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Isobaric Loading

When 'isobaric' bass loading was rediscovered in the Linn Isobarik loudspeaker, many fanciful claims were made for it. Putting one bass driver immediately behind another – with just a small, sealed enclosure between them – does not eliminate the speaker's bass resonance and subsequent roll-off, nor does it lower the front driver's resonance frequency to its free-air value. Connecting two identical drivers acoustically in series/electrically in parallel produces a composite driver with twice the moving mass and half the suspension compliance. So the combined driver has the same free-air resonance but, because of the halving of compliance, greater bass extension can be achieved from a given cabinet volume. The downside is that the second driver halves the overall impedance and contributes nothing to the radiating area, as it would if used acoustically in parallel. In practice, isobaric loading does little, if anything, to improve bass output capability. KH

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Neat Acoustics Ltd, Co.
Durham
Supplied by: Neat Acoustics Ltd
01833 631021
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