Carenza design

So here are the latest specs for the Carenza system. The first thing to say is that it’ll be a loud little beauty with 400w rms as standard, but not only that, this baby can host and daisy chain with other sound systems like it and as well as that it can power upto 4 external speakers for sound reinforcement with a total of 163w rms per cab. If you wanted to, you could connect it to a TV and listen in true 4.1 surround sound!

The battery pack is now external which means that you can go on forever if you have enough batteries! That said, the specified one in this set up is an extreme deep cycle maintenance free jobbie that’ll give Carenza a run time of 5 hours, or 3 hours with the extra speakers at full volume.

We’re currently building her and will be finished by Saturday 28th February.

Beatrix V3 Design

So this is the final design for Beatrix V3. It harnesses the best aspects of V2 with it’s multiple drivers/cone area and seperable boxes enabling it to be transported via car if necessary. It also takes into account the rather successful ported design and tuning but V3 takes it one step further with more efficient and powerful drivers and a better tuning frequency and design that means it can unlike V2 harness it’s ported performance anywhere by being loaded against the ground rather than fired rearwards. This means 100% performance almost 100% of the time regardless of where it is. Stick it in the narrow city streets of London with it’s unique acoustic tendancies and you have probably the most efficient and powerful bicycle sound system in London and any city like it in the world.

Nike.com - Run Dem Crew

The legs for the top box need to be extended by a few more centimeters and a joint added to the middle to facilitate the seperational hinges. Trouble then is finding a way to attach the legs to the bottom box in a way that’ll still allow me to completely seal and/or remove the lid if and when I need to. It’s not an easy thing to do with so much force being applied to three positions on the legs. I could glue and screen the lower half of the legs to the bass unit’s lid and screw around the legs to secure the lid to the box. Trouble is then that it lacks sufficient clamping force for all that air inside. See what I mean? The hinges need to be in the middle to provide a decent place to screw into that’ll support the lateral forces of when Beatrix goes over a pot hole.

The top box also needs upgrading with lexan polycarb as the current perspex isn’t upto the pounding of the 6 100w full range drivers, especially with such large perspex areas. The current perspex is cracking around the screws and rattling against the woodwork. The new plan is to add an aero port for that extra little bit of oomph and rubber sheeting along all the perspex/ply contact points, that’ll stop the rattling and also put less strain on the polycarb.

I could replace the Kenwood W300s subwoofers with ones rated 400w more a piece, not only that but they play lower, and go louder by 2db for any given input signal. Trouble is, they weigh 500g more each a piece, so that’s -2kg from the 12kg weight saving.

Apart from that, I’m replacing the JBL amp driving the subs with a Kenwood one that’ll do twice the power. Trouble here is that instead of running 4x 104w rms @ 4ohm, the new amp will do 1x 1000w rms @ 1ohm. Which means that it’ll be a much higher current involved, which means more power consumption. Thankfully it’s a Class D amp compared to the previous Class A/B which means it’s twice as efficient, or in laymens terms, even though it’s twice the power, it consumes the same amount of power from the battery.

I’m also wanting to replace the top amp which is an Audio System’s amp kicking out 4x 120w rms into 2ohms, which will drive the SPL Dynamic speakers quite nicely, but they would be underpowered. If I move the current JBL amp to the top, the SPL Dynamics will receive 145w per pair, which means they’ll only be underpowered by 10w per pair which is quite good actually. It’s also 15% more efficient unfortunately, it also weighs 2kg more.

What do you think?