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.
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