Stephen W. Moore

Dipole Loudspeakers

I enjoy listening to music immensely. I also enjoy creating and building new ways to listen. This page is dedicated to high-fidelity dipole loudspeakers.

A dipole loudspeaker outputs sound equally from both front and rear of the speaker. The rearward wave can cancel out the forward wave, so the speaker and crossover must be carefully designed to compensate. The reward is natural, airy, and effortless sound, unlike speakers that sound boxy and constrained.

My designs follow the philosophy of Siegfried Linkwitz at Linkwitz Lab.

On the left are the Phoenix main panels, strictly following the Linkwitz PHOENIX design. Below is pictured the crossover boards and the circuitry to perform the front/rear cancellation compensation.

On the left are my Dirt Cheap Dipoles, using the cheapest available 8” woofers on closeout from Parts Express. The main panel uses four 8” woofers and a Tang Band tweeter. The total cost of the main panels was about $100.

These sounded admirably good for being so cheap, but they were hooked up to very expensive crossovers (above), amplifiers, and woofers (below).

The woofer modules are not cheap. They use four Lambda Acoustics 12” subwoofers in dipole configuration. Below is a closer look at an unfinished woofer module with an experimental amplifier (solid-state).

I wrote a MATLAB simulation to compute the vertical lobing of the main panels. Below is the lobing when listening at 6’ from the panels. Notice the vertical response of the woofers are very good up to the crossover frequency.

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