wide baffles and baffle step


Lengthy quotation from Peter Comeau, designer at Wharfedale.  Makes a lot of sense to me...

"Th[e] larger ported box, with its subsequent increased baffle size, helps solve a major problem in modern speakers, namely, the baffle step.

I grew up with large speakers with wide baffles, but, as speakers reduced in size over the years I noticed that something was missing from the sound and, when I stuck my head firmly into speaker design, I began to understand the acoustic problems caused by the baffle step.

Put simply, as the baffle size decreases, the point at which the acoustic radiation changes from hemispherical to spherical goes up in frequency. It also becomes sharper and narrower in bandwidth as the sides of the cabinet, and the walls and floor of the room, are further removed from the equation. So, this 6dB step in the power response becomes acoustically more obvious.

I believe that a thin speaker always sounds thinner throughout the midrange when directly compared to a speaker with more generous baffle width. Of course, as designers of modern, slim speakers, we compromise by adjusting for the baffle step in the crossover, but in doing so, we also compromise sensitivity. What starts out as a 90dB at 1W drive-unit often ends up as an 85dB system once we have adjusted for the power loss due to the baffle step."



128x128twoleftears
So do you just hang the drivers out there like on strings or something?

no you put them in a big wall. Behind the wall, the energy is allowed to escape rather than reflect back out. But audiophiles want to have their cake and eat it so they accept the inferior solution of a box with baffle. 
Or listen to James in wall speakers which are housed in an welded aluminum cabinet attached to the stud wall and flush mounted..pretty nice..best in walls I ever sold or heard. Tom
Funny every speaker designer thinks his is of course the best design. That's why my house is full of speakers. But they do sound different on different recordings and performances. 
wide baffles reflect more midrange back into the room because the larger wavelengths cannot disperse around to the back of the enclosure.
this creates an uneven response at midrange frequencies that must be filtered with a BSC circuit in the crossover to yield a neutral frequency response.
all things being equal it is better to have a narrower baffle and reduced BSC filterig.