Speaker Building

D I Y
ourself
A Parts Express / Morel Exclusive

by Jeff Bagby

Speaker Design
The idea for this speaker was birthed at the 2012 Midwest Audiofest from a conversation
with Russell Kauffman, then Technical Director at Morel Acoustics. He was showing us
some new Morel drivers, using titanium voice coil formers, and I became very interested
in the design of one of the woofers and made the comment that I would be interested in
trying that one in a speaker design sometime. Russell thus challenged me to do so, and
the Solstice is that design.
The Solstice is a small tower design implementing two woofers and a dome tweeter.
I chose an MMT configuration in order to place the tweeter closer to ear height and
decided to just let the dual woofers work together in their operating range. To improve
overall bass response the tower is a Mass-Loaded Transmission Line (MLTL) design with
a slot port at the bottom of the back of the cabinet.

1 Driver Selection

The woofer that had intrigued me is the Morel TiCW 638Nd. This is a beautiful 6" polymer
cone woofer with a “hybrid” Ferrite/Neo magnet inside a 3" voice coil on a titanium former
and a full copper sleeve in the motor to reduce inductance. This is truly a state-of-the-art
motor design with very low distortion. I used a pair of these woofers operating in parallel to
increase sensitivity and bass SPL.
The tweeter I selected is the Morel CAT308 silk dome tweeter, from the Classic line of
Morel drivers. Although Morel offers tweeters in their Elite and Supreme lines as well,
measurements of the CAT308 revealed it to be a tweeter with very linear response and low
distortion, and since I have used it before and was pleased with it, I decided to stick with it
in the Solstice.

2 Crossover Design

The Solstice is a basic two-way design, with both woofers working together in parallel over
the same frequency range. To avoid issues, the crossover point to the tweeter is at a low
1.7 kHz. The crossover is a symmetrical 4th Order Linkwitz Riley acoustical design with all
drivers in phase at the crossover point and with excellent phase tracking over a wide band.
This crossover is achieved with an electrical third order network on the woofers implementing
the necessary response shaping and baffle step compensation, and a second order
network on the tweeter with resistor padding.
One of the things that surprised me during Measured Acoustic Crossover
the design stage was that due to the large
voice coil and the shallow cone on the
woofer, the Z-axis offset between the
woofer and tweeter was very close to
0 mm, meaning that these drivers are
naturally time aligned on the flat baffle
when recessed flush. Time aligned
systems are usually difficult to design,
but Morel’s driver geometries make this
easy to achieve. Because of this the
Solstice is a time aligned loudspeaker.

3 Cabinet Design

The cabinet design is as special as the drivers are. I wanted a small tower where the tweeter could be set at ear level with the woofers just
below the tweeter. This would determine the height (38") and the woofer diameter would determine the cabinet width (8.75"), being a bit larger
than the woofer frame itself. The depth (10.5") was then determined based on achieving the correct internal volume for the woofers. This
gave me nearly optimum dimensions for an MLTL (Mass-Loaded Transmission Line) design. I drew up some sketches and contacted Erich
at Denovo Audio. He had some novel ideas and designed an excellent cabinet kit. The flat-pack enclosure is precut and assembles easily
into a very well-made and very strong cabinet, designed to accomplish my MLTL woofer loading. The bass loading was fined-tuned using a
combination of impedance and near-field port and cone measurements to dial-in the optimum port dimensions.

16 1-800-338-0531
 Speaker Building

4 Cabinet Construction

The cabinet is offered as a flat-pack kit by Parts Express, and includes an attractive double-thick diffraction
reducing front baffle, routed to recess and time-align the drivers, with large chamfers on the back of the woofer
openings. The braced cabinet uses a horizontal window brace placed just below the woofers. This brace holds the
damping material in the upper half of the enclosure, while the lower half remains empty. At the bottom of the back
of the enclosure is a shelf which comprises a slot port which tunes the cabinet to 37 Hz, but makes use of the
tower design for transmission line loading as well. All panels in the kit are CNC cut and ready for assembly with
very tight tolerances and excellent enclosure engineering by Denovo Audio.

5 System Specifications

The computer predicted Room Response

F3 for the speaker is 34
Hz with an F6 of 30 Hz,
although in my room I
measure strong output to
25 Hz. The bass is clean,
extended, and non-boomy.
The system sensitivity
is approximately 87 dB,
with an extremely flat
frequency response. The
system has a nominal
impedance of 6 - 8 ohms, Final Impedance
with an impedance
minimum of 4.5 ohms, so
the load is reasonable for
almost any amplifier. Due
to the woofer loading it
handles power very well
without bottoming the
woofer and can play at
pretty high SPL’s with very
low distortion.

6 Conclusion

I was extremely pleased with how this speaker turned out. Its bass response is extended to the point that most
people will not ever need a subwoofer. The transition between the bass to the midrange is very coherent due to
the MLTL loading. The high frequencies are flat and smooth in typical Morel fashion. But the midrange is where
the real beauty lies; this speaker has made me rethink what state-of-the-art midrange is, as it has among the best
midrange reproduction I have ever heard. Whether vocals, piano, or horns, this speaker has a touch of realism
that is often very hard to achieve.
This is one of the finest reasonably- Everything you need to build your
sized tower speakers I have ever
had the pleasure of listening to. own Solstice speaker!
The Solstice speaker design by
Dayton Audio OmniMic V2 Precision Measurement System Jeff Bagby is available as a kit See a complete
from Parts Express. description online at
• OmniMic V2 used for individual driver parts-express.com
and final design measurements • Includes cabinet drawing,
schematic, assembly guide,
• Compact, portable, accurate, affordable
and building tips
• Intuitive software—open the box,
• Designed and fine-tuned by
start testing in minutes
expert designer Jeff Bagby
• Optimized for use with netbooks
• Quality MDF construction;
and laptops
easy to build and finish
• Accurate response down to 5 Hz,
• High-end woofers and
fully calibrated, includes FRD file
tweeter from Morel

#390-792 ������������������������������������ $399.99LIST  $29800EACH #300-708 ����������������������������������� $780.00LIST  $49800EACH

About the Designer: Jeff Bagby

Jeff Bagby, creator of Passive Crossover Designer and numerous other software design tools, is a thirty-year engineer in the
automotive industry working in automatic transmission assembly systems and quality control. He has been building loudspeakers
since his college days when he fell in love with this hobby, and now consults for a number of companies in the loudspeaker
industry. He lives in Kokomo, Indiana with his wife and son.
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