Cyclop, built by Laurent/France

#2
Hi Troels, I am delighted to send you, attached, 3 photographs of my pair of finished Cyclops, if you want to add them to your "Builder's response" pages. I have veneered them with the new Formica "veneer" product, which is a layer of varnished real wood, glued on a layer of epoxy (I believe), so it is easy to work (cuts with good scissors, perfectly flat), but one sheet of this Formica just large enough for a pair of Cyclops is 150 Euros. The sound of these speakers is excellent, from bass to treble, at any volume level; thank you again Troels for your web site which is a real gold mine. Best regards, Laurent.

#1
Hi Troels, I am delighted to announce you that I have finished my pair of WAF-Cyclop, except the veneer. I have reduced the dimensions of the speaker to respect my wife's tastes, and I have put the medium in the same enclosure as the tweeter and woofer. The spacing between the 3 speakers is the same than in your design. I have not made the 45 degrees angles around the medium (nobody is perfect ...). And instead of using a variovent (65 liters were too much for my wife), I have used a bass-reflex of 55 liters net volume tuned to 31 Hz. The medium volume is triangular, to limit reflexions etc. as you recommended. The damping is 2 mm bitumen, plus 12 mm felt, plus a few pieces of wool (Visaton). The MDF thickness is 22 mm for the front baffle, 19 mm for the other parts ; it should be thicker, but I wanted a speaker not too heavy.
Thank you Troels for your great design, I have only listened to them one hour but the sound is excellent, and moreover is perfect for my tastes and in my room. The drivers will certainly be even better after 100 hours of use. The treble and medium are at least as good as my Focal Micro Utopia Be, which is very difficult because they were ranked as top bookshelf monitors by many magazines, at 5000 Euros per pair. And the WAF-Cyclop bass is much better than the Micros, because the micros only have a 16 cm medium-boomer speaker and less volume. With the Cyclop, when I listen to tunes with heavy bass and drums such as Paul Mc Cartney's Silly Love Song, I can feel the bass making my body vibrating. The bass delivered by the 26 cm SEAS woofer is excellent certainly because I have used a large diameter vent (10 cm internal, 27 cm long) flared at both ends, so the air flows easily at high levels, as predicted by several web sites dealing with subwoofer building.
Also these SEAS speakers are so good (as are the Jantzen Audio filter components), that the Cyclop can play very loud without becoming painful. I had listened to a ProAc D38 last year (7000 Euros / pair) and reminding it I can say that the Cyclop (2200 Euros) is much better in several ways: normal, the D38 tweeter for example costs 25 Euros,  against 290 Euros on the Cyclop; actually not: using expensive parts is not enough to make a great speaker; I have built many speakers when I was younger and the lesson learnt is that the most important is the design of the whole speaker (filter etc.). Here are a few pictures (yes, you guys can build Cyclops in your kitchen ...). I will send you the pictures of the veneered speakers in September. Best regards and thanks again. Laurent (Toulouse, France).

Laurent, thanks for your comments and pics. Pleased to see it all materialise and performing to your satisfaction. For others who may contemplate doing a cabinet design like this, I have to say that the target response will deviate from what seen on my Cyclop website due to the change of the cabinet for the middriver. Most likely a minor dip at 1200-1400 Hz will emerge from not having a chamfered upper part, but as always, we are more tolerant to linear distortion from bigger speakers due to generally lower distortion compared to smaller speakers. Best regards, Troels.