HiVi L6-4R

Post date: Aug 19, 2014 4:23:28 AM

This driver is awesome. We should all be sent to bed without dessert for not using it sooner.

• First of all, it just looks cool as hell. A woven black Kevlar cone PLUS black phase plug? It's like a stealth fighter and bulletproof vest and Bugatti Veyron all at the same time! It is all that is man.

• Second, the Frequency Response is very well-behaved. DIYers have lost the easy-to-work-with woofers like the Vifa P-series and Audax over the years, in favor of aluminum and inventive combinations of paper. The L6-4R behaves more like a classic poly cone, and is therefore super easy to work with. Just look at it. It's beautiful! No need for high-order filters here. Lots of room for experimentation, and it's not going to hiss at you like a metal cone if you screw it up.

• Third, it's a high sensitivity driver. Now yes, this is a result of it being a "4 Ohm" woofer. But so what? Who among the DIY addicted doesn't have a large collection of amplifiers, and at least some of which can drive 4 Ohm loads? Plus, once the L6-4R is combined with the series resistance of a decent lowpass filter, the actual impedance minima would be closer to 5 Ohms (and there's a good number of commercially available "8 Ohms nominal" speakers out there that pull that trick). So many of us are used to using "8 Ohm" woofers in bookshelf speakers, getting used to sensitivities around 82 - 83 dB that we forget what it's like to have a mere bookshelf speaker bark at us with the volume knob barely turned up.

• And unlike an "8 Ohm" high sensitivity woofer, its bass does not suck. In fact, the bass is pretty darn good. I have it in a .5 cu ft bookshelf speaker, and it can do rap and metal just fine. About the only thing you'd need a sub for is LFE in movies.

I threw together a bookshelf speaker using this woofer and the controversial Airborne RT-4001. I call it the Spitfire. It's a blast to listen to. They sound really big, and that smooth FR from the woofer means no listening fatigue. If I can make it to a DIY event in the near future, I'll bring it with so people can hear the good news.

But really the purpose of this post is not to publish another design. If you like the Spitfire, great; if not, move on. What I'm here to say is that the HiVi L6-4R is an awesome woofer, and the DIY community has been missing out by not putting it to good use!