Anybody have experience with the Hi-Vi B3S?

[bonehead848]

Im looking at zaph's design with the filter and all. My budget has really hit its max so the cheaper the better. These would be for the rear three speakers (6.1). My mains are zaph's BAMTM and the sub will soon be a large ep2500 powered LLT. My concern is if there is any way these little 3" speakers can keep up with my other rockin equipment. It doesnt have to be perfect, just good enough for now.
These will be tv and movies only, music is staying 2.1.

Also, any suggestions on routing a perfect square?

[BoomieMCT]

I've not made the Zaph design but I've used the B3S with his breakup mode filter in other designs and it sounds pretty good. For surrounds / rears these should be okay.

I personally like to keep (at least) the tweeters the same in a surround setup but opinions vary.

[Anthony]

I've been experimenting with the B3N's in my OB setups and they are great. I crossed ahead of the breakup mode (although I did put a notch on there and noticed no difference).

Overall, I'm very impressed. Very smooth natural midrange. Just don't ask too much from the bass and give it a cheap tweeter to take the top ocatve and you can get a great speaker. Zaph's design using the B3S is pretty neat.

As for routing a perfect square, just build a jig. Make a square frame with half lap joints so that the inside can be the roller-bearing surface (or template guide) for the router. An alternative would be to get some 1/2" MDF and carefully cut out the square with a jigsaw and use files and sandpaper to get it perfect (very time consuming). Then that can be your template.

With routers, jigs are the name of the game. They take a while to get right, but they make the operations safer and easier in the long run.

good luck,
Anthony

[bonehead848]

I feel horridly embarrassed for asking this but what is the impedance of the b3s with the filter? I know its an 8 ohm speaker but one of the charts on zaphs site make it look like its 4 ohms. The filter cant change that right?

[Anthony]

Actually, it can, but usually not by that much. Notch filters can drop the impedance quite a bit as well. However, it is usually the parallel aspects of the filters that cause impedance problems -- at least when I see impedance problems, I usually start there to try and fix them.

The worst is when you have a speaker that sounds good, but a bad impedance plot (too low or too much negative phase). however, with some trial and error, you can usually fix it.

[Bent]

revive an old thread...

I just did a pair of Zaph's B3S monitors - but used the mildly prohibited B3N's instead with Zaph's same filter network as the back order wait times were too long on the B3S's . (I used a 7Ω resistor at the R2 location because "it was available").
I did a pair of qwik/dirty cabinets with one 10' length of 6" x 1" spruce board... I am impressed with their sound, but noticed they are definitely power hungry with the 7Ω BSC resistor. I selected 120 hz as my crossover with my receiver (the next available selection wasn't 150 hz in my case, but rather 200 Hz... Too high, so I went with 120 Hz)., so subwoofer localization certainly became an issue, but since my sub uses a pair of 15" Soundsplinter drivers with a 1200 watt amp in a 300 pound enclosure, I wasn't about to try tweaking the placement relationship. My inductors' values were confirmed with a Z meter by Sencore, one of the the 0.8mH units measured at 1.0mH evem, the second measured at 0.82mH, and each of the .08mH units were ordered as 0.10mh and devalued by a couple/few turns to bring them into spec as well. (unwinding inductors gives you really ugly spaghetti which can't be wound back up to achieve the initial value again).

They are definitely not as sensitive as my Paradigm Mini-Montors, but I like them enough to keep them, and build 4 more to add to them for HT duty in the living room.

Total assembled cost in my case was about 25 dollars per speaker including drivers, filter components, shipping and materials. The cabs aren't stained , just sanded. I intend to do 6 vertical trans-lam cabs made from 3/4 mdf at approx 5.5" wide x 10" tall x 8" deep.