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The Uglies Tower and Surround Build Log
I am Getting ready to build a new Home Theater Tower Speaker and Rear Surrounds. You may be wondering why no center. Well, I plan to use a third tower, since I have an acoustically transparent screen. However, if these are well received, I am sure I could be persuaded to build a center speaker. Each tower speaker will consist of two W8-2096 midwoofersand each surround will contain the W6-1721. I am still undecided on the tweeter, but am leaning toward the Peerless Corundum 1″. I was leaning toward the Wavecor, which are one of my favorites, but I am really trying to keep the cost to around $600. And that would push me closer to $700. Plus the Peerless can take more power (more on that later). Let’s look at the drivers and talk about them.
For theater speakers, I want something dynamic, that can handle bass. If you can’t tell, these can handle bass! I put a picture of them next to a GRS 8PF-8. Which is an 8″ woofer.
These are massive in comparison…and heavy! But that is the reason they were chosen. Each of the W8’s have an x-max of 8.5mm! That is better than some 8″ subwoofers. In fact, it is only 0.5mm less than Dayton’s reference sub. Looking in WinISD, it looks like you can easily tune these to 36hz (F3 of 35) and still give them max 250 watts before they hit their mechanical limits of 17mm. This should give you plenty of headroom when big dynamic bass scenes come on the screen. Which should really benefit those who cross their mains low or run them full-range.
The W6 was chosen for the rear to match the dynamics of the front. Unfortunately a ported cabinet is probably out of the picture due to the size the enclosure would have to be, but I am still thinking about it. So we may do sealed. But even sealed can give an F3 of around 69hz. Add in room gain, and you got a very formidable rear speaker.
Now all of these speakers will be able to take a lot of power. So having a dedicated amplifier seems to be best for these, but I will test them both with a dedicated amplifier with headroom and an AVR to see and hear the difference.
Dowload the FRD and ZMA Files here: