Readers of this thread may be interested in the following quotes from Steve from the old forum in 1999/2000...
Quote:
If you took a traditional horn flare and a traditional port... and they had sex, the wicked one would be the result.
Think of the horn flares of the wicked one, as an esoteric variable port.
The dual design yeilds more complexity, as the last order of the horn flare is shared by both sides. At this point the pressure doubles, and the wavefronts from each side are combined in phase.
Quote:In a ported enclosure the port which is really a piston of air, reasonates at one frequency in phase with the woofer. When this happens the dampening action on the woofer increases causing it to move less. (Interesting to note that at this point where the woofer's excursion is the least, the output of the cabinet/speaker combo is at it's loudest.) So we can see that a port increases power handling at a given frequency. This damping action reduces as you get farther away from the tuning frequency of the box. Basically, you have damping across about a 1 octave range.
In a horn, the flare itself creates an impedance against the woofer, and effects it similarly to a port. The main difference is that unlike the port which works at one frequency, the flare of the horn acts like a variable length port. By this I mean it dampens the woofer at every frequency. For this reason, power handling and effeciency is increased over a ported box design, and because the woofer moves less, accuracy goes way up, and distortion goes way down.
As for calculating the wicked one's response on a computer program, it can't be done. There are some horn flare calculators available in the shareware archives on madisound's bbs, but in designs like the wicked one, velocity, phase, capacitance, and complimentary resonances are also factored in.
That should be a good start.
Steve Deckert
Doesn't help my understanding of the WO. Interesting though.