8c placement and Boundary Coupled Bass

The sound quality of your audio system is primarily determined by your loudspeakers, and the way your loudspeakers interact with the acoustics of your room. One way to get a great sounding system, is to design a purpose-built room from the ground up, in which the (usually soffit-mounted) loudspeakers are part of the design. This works. But because of cost and space requirements, it's attainable only for the happy few.  

Most of us work and live in real-life rooms, with less than perfect acoustics, and limited space. This is where the 8c comes in. In its essence, the Dutch & Dutch 8c is a highly accurate integrated audio system that adapts to, and works together with the acoustics of your room. You’ll get great sound, even in rooms with little or no acoustic treatment. We call it RoomMatching.

The 8c's have a range of technologies on board that will ensure that they interact with your room in a favorable manner. One of these technologies is Boundary Coupled Bass (BCB).

The 8c's have two high-excursion woofers in the back of their cabinets. These woofers operate below 100 Hz only. Inspired by the work of the late speaker designer Roy Allison, the 8c is designed to leverage Boundary Coupling. Boundary Coupled Bass (BCB) offers four main benefits:

❥ The destructive boundary interference that plagues conventional loudspeakers is avoided.
❥ Low-frequency headroom is increased by up to 6 dB.
❥ Increased directivity in the bass, for a good directivity match between the Boundary Coupled Bass and the Acoustic Cardioid midrange.
❥ The 8c can be placed very close to the wall, which make for a less obtrusive system.

The 8c's have pre-programmed settings that let the 8c's easily adapt to a specific distance between the back of the 8c and the front-wall (in accordance with the professional and scientific literature, we call this wall the front-wall: listener-orientation is the reference, not the speaker's). You get the best results by placing the 8c’s between 10 and 50 cm from the front wall.

How does it work?
The 8c’s bass drivers acoustically couple with the front-wall, and the 8c and the wall effectively combine to become one single sound source. This combined 8c/wall-system radiates sound in a phase-coherent hemispherical pattern. The preset that corresponds with the actual distance between the back of the 8c and the wall, does two things:

1. it assures that the 8c/wall-system and the Acoustic Cardioid Midrange in the 8c's front baffle are time-aligned.
2. it makes sure that the 8c together with the wall has a flat frequency response.

Will the 8c work with the wall in my room?
In all probability, yes. Although some walls offer more bass support than others, the 8c's can adapt to a wide variety of walls. The easiest walls to work with are flat, solid, rigid walls. But you can also get great results with walls that are more flexible and with an asymmetrical room layout.

With some wall types it is easier to get good results. Other wall types require more attention and effort. Whatever the situation, a combination of Boundary Distance Settings and RoomEQ will ensure that the 8c's adapt to your specific situation in the best possible way. Therefore, whether your front-wall is a slanted wooden ceiling with a skylight, a brick wall with a door in it, or a wall that consists entirely of double-pane glass - the 8c's RoomMatching technologies help to ensure you'll get great sound.

And now here is the important bit that people sometimes miss. Say you have an room that's more acoustically challenging than most. Even if the results you get may not be as good as what you might get with a 'better' wall, it will at the very least be way better than the results you'd get with a speaker that doesn't even take the boundary into account, which is 99% + of speakers.

If you are unsure of how to achieve the best possible results, please ask your Dutch & Dutch dealer for help, or purchase our Remote Commissioning Service: https://shop.dutchdutch.com/rcs.html A trained Dutch & Dutch engineer will help you to match the 8c's to your room, to ensure you get the most out of them.