plastic penguin said:
davedotco said:
chebby said:
CnoEvil said:
Rethep said:
CnoEvil said:
Sealed (Infinite Baffle) keeps its "atmosphere" contained within the speaker, so the room plays much less of a role.
"Sealed" and "infinite baffle" are not the same! An "infinite baffle" can be compared to a "port", but the hole is much bigger.
"Infinite Baffle" is a great description of how I feel about the complexities of speaker design.
If I have got it wrong, then apologies, but this is what Wiki says:
"Infinite baffle" or simply "IB" is also used as a generic term for sealed enclosures of any size, the name being used because of the ability of a sealed enclosure to prevent any interaction between the forward and rear radiation of a driver at low frequencies.
Strictly speaking, the differentiation of the two terms is valid. A true 'infinite baffle' would not present any 'damping' or resistance to large movements of a bass/mid cone because there would be no trapped volume of air like you'd get in a sealed cabinet. The volume of air behind a theoretical 'infinite baffle' would itself be infinite and offer no resistance to the movement of a speaker cone. (Too large a volume of air to be compressed or expanded by the movement of the speaker cones.)
However, for whatever historical reasons, 'infinite baffle' and 'sealed cabinet' (or sealed enclosure) have become (albeit wrongly) interchangeable terms and I have frequently been guilty of using both.
Which is why the Americans, in particular, often use the term
'acoustic suspension' to describe sealed box louspeakers.
Remember Wharfedale using that term with their Dentons and Lintons. There were owned by Rank Organisation, which ties in.
The term 'acoustic suspension' was coined in the late 50s by american speaker designer Edgar Villchur, then president of Acoustic Research. The AR speakers of the day were highly regarded and spawned many imitators, most noteably KLH.
British loudspeakers of this period still used the term infinite baffle, possibly in deference to the americans. As I explained above there is a difference between acoustic suspension and infinite baffle (as in sealed box) that was pretty clear at that time but much less defined in later years.
Whether this was to do with the convergeance of the two technologies or loose marketing BS, I could not say.