[Elecraft] external speaker in EC2 cabinet?

[Wayne Burdick]

Vic, Lee:

An external speaker kit is a great idea, but personally I would want it to be in
an EC2 cabinet, not something taller. (It always annoyed me that my IC730's
speaker was taller than the IC730 itself--this is true of some other
transceivers and their accessory speakers, too.)

We tried putting a front-facing speaker into an EC2 cabinet quite a while ago.
What we found is that you get lots of high end but poor bass and midrange. The
problem is that the box is not tall enough to provide good base "backing" when
the speaker is mounted on the front panel. When the speaker is mounted on the
top, bass and midrange is quite strong because the larger dimension of the box
and the top cover itself provide good low-end emphasis.

What we concluded is that to use an EC2 as a speaker cabinet, you'd have to
either use "porting" techniques (as in the Bose speakers, among others), or
include an active EQ network and audio amplifier. The latter is OK, although it
would require a 12V supply so it's a little less desireable than a non-powered
speaker with similar performance. Can this be done with porting or other
acoustic design techniques? I'm not sure.

While we don't have time in our present schedule to delve into this deeper, we'd
certainly like to encourage others' efforts to put a speaker in an EC2. This
would, as you mentioned, be a very viable product, and we'd get involved taking
it from prototype to production. Ideally we would integrate an optional power
supply into the same cabinet, so the speaker and related electrical and
mechanical components should take up the minimum possible space. 

Anyone game? There are EC2 cabinets in stock just itching to be used by audio experimenters....

73,
Wayne
N6KR


Vic Rosenthal wrote:
> 
> Lee Buller wrote:
> 
>  >  Quality speaker for the K2.
>  > Designed to look good, but also designed to sound good.
> 
> I think this is a good idea from a commercial point of view.  People
> have always been willing to pay a premium for the 'matching' speaker for
> their rig.  A speaker with an Elecraft emblem on it would sell well.
> Technically, I've found that it's hard to get a speaker that sounds good
> on CW.  Maybe it could have a switch and some passive components to
> optimize response for CW or SSB.