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Danley Sound Labs SH-100B Loudspeaker
Tom Danley is sort of a rocket scientist—or at least a scientist who has worked on things like Ground Zero bombing simulation and active noise cancellation of jet engines. He leverages mathematics and physics to meticulously create some pretty amazing speaker designs. Danley’s unique subwoofer designs were heard by thousands, if not millions, in the late 1980s and early 1990s at concerts of all kinds. More recently, you’ll find Danley products in churches all around. And that’s no surprise, considering that the company’s mission statement is simply Proverbs 3:4, “To find favor and a good name in the sight of God and man.”
Danley’s original SH-100 speaker is a very straightforward but excellent design, essentially a Synergy Horn coaxial two-way speaker in a pretty simple box. The wide dispersion and front-to-back rejection of this speaker are the two standout features that make it very appealing. Danley has now wrapped this speaker inside one of his clever tapped-horn designs, extending low-end response from 70 Hz down to 35 Hz. I got to test drive a Danley SH-100B ($2,998 passive version, $4,670 self-powered version) and I was delighted with it, as I expected.
A Look Inside
The speaker enclosure is formed of Baltic birch, 29.5 inches tall, 20.5 inches wide, and 19 inches deep. It’s surprisingly light at 115 pounds. Even with the laughable extra eight pounds added by the available self-powered amp, it only totals 123 pounds. The cabinet is covered in a durable black coating that should be more than enough protection in an installation. Line-X truck bed liner is a finish option for portable or outdoor usage. NL4MP Speakon connectors get your signal into the box. The original SH-100 was a 20.5-inch by 20.5-inch box nine inches deep with a center-loaded eight-inch coaxial driver. In the SH-100B, Danley has literally wrapped a tapped-horn woofer box around this original design. Four eight-inch woofers are arrayed around the original SH-100 box in accordance with Danley’s unique tapped-horn design. The best way to describe it is to say that the four woofers are directed, on an angle, toward the middle of the rear of the cabinet. Short of getting into the technicalities of horn theory, the woofers are effectively closer to the mouth of the horn, rather than the throat. Again—I won’t belabor the gory acoustical details that will thrill the physicists (and you can see the Danley website for a white paper on tapped horn theory) but I will convey two points. First, the drivers’ radiating surfaces are effectively increased by a significant amount through this design. Second, diaphragm excursion is reduced, also reducing distortion. Bottom line—Danley’s math and physics have yielded a compact, powerful woofer design that produces excellent fidelity.
The coverage of this speaker is wide—a 110-degree conical dispersion pattern with very noticeable boundaries. Frequency range for ±3 dB is 35 Hz to 18,000 Hz, down 10 dB from 20 Hz to 24,000 Hz. It’s a pretty efficient speaker as well, with a 1W/1M sensitivity rating of 98 dB SPL (down 1 dB from 80 Hz to 20,000 Hz.) This is a very honest spec, as well, measured in free air at 10M of distance with a 28.3V input. Maximum output is very healthy, at 126 dB SPL continuous, 129 dB SPL program. It’s rated for 1000W continuous power, 2000W program. Nominal impedance of the package is 4, and a 35 Hz highpass filter with a slope of 24 dB/octave is the signal processing recommended by Danley. And in case I haven’t already made it clear, the overall package basically consists of a center-loaded eight-inch coaxial driver surrounded by four eight-inch woofers in a tapped-horn configuration.
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