Hello Lewm,
I am well aware of the potential. Acoustat had model X which had the OTL directly driving full range panels.
My "issues" with panels are not how hard they are to drive.
I am well aware of their strengths. My issues is maybe my own personal perception but panels always make me analyze the music instead of listening to it and immersing myself in it. They give me an illusion that the voices come from outer space but the cavity of instruments are missing somehow as if the cavity was blocked or instruments were much flatter than what they really are. To me they sound like they miss the resonances of a stringed instrument but panel guys will say I miss box colorations, which is maybe the case.
Hard to explain why panels sound like that to me, but perhaps it has to do with mid-bass cancelation due to the dipole construction (destructive interference in physics). In addition, I always panels as coherent from the midrange and up but not so from lower mid-range to the deep bass.
I believe that some people are more sensitive to upper frequencies and some are more sensitive to lower frequencies and then you have the horns, which I could never warm up to due to my own preferences in sound reproduction.
In the end, at the highest echelons of audio, when clarity is achieved, our hearing and perception defers and everyone has his own preferences.
Otherwise we were all owning the same exact system, which would have made this hobby pretty boring…:-)
I am well aware of the potential. Acoustat had model X which had the OTL directly driving full range panels.
My "issues" with panels are not how hard they are to drive.
I am well aware of their strengths. My issues is maybe my own personal perception but panels always make me analyze the music instead of listening to it and immersing myself in it. They give me an illusion that the voices come from outer space but the cavity of instruments are missing somehow as if the cavity was blocked or instruments were much flatter than what they really are. To me they sound like they miss the resonances of a stringed instrument but panel guys will say I miss box colorations, which is maybe the case.
Hard to explain why panels sound like that to me, but perhaps it has to do with mid-bass cancelation due to the dipole construction (destructive interference in physics). In addition, I always panels as coherent from the midrange and up but not so from lower mid-range to the deep bass.
I believe that some people are more sensitive to upper frequencies and some are more sensitive to lower frequencies and then you have the horns, which I could never warm up to due to my own preferences in sound reproduction.
In the end, at the highest echelons of audio, when clarity is achieved, our hearing and perception defers and everyone has his own preferences.
Otherwise we were all owning the same exact system, which would have made this hobby pretty boring…:-)