Distant cousins?
July 26, 2022 Leave a comment
I’ve showed off my fascination with (small) coaxial loudspeaker drivers before and recently I scratched the itch again with a pair of SB12PACR25-4-COAX.
This is a new driver from the “cheap” SB PFC/PAC lines. Like the Seas driver it has an alu cone and a softdome tweeter, but the price is around 1/3 of the Seas driver, courtesy of cheaper SB manufacturing and a cheaper plastic basket compared to the die-cast aluminium on the Seas. That said, it doesn’t feel that cheap to be honest, because even though the basket is plastic it seems well-made and solid. I have several others of these PFC/PAC SB drivers and they as well-engineered as the rest of the SB lineup IMO and excellent value for money. In case you doubt their “audiophile credentials”, there is even a Troels Gravesen design based solely on the PFC-drivers.
Now I could have just bought the paper-coned version of the coax-driver that has been on the market for years, but I have the 16cm version of that already, the price was about the same and I thought it would be fun to compare the alu-version to the Seas L12 – oh, and I think the alu-version looks cooler as well :).
This is one of the drivers that I have bought with a specific project in mind, namely to try and build a small active all-in-one “desktop” speaker. The original plan for that was a three-way design with a small built-in subwoofer, but the enclosure ended up being very large and impractical (i.e. desk-sized instead of for desk use…). Two of these SB12s plus some electronics is an altogether more reasonable size, so I have repurposed the other drivers for something else instead.
I’ve already cut some wood for the basic design and with a holiday coming up soon, I hope in a week or so I can get these drivers into cabinets and do some basic listening tests. In parallel I am also looking for suitable electronics, but that’s a story for another time (mostly because it’s not done yet 😉 )