If 90% of music is in the midrange, then why not use a great single driver speaker? Keep studying Tweek, you will eventually find out that I have been right all along. |
How about this for a 21st century speaker. A full range plasma point source driver! |
Tweekerman, I am sorry if I ignored your post on the other thread, no disrespect meant. I have read about the Ravens and others you mentioned, but have not personally heard them. The Ravens may be the future, or the German Physic wave bending transducer, or the plasma tweeter(no full range yet, that I know of), or the Morel driver(discontinued), or the Sound Labs type of E-stat panels, or even a new generation Lowther type single driver which almost does it all, except for a small upper midrange peak and a bit bass shy. I would state that my prefence is some kind of full range single driver(cone,panel,ribbon,plasma,whatever) that really handles the entire audio spectrum, and does so in a point source fashion, presents a stable load, has minimal inherent phase shift and breakup modes, is very fast and efficient,and has no intervening circuitry between amp and speaker. And, of course, it has to play music. A friend once said to me,"I can eliminate all forms of audible distortion. Just turn the system off!" So it must be musical, technology is just a means to an end. There is alot of room for improvement in speaker systems and it will be interesting to see what may come in the future. Regarding your other point about building your own speaker system and saving money, I think it is a great idea and it can be done. I have done so and am very happy with my results. Remember, it is a learning process and very unlikely that your first one will be your best. But you will eventually get to the place where you won't want to buy a manufactured speaker system because you can make an equal or better one yourself for alot less. Unless they have a very complicated proprietary design that is impractical to make yourself. Great thread. |
After a quick trip around the web, I found only tweeters using the plasma technology. Mfrs. include Accapella, Magnat, Corona, and a DIY page for a plasma tweeter by Ulrich Hauptmann in Holland. They all use a flame/ionization technique which results in an AM sound transmission. Commonly, a horn is coupled to increase sensitivity. Primarily used for 4kHz and above. Tube electronics are used to regulate/modulate the flame. Advantages are stated to be coherence, imaging, natural tonality. The only price I could find was the Accapella Horn Loaded Plasma Tweeter at $2600 each. Sounds like a really neat technology to me, but possibly a little dangerous. I guess we'd have to start up a new thread about whether we would then need pure-silver litz braided propane gas lines for the tweeter. |
I think the Manger design looks great, in theory. Haven't heard it, but would love to. From what I see on the website, the best bet would be a Manger driver about 2 inches larger in diameter, so it would get down into a reasonable bass range(40Hz). Since it extends to 35kHz on the top end, this would be just about a do-it-all single driver system. As long as we're dreaming, let's go for the 20Hz-35kHz version, and get it all. It would be nice if they made the driver available separately, so we could experiment with our own low end tunings. I know it would be ungodly expensive, but still cheaper than their cheapest monitor at $5600. I would love to T-line a pair of these things, just to see what I could get out of them, running single. The response curve looks pretty flat all the way down to 60Hz, so there may be possibilities. Can't afford them though. |
Tweekerman, I am saving up to get a set of manger drivers. I plan to try different low end extension techniques, to see how low it can actually go, with help. If you look at the response chart, it seems to go to 60Hz at the same relative db as it has in the midrange, with a small rise at the midbass area. The fly in the ointment is the 88Hz resonant freq., but I have a trick or two up my sleeve for that. My goal would be to get 40Hz out of it, before any significant rolloff. This way, even if it is 12db down at 20Hz, you are still only 6db down at 30Hz and that's ok with me. It may take awhile to save up the cash,though. |
Bishopwill, I humbly and completely disagree with your point of view about not hearing what the composer intended. The same could be said about any speaker, whether it be 1 way or 6 way. If I said that a multi-way speaker did not produce the 16Hz organ note that is heard once in a blue moon, would you say it cannot produce the performance the way the composer intended? Almost every speaker in the world is rolled off somewhat on the low end. Are they all to be tossed out as well? My single drivers will reproduce even 20Hz albeit at quite a lower level than the average SPL. This conception that single drivers cannot reproduce bass information is just incorrect. It is there, just rolled off some. Just like many other speakers. And when you consider the problems encountered with crossing drivers in and out, with the response lumps, phase anomalies, and loss of signal information, would you say that these irregularities would be preferred by the composer as "more acceptable" deviations from his intended presentation. Are you saying that crossover distortions and losses are part of the composition? There are very few speakers in this world that are truly flat and accurate at 16Hz. And many of them sacrifice far more in musicality throughout the other areas of the spectrum in order to achieve that low end. I respect your opinion to disagree with my point, but I think when pressed in this way, you will have to agree that no speaker really presents the performance exactly as the composer intended and that most of them are deficient in the bass frequencies to some extent. You just seem to think that a single driver with a rolloff that begins at 40Hz is not producing bass below that point and that somehow multi- driver speakers are. You may be surprised to learn that the majority of multi-way speakers are not flat below 40Hz or even higher. I guarantee that if you heard a good single driver system, you would not have the opinion that you have. |
Ok, Bishopwill, I'll give you the deep organ part of the argument against single drivers. But, the high end is not rolled off on good single driver speakers. Many times a high end rolloff on these is actually the characteristic of the SET amps that are commonly used with them. The transformer on the amp it the usual culprit in rolling off the highs. They will "beam" however, so the sweet spot is smaller than other designs, regarding the high freq's.,But a 1 inch dome tweeter beams at approximately 10kHz, so you lose that upper octave if you are off axis on multi-way too. Lowthers will respond within a few db of average all the way to 22kHz. So, we're really talking only about a low end deficiency here. I see the vast majority of speaker designs, even very expensive ones, don't do 20 cycles within 2 or 3 db. So I agree with you that it is a matter of degree as to what level of bass rolloff you can accept. My position is that the increased coherence of the single driver is worth the tradeoff of the lowest bass response that you probably are going to get with almost any speaker anyhow. I am not against low bass response by any means. I would love to have 16Hz flat and clean. But, I just don't want it at the expense of the truthfulness of the rest of the spectrum. Pleasant listening and thanks for your point of view. :-) |
