Tips for your first open baffle build that I wish I'd known sooner

I've had a pair running for a couple of years now, built around a 15 inch woofer with an 8 inch fullranger above it, and my experiance with width went a bit differently. I started with panels around 55cm and found the bass got bloated in my smallish living room, so I actually trimmed them down and it evened out. I think room size matters as much as panel width, maybe more.

On the ringing, I leaned on damping instead of extra bracing. Felt stuck around the inside of the cutouts plus a couple of coats of varnish tamed the harshness enough that I stopped noticing it. Not saying bracing is wrong, felt just did the job for me and I didn't want to cut more holes.

The placement advice matches what I found. Mine sit a metre and a bit off the wall and pulling them even half a metre further cleaned up the imaging noticeably. Took me way too long to stop fiddling with toe-in and just move the whole speaker back.

One thing I'd tell anyone starting out: check the Qts of the woofer before you buy anything. A low Qts driver sounds thin on an open baffle no matter how wide the panel is. That burned me on my first attempt when I used a car sub I had lying around, thin and shouty untill I swapped it.

Reading this with interest since my room basically forces me to break the placement rule. I can only get about 40cm off the back wall before things start hitting furniture, so I'm wondering if angling the panels so the backwave fires toward a curtain or bookshelf would help soak some of it up. Has anyone had luck with heavy drapes behind open baffles, or is that just wishful thinking? Still in the planning stage on my first pair, nothing cut yet, so I can still change the layout if wall proximity is going to sink it from the start.

Can vouch for the curtain trick actualy. Mine fire at a big lined curtain covering a patio door and it tames the backwave loads better than I expected. Not a total fix but it's cheap to test before moving furniture around. Just let the fabric hang loose with a gap behind it rather than flat against the glass, that's where mine got worse for a bit.

That last bit about the plate amp is dead on. Spent two summers trying to squeeze usable output down low with ever bigger woofers and diffrent notch filters, got nowhere. Picked up a secondhand plate amp for pennies, set the crossover by ear, and the main panels finally opened up because they weren't being asked to do something they can't do. Wish I'd done it from day one instead of treating it like admitting defeat. Also the break-in thing is real, I nearly sold mine after two weeks, then around a month in they suddenly sounded like different speakers.