Music Stranglers

[Lindsayt]

Amongst large speakers, I think huge sealed boxes and huge corner horns can hold their own against open baffles.

These days I'm not into speakers with stupidly willfully low impedance and efficiency. If the speakers are giving the amps a hard time it'll sound like they're giving them a hard time.


I like big old Altec, JBL, EV, Klipsch, Bozak speakers a lot. They're properly engineered for the job.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

I understand your preferences Lindsay but any form of cabinet or acoustic amplification (horn) will add colouration. The only system that adds no colouration is open baffle. Its only drawback is low frequency cancellation, but that can be ameliorated by correct room positioning of the speaker in the acoustic. This is because they are bi-polar (not a personality disorder in this case).

[Andrew]

While we are on the subject of strangling music in speaker design, I have to say most grilles I've come across are a real "muffler". Again these often seem to be a marketing/cosmetic addition. Spend the money on the bits that make noise rather than adding bits to stifle it.

[Lindsayt]

Colouration is inevitable with speakers. The rearward firing energy from open baffles has to go somewhere. And that is a form of colouration. It's just colouration of a different sort to boxed speakers.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Rear energy from open baffles is not a form of colouration. It is identical to the front energy just 180deg out of phase with it. The back energy is reflected within the accoustic, which is why careful positioning puts it back in phase. There is *NO* *additional* colouration apart from that created by the acoustic, which would be there anyway.

[Fretless]

So that would make electrostatics & magnaplanars the 'ideal' loudspeaker??

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Er, not quite. What they have is a very clean portrayal of midrange as they are bi-polar with no enclosure distortion. BUT panel speakers have other problems at the frequency extremes and because of their electrical characteristics are next to impossible to match with cone and dome drivers to alleviate these problems. Many attempts from the B&W DM70 to the present day, all musical failures. The most successful as it doesn't try to do too much is the first Quad the 57. It worked very well and is still considered by many to be the pick of the pack, especially if doubled up and stacked. Stacking solved to a degree the low frequency problems but they could still never drive the way a cone speaker can. Quad then tried to take the concept on with the 63 and in my opinion they fell on their arse with it, from sublime to yuk! IMO.

The other thing you have to take into account with panels is the ripple effect that Maggies especially suffer from. Standing waves on the panels create ripples which then distort the signal phase and they have a horrible habit of distorting reality in imaging. I remember sitting in a shop dem room in Taiwan early 90's listening to a big pair running from NVA amps listening to solo violin. The violin was over metre long according to that speaker

There is no perfect speaker.

[Fretless]

Very clear, Doc, thankyou. So it comes back to personal taste / budget / room acoustics / rest of audio system.
Every installation is different and unique.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Very much so. Commercially the best solution for me is acoustic suspension which is why I use it. It takes the box out of the equation in a specific way, and that is to make the bass driver *think* it is sitting on a cushion of air and not in a box. It is again of course a compromise, but it allows you to do things with smaller drivers and smaller enclosures you can't do any other way.

[SteveTheShadow]

Simplicity is king for loudspeakers, everything else is bullshit and marketing.

Yes.
Us Brits make some really good, simple, two-way, stand-mounters, but when we start with bigger speakers, it seems to become a competition as to how many 6 inch drivers we can cram onto a metre high baffle.
Percieved value is king here as more drivers must mean better Guv.

I' m a big fan of wideband drivers helped out at the top by a good tweeter, crossed over well above the usual 2-3KHz area.
I like a simple series cap to the tweeter and that's about it. Working like this has given me something I can listen to for hours without fatigue, which is more than any bought speaker has ever done, apart from a set of Royd Edens I once owned.
Once I got them away from a NAIT 2 I bought because I didn't know any better, they sang.

For me, a high quality, efficient, wideband, main driver, with a powerful motor is a great way to get good sound, a good quarter wave resonator cabinet with a properly dimensioned, down-firing port close to the floor, gets you the bottom end, and can sound surprisingly good down there, without waffle or boom, if engineered sympathetically. A decent tweeter crossed over high with a slow roll in provided by a series cap helps give a bit of sparkle at the very top.

It's outwardly simple but requires a fair degree of fannying about to get just right, but when you hit that sweet spot, you know about it straight away as the difference between something slightly off and bang-on, is not subtle.

I'm by no means an expert speaker designer, even though I've been building them since I was fourteen, but to me, these complex, steep crossovers seem to always be an attempt to force a set of cheap drivers into line, rather than spend money on better ones. Once you've forced everything straight, add in a bit of marketing and woofle dust and you have another mee too product to try and get a share of an ever dwindling ever more crowded market.

I've never succeeded with complex crossovers, but some would say, that's because I am too thick to work them put properly.