The Truth on the Biggest Lie about Open Baffle Speakers

More! Not less!
The open baffle has MORE room interaction than a boxed speaker simply because it's firing out of the back of the speaker as well. Those emissions reflect from the walls in the room almost exactly like the ones from the front.

The "figure 8" dispersion pattern is mostly an "on paper" concept that goes out the window in a real room. By real room, I mean YOUR room - any small room.

As demonstrated with measurements in this video, the room modes are still activated by a dipole speaker. That's because all that takes is for the mode frequency to be present in the room. If it's there, the room will resonate at that frequency regardless of where it's coming from or what's producing it.
My listening room has a very strong room mode at 37Hz, and you can clearly see in the waterfall and spectrograph plots that the mode is being energized. That's because the dipole sub is playing that frequency - it's in the room and the room is resonating at the frequency.
If you can measure output at 37Hz, then that room mode WILL BE activated.
The ONLY WAY to not activate it is to have NO CONTENT at 37Hz at all - zero - a HUGE null.

Also as shown in the video, an open baffle speaker is putting a lot of energy out off axis, even out to 90 degrees to the face of the baffle in the so called dead zone where maximum cancellation is supposed to happen. As I said in the video, the output from the rear CAN NOT be exactly the same as the output from the front, and that weakens that cancellation effect at the sides.

So the truth is that open baffle speakers are not the physics-defying panacea that a lot think they are. They have more room interaction (and that's WHY they sound different and WHY some of us love them) and CAN NOT solve room mode problems or make room treatment unnecessary.

My video from 2 years ago where I compared the isobaric sub to the open baffle sub:    • Experimenting With Open Baffle Subwoo...  
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