Another "built my own" experience here, probably from the early '80s. Mine were a fairly standard 3-way, IIRC the drivers were KEF B139, B110 and T27. Maybe 4 feet tall, 12" wide and 18" deep. A number of my friends built identical speakers after listening to mine, so I guess they sounded pretty good.
Main challenge with transmission lines IIRC is that they have to be quite large relative to the driver size in order to work well, but upside is that you can get smooth & deep bass, better than ported enclosures at the time. I still remember listening to other speakers back than, missing the deeper bass notes, and wondering why more people didn't use TL enclosures (it was another decade before I discovered WAF :)).
My impression is that ported enclosure designs have continued to advance while transmission line designs have not (at least not so much) so I imagine the relative benefits are smaller these days.
In terms of modern speakers, I believe the Salk SongTower's are transmission line. Thought there were a couple of others as well but the names are escaping me at the moment.
EDIT -- that reminds me, one of my friends at the time had some similarly sized/shaped speakers, also with a port at the bottom front, but I don't think I ever bothered to ask if they were bass reflex or TL. His parents had the biggest/fattest cat I had ever seen, and the cat liked to sleep in front of the port on the left hand speaker. When we played music with deep bass (DSOTM was always a favorite) the cat's fur would puff out in time with the music.
Last edited by bridgman; 03/25/15 09:52 PM.
