caveat-

The information shared here is as complete as has ever been published about these designs.
These are strictly, absolutely, experimental DIY designs.
Obviously we don't make money by putting these designs in the public domain, and we won't take any responsibility for whether or not they will make you happy. They are very inexpensive to build, and are intended to present a DIYer who has an urge to learn with a great starting point from which to develop a sensitive speaker system.
The point behind publishing these designs is to share knowledge. Because of this we know many folks will want to ask us many questions about the designs.
Please understand that we have made a conscious choice of making absolutely no monetary gain by publishing this info on the web because we wish to support the DIY community. But we also run a business with just two people that takes a tremendous amount of our time, and because of this we really can't spend time answering further questions about these designs, except for those regarding which of our commerical products work well with them. This is why we have published essentially all the information we have to give, so that you have all the same knowledge from the get go that we learned the hard way over the past five years. Careful reading of the pdf files will offer much insight into most of the questions builders may come up with.
In this spirit we encourage folks to send us their own Whamo experiences by e-mail, and we will add them to this website to build the community knowledge base.
If there is enough interest, perhaps some volunteers would be willing to administer a more developed FAQ, or even a newsgroup. If you have an interest in taking on such a responsibility, contact us, and we would be happy to discuss sponsoring such an endeavor.

further developments

After VSAC 97 Doc was approached to design a series of speakers intended for the Chinese market.  High sensitivity was not to be considered a high priority.
During the intervening months Doc had been dealing with the new product development person at MCM. In one conversation it was disclosed that the manufacturer of the original 5" aluminum cone driver was developing a new driver, and Doc put in his 2 cents. The result was the 55-1870, a 5" aluminum cone driver with a much larger 17 oz (vs. the original 8 oz.) magnet, a curvilinear cone, and a rubber surround.
The  new driver was less efficient, only 87 dB, but much smoother and more extended at both ends of the frequency spectrum, with an honest 54 Hz to 15 kHz response.
Several designs were developed with various numbers of these drivers, the most efficient being about 92.5dB @ 1W @1M. We show the designs here to give an idea of their simplicity, but due to the possibility of  their future release as a commercial product, we are unable to offer any design specifications.

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