Yes Greg, how does the saying go? "Great ears hear alike " or something like that, no? (-;
Cheers! |
Greg you are right about the toe-in, with stators on the long side of "shoe-box" like rooms. I am just using a very tiny amount of it and another thing should be mentioned, that with stators the distance to the side walls is uncritical for all intents and purposes. Another advantage of dipoles, which is not to be underestimated. |
Tubegroover you've hit the nail on the head. I too love this thread and I'm learning from it.
Sean, I'm surprised that you think of using electrostatic panels just for the highs. An interesting thought. In my practical experience, I've found ALL ESP's I've every listended to somewhat lacking there. As for your thoughts ad personam:
Your diagnosis is right of course: When I was a child, they used to say that there was nothing crazy enough, which I would not try. So there you are...and ahem, its a Golem, not a Frankenstein and drop me line, if you should ever hit these shores. Though you seem to tackle your goals far more rationally than I prefer to do, we seem to be after the same thing and that is what counts.
Cheers to all and happy listening!
Detlof |
Edle, to what kind of stators, if at all, have you listened to? They clobber almost anything on earth in transient speed, they can carry quite a wallop and with modern stators, dynamics are very good, if the stator is large enough. On the other hand, forget about a really low bottom end ( you'll need a hybrid like the one in question or subs) and highs which bats will react to are also nothing to write home about. Their midrange however, is practically unsurpassed to this day, in comparison to your Altecs, which though no slouch in transient speed, are terribly coloured to these ears. As long as Herve's taste of pop and rock doesn't embrace too much of heavy metal, IMO stators would be absolutely the right choice for his taste in music! |
Sean, kudos to you. You definitely have had the final word on this topic. Your thread, no, your essay is well considered and right to the point. I use a wall of stators, carefully selected and even more carefully placed, reinforced by plasma tweeters and subs, whereas a close friend uses the excellent horns made by a-capella in Germany(www.acapella.de), which also use the same plasma tweeters. They are very good in their bass rendering as well, the biggest horn having a diameter of about 130cms I think. As you say, they are less finicky with placement, much more efficient and more dynamic than my stators, but also a tad less demanding of the electronics feeding them. As you indirectly infer, I had to spend much more time and care, as well as money to get my music right, in comparison to my friend, who however spent as close as the equivalent of $60.000 for his speakers.
On the level of personal taste I admire the finesse and delicacy of his setup, a soundstage, which to my ears is unsurpassed, but in spite of the wallop and dynamics his rig can develop, I find the musical rendering a trifle too polite. In comparison, my wall of stators is clearly less good in the rendering of the soundstage, but will develop a directness and can play "dirty" as I call it, in the way real music often is, which his A-capellas cannot match. I have never had the chance to listen to the US SOTA speakers like the Pipedreams et al, so I cannot compare, but his system and mine in rare moments let you forget that you are listening but to a facsimile of the real thing. |
Sean, don't you think that most good planars today have a fairly decent bass response well under 100hz? Just think of the new Quads or the bigger Sound Labs. Also the more expensive Maggies are no slouch in this regard at all. So I find your remark perhaps a bit misleading, at least for a newbee. But just because we seem to be in disaggreement here, I find your thoughts about bass response and planar speaker placement all the more important: When I originally experimented with this, I adhered to the one third/two third rule and got muddy bass amd fuzzy images. Finally I ended up not quite halfway into the room, more or less in the middle between the 1/3 and 1/2 position to get things right.
Also here there are no really hard and fast rules. Every rig and room is different, not to speak of the furnishing in it.
As for Altecs and Klipschhorns, I have of course never heard all and every make of them, but the ones I had the chance to listen to, I found very statorlike, as you said in your first post, but also coloured. So I never really considered horns as an alternative until I came across the a-capellas, which I would suggest everyone look into, who is seriously considering hornspeakers. I don't know however, if they already are being imported to the States. |
Audiokinesis point, that the bass of dipoles is NOT omnidirectional as well as the reasons he gave for it, (cancellation of out of phase front and rear waves) is common knowledge here in Europe. The reason for that may possibly be, that electrostats, at least until about 10 years ago, when horns again became interesting, were the speakers of choice, if you wanted to have anything resembling a live jazz combo or chamber music. And since the chance to hear anything really loud would send the police to you though the kind graces of your neighbours, they did also fine with orchestral music.
Furthermore, Audiokinesis is right on the money maintaining, that when with dipoles the direct and reverberant fields sound pretty much the same, you've got them set up well. I should know. I've been playing
around with them for more than thirty years.
Whereas I will contest Sean's statement that most stators don't have much output below 100hz, I fully aggree with him, that it takes " surface area and displacement " to move a lot of air. Hence my idea of using "walls" of stators, in fact 6 on each side and stacked, to try to solve this problem. In fact it did not, until with the help of a pair of old Maggie bass panels and three different sets of subwoofers and much agonizing in trying to blend and voice it all, I finally had the problem licked to my satisfaction and the legs of my pants flipping, when sufficient bass energy was around.
As you've probably guessed, if you've bothered to read until here, I am not a technical man at all. I prefer to find out things for myself by trial and error and the only thing on earth I trust are my own ears, which (masochistically perhaps) I regularly immerse in live music.
Cheers to all,
Detlof |
Now Frap, that is truly fascinating! I did not know about Aikman nor do I read the the mag you mention. Thanks for putting me one to this. Just goes to show, if you experiment with an "open mind".......just another word for "fools paradise" (-; ...you sometimes get interesting results!
Tim, I don't know, never tried it with Maggies. However using Quads etc, it only really worked, if each pair of speakers has its own amplification, that is, you would have to use either four monos, or two stereo-amps, one per side. Quads, like most stats are not an easy load for an amplifier and hence running two, even on fairly powerful amps, was not a good solution.(I do cascade two specially modified Stax F 91s however, but they run on the Spectral 360, which seem quite unperturbed by this load.) So to really get an advantage out of this kind of setup ( better dynamics, much better SPL ) it soon gets quite complicated and costly. Just think of the extra cabling it takes. Put Perhaps the Maggies are easier to drive. I'd surely try it out, if you have the necessary hardware at hand.
Regards, Detlof |
Audiokinesis, in your post of 09.05 you possibly gave me an explanation, why when listening to the Exalibur horn speakers I found them a tad too "polite", i.e. artificial, compared to my rig at home, which in its fairly uniform soundfield seemed to have a closer aproximation to the real thing. I've also experimented intensively with infield listening and positioning myself further away from the speakers, finally preferring a position, which gave me the best holographic soundfield. Since Sean diagnosed me as a "nut" (-; whereas, by no means in disagreement, I would rather call my mental state experimentative and curious, happily moving in fool's paradise, because unhampered by any technical knowledge, I have nothing to lose if I tell you, that for better ambience retrieval, I am experimenting with a pair of Quads, placed at right angles from and right next to my main body of speakers, close to the long side of the walls, firing toward each other and with their own set of electronics feeding them. The results so far are quite interesting, IF you apply power to them VERY judicially, first setting SPL for the main body of speakers and then blending the side speakers in very carefully. I was amazed, that the holographic nature of the soundstage practically remained the same, whereas ambience seemed to increase in quite a pleasurable way. I borrowed the stuff from a dealer friend, in order to make this experiment and shall have to give it back, but am sorely tempted to try something similar at a later time.
Cheers |
Hi Fcrowder, your findings go parallel with my experimenting and I also found, that the Quads should be moved well into the room for a good compromise between holographic imaging and ambience retrieval. I have record shelves with LPs on my back wall from the floor to the ceiling and they do very well as difusors. On the side walls I have those made by Gryphon in Denmark at the critical points of reflection. I also found the external crossovers of the E. sadly lacking and hence never used their highpass side. Seamlessly blending subs with stators is an absolute pain, especially in my configuration. It took me about a year and a pair of old Maggie bass panels, as well as cutting my subs off at the lowest possible frequency and lots of moving around and quite a bit of room treatment, until I was (more or less) happy.
I've never experienced however, that my subs were faster than my stators. But then I never cranked my subs volume up very high. It was the contrary which practically drove me nuts and forced me to try unusal ways, like blending in the the Maggies between the stators and the subs. |
Sean, congrats for finding those RTRs. Those panels are excellent and I think, they should "work well enough", as you put it. In their heydays they easily held their own against those famed Decca ribbons, were certainly better than the Sequerra ribbons I used later. Unfortunatedly I blew one after the other, with my " experimenting". Weren't they used for the high end of those memorable Servo-Statics, made by Infinity in the seventies? What you're building up, seems somehow familiar. Wished I could hear it, when you're happy with it.
Cheers Detlof |
