More improvement to report on the PVC pipe speaker enclosures (Voigt pipes).
Today I decided to stuff the upper pipe resonator. Stuffing reduces the velocity of sound due to increased density of the resonance volume. Such an increase of density lets the resonant volume appear larger to the sound-waves.
Quick excursion to a previous post: those pipe-enclosures are just broadband quart-wave resonators, having a pressure node at the closed end of the pipe and a velocity node at the open end.
Reducing the velocity of sound inside the pipe will therefore lower the quarter-wave resonance, resulting in more bass.
Poor man's stuffing could be cotton wool (cotton batting). This stuff introduces a severe problem! The pipes will be home of moths!
There is help, however, a real poor man's stuffing: polyester fiber from real cheap cushions. At a modern Swedish furniture store, such cushions are as cheap as €2/pc containing 400g of fibers, which is a lot more than needed.
I loosened up the cushion fiber, in order to create a very light and fluffy stuffing. Mind you, with 2" drivers, you don't want to dampen too much. It took just a few grams to lightly stuff the tapered resonators.
The result was quite pleasing. However, running the converters w/o the upper resonator revealed some adverse effects of the horn (lower part of the pipe/resonator).
To remedy this effect, I dropped a quarter cleaning cloth, cut the long side, into the tube, covering the back of the driver and following down as deep as possible.
Finally, my PVC-plumbing Voigt pipes are pretty close to Voigt pipes made from wood, as found on the world-wide-waiting-network, i.e. stuffing above the driver, damping behind the drivers and a horn like bass mouth.
As announced before, the next step has to be the homebrew low noise amp.
