Open Baffle
My first experience with open baffles began with a pair of old Isophone speakers I purchased
rather cheap on ebay and mounted on small cardboard baffles. Besides the lack of bass I was
immediately surprised how good and open the sound was. Those Isophones were only midrange drivers
so I had to search for a fullrange driver because I was now convinced that I had found something
really interesting to go after.
Next came the CSS FR125S which I first
saw on this site: Tom Zurowski - zhorn.
I decided to try the JELabs design for them.
It's amazing how the CSS driver works in this baffle. The JELabs design allows the CSS to produce enough
bass for its size. The driver doesn't let you miss any high frequencies anyhow.
After a year of listening I was still searching for improvements and ended up looking for a new driver. After a lot of research I read about the Silver Iris coaxial driver sold by Hawthorne Audio. There are also two reviews of these drivers at TNT Audio. The model I decided to use is the Silver Iris 15" coaxial and comes along with a crossover for each driver.
The picture above shows the Silver Iris in the JELabs baffles. As soon as they arrived I mounted them on those baffles the CSS used to be in before. After a few months of listening I decided to follow the device of Darrel Hawthorne and other experienced SI users to mount the drivers in smaller baffles. In fact the Silver Iris sound a little boomy in the large baffles. One reason for this is probably not only the large baffle construction for the SI but also because they are set up in a small listening room and don't have enough space behind them. Using smaller baffles (see pic below) improved the sound significantly.
Links
Hawthorne Audio
fullrangedriver.com
diyaudio.com
Linkwitz Lab