Wanna Build Some Monitors..

[AmplitudeAudio]

Rock,

I have built monitors in days gone by. I still use my "Swan System" monitors today (the big honkers in the attached photo) even though they are pushing 15 years +. I had to re-foam the woofers a couple of years ago. Fortunately someone else took care of the design and I just did the construction. They were designed to compete with the B&W 801s and the guys who designed them began selling them for $6,000 a pair in 1991. I put about $1500 in the speakers and materials.


Unless you are really into woodworking, speaker testing, crossover design, listening tests, crossover component tweaks, more listening tests....etc, I would say either buy something pre-built or try to find a kit. I don't mean to sound negative but speaker design is a fine art and requires a huge time investment. The guys who designed the speakers I use went through numerous woofer, midrange, and tweeter combinations before they were satisfied and were kind enough to publish the results in "Speaker Builder" magazine. A good friend of mine used to spend a lot of time tweaking crossovers on a simple 2-way system he designed.

The results can be very rewarding and you can build some really nice speakers for less cash if you have the time.

You may want to check with Madisound for their latest kits. They are a good supplier of high-quality speaker components and kits.

Good Luck!
Charlie

[r0ck1r0ck2]

zam!

that speaker is a BEAST!

hmm..

i feel like i've seen other people on GS put up their speaker builds before..

thanks for the link.

[AmplitudeAudio]

No problemo, the beasts are pretty cool, drivers are per side:

12" "Swan" woofer X 2
5" Focal "mid-bass" X 2
1" Dynaudio partially horn loaded, fluid cooled tweeter

active crossover at 200 Hz,
response 20Hz - 25KHz +/- 2 dB at 120dB

I have them hooked up to a Mark Levinson ML-11 (300W/channel max) for the satellites and an Electron Kinetics Eagle 2a for the subs (250W/channel). They were designed to be studio montiors and they are very revealing. Plus they can shake the house.

Joe Diapolito (who designed these) came up with original "mid-bass over/under tweeter" design but didn't patent it. A lot of speakers have used this setup but he was pretty scientific about it.

Charlie

[nandoanalog]

Building my own monitors.... Sounds like fun...

Buiding a solid cabinet sounds like a royal PITA.

So.... Anyone knows how to build a egglestonworks ivy cabinet?...

[Kiwiburger]

I was wondering when this subject would come up - nearly raised it myself.

Apart from the fact that high end monitors are a status symbol, I think it makes a lot of sense to DIY your own speakers. The economics of building, storing, marketing and shipping speakers means that you don't get good value for money with commercial speakers. There is a real temptation to the makers to build them out of cheap materials (MDF?) with cheap labour, and throw in cheap amps and make outrageous claims of being flat & uncolored etc. Also physical size and weight costs money, so the cheaper stuff is compromised.

No two speakers are ever going to sound the same. At any price point. So don't kid yourself that there is the perfect speaker. You have to learn and work around any speaker, so there is no reason to assume a commercial speaker has to be better than something you build yourself. I'm suggesting that a DIY speaker could in theory be far superior.

My pet hates about monitor speakers are:

1 - hiss, hum & buzz from cheap amps. My solution is to go passive, and use a high quality amp outside the room. That's another thing that can be built with higher quality for less money, but that's another subject.

2 - rattles and resonances. I haven't found a monitor speaker that doesn't rattle. My Dynaudio BM15s had a nasty internal rattle from one speaker terminal, so i've had to jam some felt between them.

My feeling is that if I wasn't such a gear snob, I could build a better speaker out of heavy plywood & 4x4 that would be so solid it couldn't rattle. I read about one legendary engineer who made his own speakers out of marble slabs for similar reason, and used them for years on some classic albums,

I've definately decided DIY is the way to go for guitar cabs. What is the point in paying good money for a Marshal cab or better, if it's still going to rattle, and if you have to cut off the grill fabric anyway? Cabinets are for on stage, preferably with an endorsement deal.

[nandoanalog]

So.... Wich speakers are used on egglestonworks IVY?

[r0ck1r0ck2]

a hell of a lot of them..

[O.F.F.]

Still building and tweaking mine (hence no pictures yet, also don't know if anybody here cares) but so far it is very promising indeed!
Started of with 12" Tannoy dual concentrics to which I added a pair of ribbon supertweeters (Fountek JP3.0). Now building two copies of PMC XB2s (Volt RV3143 drivers in a transmission line) for the low end. The whole thing is driven actively with a pair of BSS FDS360s feeding an MC2 Audio MC450 for bass, an MC2 T500 for mids, a QSC (subject to change) for treble and an Omniphonics Footprint 150 for the supertweeters. Crossover freq. are currently 250Hz, 1.2kHz and 15kHz.
Cost has been £2375 by now for everything which is less then 1 PMC XB2 would be retail. Had I bought equivalent main monitors I'd be looking at £15K for actives incl. amps! All in all I highly recommend self-build if you know what you're doing.

Hint: If you run ribbon tweeters active they need a passive high pass between amp and tweet as any amp plop will kill them instantly! Since mine run from 15k I used a 10k high pass.

ps. still looking to control the supertweeters dispersion, any helpful suggestions are very appreciated! How do you design a waveguard? Would it be feasible to use a 2" short throw treble horn for this purpose?

[AmplitudeAudio]

Kiwi,

You mentioned MDF as a cheap construction material, actually it is a preferred material since it absorbs and disperses acoustic enegy more evenly than solid wood or plywood. As far as rattles go, the interior bracing of the cabinets can help with this. The B&W "matrix" series from days of old used a structure similar to the cardboard divider used in wine/bottle shipping boxes. This stiffened the walls of the cabinet and raised their resonant frequency higher than that of the woofers range. I used some solid oak and MDF braces in my cabinets to get a similar effect. Some times a "rattle" is actually an air leak somewhere in cabinet or speaker gasket.

I agree that you can get much more sound for the money if you DIY but your time investment has to count for something.

Charlie

[nandoanalog]

Seriously guys.... How do I build some IVY speakers?

Anybody knows those cabs measures (inside/outside)?

The concept of a speaker that uses no crossover amuses me. Common... Teach me!

[Kiwiburger]

With linear phase digital eq being so good now, I would think it should be possible for somebody to design a great crossover plugin. Then each driver could have it's own dedicated send in a bi or tri-amped configuration.

[O.F.F.]

According to Egglestons site they use Dynaudio Esostar tweeters (ca. US$600 a pair if you can get them) and Morel 166 (ca US$210/pair?) cone mids. No mention of the make of woofer.
May be not your best first project as I understand for a stereo pair you'd need 4 tweeters, 12 midranges and 18 woofers!
One odd thing is that, as much as the Eggleston site gushes about the Morel 166 mid,
the data published on Morels site shows absolutely nothing of Egglestons claims for said driver. For example Eggleston claims an incredibly smooth natural roll-off of -6dB/oct outside the drivers pass band while Morels site shows a drop of -15dB between 5 and 6k! The waterfall diagram doesn't look too good either... it may still sound great but it looks like a very standard mid/bass unit with a pressed steel chassis.
How do they stop the tweeter from frying without a crossover? Also it would distort badly even if a bass signal won't kill them; conversely woofers tend to distort treble when asked to reproduce it. How do they avoid all this without using any form of crossover? All reeks a bit of audiophoolish hyperbole and marketing somehow...

This is just my personal opinion after visiting their site but I'm not holding my breath to hear one (or even two) of those things.

[gurubuzz]

Originally Posted by Kiwiburger

With linear phase digital eq being so good now, I would think it should be possible for somebody to design a great crossover plugin. Then each driver could have it's own dedicated send in a bi or tri-amped configuration.

how about using something like a DBX driverack ???

Funny I was thinking of starting this thread too as I want to make a set of mains.

When I was 9 me and my dad made a set of speakers from a kit ..heck that's was over 30 years ago and they still sound great..no buzzes or rattles. It was a great experience for me ... no-one's dad built speakers let alone have their son help ...I think this was one of many experiences that has given me a "no fear" attitude to sound and electronics...

one mid range crackles a bit when you really crank them....

I'll see if I can post a photo.........

[Eganmedia]

Originally Posted by AmplitudeAudio

Fortunately someone else took care of the design and I just did the construction. Charlie

Isn't that ALL the difference?

You could buy the best drivers, buy the best crossover, and use the best materials in the world, but if ever ther was a "whole being greater than the sum of its parts", it's gotta be monitors.

[nandoanalog]

Originally Posted by Eganmedia

Isn't that ALL the difference?

You could buy the best drivers, buy the best crossover, and use the best materials in the world, but if ever ther was a "whole being greater than the sum of its parts", it's gotta be monitors.

Then lets get started!!!! Lets design a "world class main speaker by gearslutz" that might even become a "industry standard".


Why not give it a try? We got at least 2 manufacturers lurking around that could give us some help (even if this isn`t quite favorable to their business).

[krisstoff]

Has anyone got any cabinet designs they can point us in the direction of. I want to build some kickass main monitors. Also points on internal damping would be great.

[O.F.F.]

IMHO the hardest part in speaker/monitor building is driver choice.
Once thats done its just a matter of deciding on the type of bass enclosure (infinite baffle, ported, transmission line), if you want the drivers tweeter-on-top-mid-underneath or a d'Appolito arrangement (I like these, next best thing to a dual concentric) and sticking to some basic principles like rigidity, keeping the speaker as narrow as possible with radiused edges (unless its going to be soffit mounted), keeping the voice coils in roughly the same vertical plane, avoiding bass cabs with paralell internal walls and making the whole box as inert as humanly possible.
I'd also like to keep the drivers as close to each other as possible.
Ported cabs are the easiest as for every woofer there is only one cab volume and one port size which gives a maximally flat and extended response. Hooray for Messrs. Thiele and Small!

As for crossovers: If you work in digital get a good digital one and if you work analog its difficult to go wrong with an analog active using 4th order Linkwitz/Riley filters.
Passive xovers best avoided as they are complex AND rubbish...

Easiest (cheaters) way is to find out which drivers are used in a monitor you like and just buy those. For instance here in UK is a shop called Wilmslow Audio who'd sell you the drivers used in PMCs MS2 (I think thats what its called; the drivers are Volt Radial, ATC dome mid and a ScanSpeak tweeter) for £1500. Add some wood for a couple of hundred and you get a set of monitors with a list price of £7500.

As for 'the whole being greater then sum of its parts' I tend to disagree, the problem is that a small oversight can negate a hell of a lot of design effort. These can be genuine oversights but often I think they are being dictated to the manufacturer due to cost. For instance I am building double-skinned enclosures and the easiest way to mount the drivers would be to bolt them straight through both skins but this would make a mockery of building double skins so I will have to rebate the t-nuts into the outer skin and cut down 24 bolts to the exact size. This alone would increase retail price by about £1000 (est.) if I were to buy rather then build.

[gurubuzz]

Originally Posted by krisstoff

Has anyone got any cabinet designs they can point us in the direction of. I want to build some kickass main monitors. Also points on internal damping would be great.

I want to build mains too..


I also need info on soffit mounting basics...

[AmplitudeAudio]

Joe,

The point of my comment was that someone else spent months of design, research and testing to come up with the "whole". I don't have the time or desire to do that, but, was able to "cheat" and build some kick-ass mains for 25% of what they would cost already built. Granted, not every $6000/pair monitors have their design and construction details documented for all to see. I'll see if I can find the original Speaker Builder articles and scan them in to be posted. Keep in mind that Dynaudio no longer makes the tweeter but an upgraded inverted ceramic cone was used later (@ $600/each!) and the sattelite crossover modified accordingly. I don't think I have all of that info.

nandoanalog,

Sounds like you need to pick O.F.F.'s brain a little more as he seems to be well versed in speaker design techniques.

Charlie

[nandoanalog]

Now we are getting somewhere .

To me, it doesn`t make much sence building a small nearfield monitor because they are allready relatively cheap.

I honestly don`t know $hit about speaker building. So I think that making a replica off a speaker like egglestoneworks ivy (or something with the same principle) would be a safe bet since Bob Ludwig uses them.

Why not get the same speakers, understand the cabinet principle, and build it ourselfs?

About the outside granite layer.... That would be a PITA... I have very easy access to granite, but it would still need the guy to work it ( it would probably cost 5000$ alone)...

So... Until now we know that they use Dynaudio esotar tweeters and morel mids.

On their site it says:

-Tweeter: Two 1" cloth domes stacked back to front. Each tweeter has a large-diameter vent on its pole piece and a big aperiodic damping chamber that imitates an infinite baffle loading. Stacking them doubles the size of the pole piece across the same driver surface area, increasing linearity and power handling, while having no effect on frequency response. The tweeters are manufactured on a special production line under laboratory conditions.

The crossover for the tweeter is hard wired. We utilize Hovland MusiCaps and Vishay resistors.

I don`t know what "Single Cardas rhodium binding posts" means.... But it`s there...

Mid-bass: Twelve 6" polypropylene, double-magnet driver, with a 3" voice coil diameter. Extremely rigid structural physics and the piston-like action of this driver produce exceptionally quick transients and a complete absence of coloration. These drivers are run full-range in four independently tuned transmission lines. Each transmission line contains three drivers in a pressure driven design, mounted front to back. The rear drivers reduce backpressure on the baffle-mounted drivers, simulating a free air resonance while simultaneously increasing linearity and power handling.

Bass: Nine 12" woofers loaded in three parallel chambers. Each chamber consists of three woofers firing in a pressure driven configuration. The rear drivers reduce backpressure on the baffle-mounted drivers, simulating a free air resonance while simultaneously increasing linearity and power handling. The rear drivers are vented out the back of the enclosure through 4" ports.
-Enclosure: The extremely heavy enclosure becomes slightly wider as the speaker gets deeper on the bass enclosure and slightly narrower on the high frequency section. This minimizes parallel wall interactions, while increasing rigidity and stability.

-Damping material or stuffing is Acousta-Stuff, a nylon polyamide loose bulk fiber that is tri-lobal (instead of round) and multi-directionally crimped so that the strands interlock to form a very cohesive mass that does not require support and will not settle.

They say they use some sort of dampening material to kill cabinet vibrations used on european trains. Is that Acousta-stuff? Or is it anything else?

[AmplitudeAudio]

Originally Posted by nandoanalog

Why not get the same speakers, understand the cabinet principle, and build it ourselfs?

You would have to find out how the crossover is constructed or at least what frequencies are involved. Even then, the components values used are typically matched to the driver's impedance and other electrical characteristics.

Originally Posted by nandoanalog

The crossover for the tweeter is hard wired. We utilize Hovland MusiCaps and Vishay resistors.

What values did they use? If you can find someone who owns a pair and convince them to open them up, you might be able to get a picture of the crossover.

Originally Posted by nandoanalog

I don`t know what "Single Cardas rhodium binding posts" means.... But it`s there...

These are where you connect the speaker wires from your amp to the back of the cabinet. This is one area where DIY allows you freedom of choice. I used the $7/foot (in 1989) Van Der Hul silver wire inside my cabinets since I only needed 5 feet total. I also used some high dollar Tiffany connectors and slutty crossover caps and coils as well. Unless you are buying some expensive monitors, most manufacturers are going to used the cheapest components they can get away with since they have to build 1000s of pairs not one.

Charlie

[O.F.F.]

Hate to rain on your parade but I suggest you forget about copying the Eggleston unless you are prepared to buy one and take it apart!

The bass loading appears to be proprietary as I for one have never come across anything similar. Things become substantially more complex when you start puttting more then one woofer into one box and essential driver data (like Fs, Vas etc) changes in a way I certainly can't help you with. And their triple push-pull configuration makes predicting any kind of behaviour practically impossible (to me at least). I think Quested Audio makes a point of putting all their woofers (up to 4 per speaker) into separate internal compartments to avoid all those pitfalls.

What Eggleston says about their mid bass driver loading makes at least partially no sense at all as a transmission line does not produce meaningful backpressure on a driver like a sealed or ported cab does, it is merely a waveguide. Also mounting a driver in a suitable t/l actually reduces system Fs to about 1/2 oct below driver free-air resonance so I don't see why I would want to maintain free air resonance unless the drivers are physically not capable of taking the extended response.

Either way I'm not saying that Egglestons are bad speakers (I simply don't know them at all) I'm saying that it would be almost impossible to reverse engineer them as none of the standard formulae (Thiele/Small and that bloke whose done the same for transmission lines but whose name escapes me etc) are in any way applicable.
( I like t/ls; they've got a lot going for them: potentially low distortion, lower system Fs, very shallow roll-off below Fs. A bit demanding on the driver though and damping is critical!)

Since you said you "know $hit about speaker building" I strongly recommend to pick another speaker to copy! Why not try the 'PMC's I mentioned in an earlier post?
(If Bob Ludwigs use of Egglestons impressed you have a look at their users list!)
And if you don't like transmission lines you could always buy a few more of those Volt woofers and turn them into 'Quested' 412s as they both use the ATC dome midrange and the tweeter looks remarkably similar too. For me it would be very difficult to recommend anything other then the ATC mid anyway as my three (second) favourite monitors (ATC,PMC, Quested) use them, if I wouldn't like my Tannoy DualConcentrics so much I'd own some! That Wilmslow Audio kit (Prestige I think its called) really is a good start: You get a passive crossover so you don't have to pay out for a bunch of amps straight away and there is a variety of cabs suitable (70litre ported as Wilmslow sells, 110litre ported as Volt suggests for same woofer, t/l like PMC or add more woofers at £250ea. like Quested), I would be tempted to swap the tweeter for a ribbon though.

If I were to build a main monitor from scratch I'd use two Volt woofers working into one t/l each, two ATC mid domes and one ribbon tweeter. All nicely time aligned in a d'Appolito arrangement (vertically, tweeter in the middle, one mid above and one below followed by the woofers and the t/l openings). All driven by an analogue active crossover and some nice amps. The closest I can get in my simple mind to a full-range point source. Wouldn't wanna move the things once they'd be built though!
Also there might be a case for running both woofers into one t/l but I don't know of any documented precedence so it'd be down to trial and error.


ps: speaker building can be addictive! I started at 16 with a pair of back loaded horns with 10" Fostex drivers which I built in and for my bedroom. My neighbours were very pleased when I moved out...

[nandoanalog]

Soooo.... Let`s dumb it down....

Egglestonwroks sounds like rocket science....

Then let us build something better than that!!! Gotta be easy... It`s just a bunch of speakers and glued wood... right?....

So.... Ribbon tweters.... Are they any good?...

Time aligning speakers?... Explain please....

Is there any kind of software to design speakers?

[ddageek]

OK first thing that comes to mind when ever this subject comes up is that most manufactures use drivers "that are based on" a driver that you can find for DIY!
you want to DIY buy a speaker building boo and a program like bass box pro so that you can to some extent perdict how the driver will act in a box or buy a madisound kit!

[AmplitudeAudio]

This kind of reminds of the classic computer programmer cartoon: room full of guys behind terminals all typing away, boss walking out the door says "OK, you guys start writing some code and I'll go find out what they want the system to do".

The first question I would ask myself is, what do I expect my main monitors to be capable of doing? 20Hz-20KHz +/- 1 dB @ 120dB? or is 35Hz-18KHz +/- 4dB @ 100dB acceptable. This depends on how big your control room is, what kind of music you typically mix, what volume level you mix at, how loud your customers want to hear their music at, etc. Once you know what your expectations are, you can find drivers that will deliver that level of output and accuracy, then you can build a cabinet that suits those drivers, then you can build a crossover to match the drivers, etc, etc. If you just go off and build a box, throw some woofers in it there's no telling what you'll get. Probably a nice looking box you can use for an end table and less $$$ in your wallet (as well as time you could have been making $$$ in your studio).

Again, I'm not trying to sound negative but, I agree with ddageek and everyone else here, you have several options:

1. Buy a kit from Madisound (or an equivalent), build the cabinets as they recommend (or even buy premade cabinets), wire them up and enjoy the fact that you "built" some speakers, saved some money, and hopefully, get what you expected.

2. You can spend the time and effort that O.F.F. has educating yourself, know how to design and build speakers properly, and get good results.

3. Pay someone else to build speakers that will meet your expectations. It doesn't need to be a manufacturer either. Try to find a buddy who builds speakers as a hobby, you buy the parts they need, maybe help them with the construction, and then pay them for their knowledge, time and effort. You might even learn enough about speaker design and construction while your at it so that you can build the next pair yourself.

My 2.5 cents,
Charlie

[O.F.F.]

I like ribbon tweets, especially for analogue recording as they don't exhibit the problems dome tweeters tend to have above 20k or so (cloth domes tend to break up ie deform whilst metal and ceramic tweets have nasty resonances just above 20k).
Ribbons typically have the lowest distortion figures, have the lowest moving mass, no resonances, can't break up since the entire area is driven and are pretty much the only transducers which can reproduce a 20k square wave.
Like ribbon mics they are somewhat fragile though and not at all tolerant towards any kind of lf and some are not particularly efficient.

Time aligning the drivers refers to placing all voice coils in the same vertical plane so all sound travels the same time/distance to reach the ear. You could fix that later by inflicting a delay upon your speakers but why fix something which can be avoided in the first place? Note: in case of a ribbon tweeter the ribbon is the voice coil (actually it is the equivalent to a voice coil with a single winding).

Software is only necessary to determine the box volume to get the most from your woofer and any necessary port dimensions if used. I used the mhsoft on-line calculator. You'd have to google it (mhsoft, speaker calculator or something like that as I don't have the link anymore.

Cabinets are a bit more then wood-and-glue though! Mine will consist finally of an inner box made from 18mm MDF, followed by a acoustic sheeting made from a 6mm layer of foam, 2mm of lead-replacement sheet and another 6mm of foam. All this enclosed in a box made of birch ply which also carries the drivers. Each driver is in its own separate box. Basically the idea is that sound only exits the cab where you want it to exit and they need to be free from vibration. Rigid yet absorbent. Easier said then done...

ddageek raises a valid point in that the drivers used by manufacturers may differ from the ones available to the public but when I was reverse engineering PMCs XB2 subs it became clear that it is possible to fulfil all of PMCs claims for this woofer using the standard Volt RV3143 driver. But I think PMC may have upgraded their specs and may now actually use a custom Volt driver, the upgrade may merely be the drivers power handling though. Either way a response down to the low 20s with minimal roll-off is good enough for me, if one needs to move more air for a bigger room or higher volume use a bigger or multiple drivers. Volts 18" radial in a t/l might be good for a smile!
I don't think the ATC mid domes used by others differ in any way from the ones ATC uses themselves and sells to anybody interested. And even if they do who cares? Mid range is not a weakness of ATC speakers in my experience.
But do read as much about speaker design as you can, it always helps if you got an idea whats actually going on acoustically, electrically and mechanically!

[nandoanalog]

Let us assume that I want to design speaker to be in a room of 12x7x5 meters. That makes 420 cubic meters. I assume that I`ll need a bunch of 12" drivers.... Or some 15" or 18".

But aren`t 18" or 15" drivers too slow for monitoring?

From what I`ve read until now, it looks like it`s easier to design a closed enclosure. So let it be closed.

Another thing that bothers me is the fact that those volt loudspeakers show a pretty nasty frequency responce on the upper 500hz section... How do we deal with it? Design a crossover that doesn`t let it go past 500hz?

I think that I could make a bi-amped system and place the crossover before the amps. That would probably make life easier for crossovers? Wouldn`t it? Dealing with less power is easier for electronics.... Right?

I feel as dumb as it can get....

[O.F.F.]

That is some space you've got to fill there!
Nice yet somewhat daunting! Guess the space would dictate a quite serious monitor,
I think you should be looking at a fully active 4way job.

15"s are fine but when one isn't enough I'd rather use two 15"s then one 18".
Wasn't that serious about the 18" in a t/l, still it would make me smile!
15"s are defininetely fast enough as it is a matter of how much air the can move to some degree. They just don't have to move that far compared to smaller drivers.
Slow woofers tend to be small diameter drivers with a low Fs: To achieve that they have to use heavy cones and long excursions which reduces efficiency; this makes them slow and prone to power compression.

With regards to type of bass cab since hearing a few PMCs and building my own, I am pretty much convinced that a transmission line is the best and in engineering terms most elegant solution. In a closed box you have to damp out all energy the woofer radiates rearwards (obviously the same as it radiates forward). So while it is easy to determine the box volume it, the actual damping will be a problem.
Transmission lines are not that difficult just potentially tedious to built and you get to
utilize most of the rearward radiated energy to your benefit.

No, I wouldn't run the Volt as high as 500Hz, mine go to 250 curently.

Either way this seems to be fast becoming a very personal project of yours and I am quite happy to help you as much as I can but this forum might not be the place.
If you like you can send me a personal message and we can continue to bang our heads together directly via email?

[gurubuzz]

Hey guys it doesn't have to be such a personal project...

I'm sure there would be a handful of people wanting to build some kick arse mains....


I'd like to build something similar to these Westlakes



not necessarily 2x15"

even 2 x 10's or 12s

Just something that can make a nice breeze...for you hair to blow in.