ) than the Acoustic 360/361.

IMHO, you would clone that build very carefully, and really, do you need > 18"?
 
Back in the 80’s I worked in a high end audio store that sold a line of speakers called Apogee. The flagship model was the Scintilla. The non electrostatic flat panel full range drivers were about 20” wide by about 6’ tall . They were a one ohm speaker :wideyed:. They needed very specific amplifiers. Fortunately we sold Krell amps. We drove them with KSA 100 100 Watt monoblocks. To this day it’s the closest I’ve ever heard to live music.
This is a great tale. Makes me want to go on a vision quest to find the same setup! could be a long journey but, dang, this sounds special!