Not very I suspect.I quite like this bit though:
"New technology has also allowed us to design--for the first time in history--a true full-range speaker WITHOUT a whizzer cone or phase plug."
Just a trifle of marketing hyperbole there, methinks.
That aside, I hope it does prove to be a good driver -I'm all for eradicating whizzer cones whenever possible.
yes - all polemics as to CSA's marketing and design philosophies aside, it behooves us to wish anyone catering to hobbyists whatever success they can attain
or at least it makes us feel better to contain any animus for private consumption
Amen.
Thinking positive, Lowther et al still seem to be chugging along, suggesting that there's still some kind of market out there. Depends I suppose on who has the tooling & what (if anything) they're doing with it. Presumably watching it rust in peace. That driver really should be brought back. Hell, I'd even take the C or E model at a pinch (A obviously preferred. By a long way ).
Thinking positive, Lowther et al still seem to be chugging along, suggesting that there's still some kind of market out there. Depends I suppose on who has the tooling & what (if anything) they're doing with it. Presumably watching it rust in peace. That driver really should be brought back. Hell, I'd even take the C or E model at a pinch (A obviously preferred. By a long way
).
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well, csa is being truthful.............
""New technology has also allowed us to design--for the first time in history"
It is a new design for them, even though it sounds like they invented the cone with no whizzer, lol. What is this new technology ?
I'd be interested in a 12" (seeming my preference, at least temporarily).
Eminence can do beta 12lta but with changes (again, 100 lot quantity, maybe $50 each) that would make it close to the hammer 12 kit. Maybe a lighter cone, a stronger magnet, maybe softer suspension all the way around, maybe (I doubt it) a copper cap on the pole piece, then lastly a smaller, straighter whizzer. The design would be a pain with many versions, especially finally being happy with a cone with ideally a climbing response, then the whizzer knocking down the response past 2khz but then extending up to say 10khz.
Way back, you could order different cones with different magnets on eminence drivers. They basically stuck this cone with this magnet, and you get the alpha series, the beta series, etc, etc.
Seems Philips already did the design work years ago (love my 12"), maybe even calrad. Even the greatest drivers from 30's to 70's, the pinnacle of full range drivers, seems to be lost to time. People want 2 and 3-ways, unlike most of us here.
The phy drivers are probably great (even the 8") given the attention to detail, the long and soft fibers, etc, etc, but the price is also way high.
But I do like the "demodulating" rings in the calrad and the WE's.
perhaps they should read phy's story.
http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/phy/phy.html
""About good drive units in general, it's really very simple. Physics tell us that we must have very light moving mass since mass operates as the square of the inertial position (in fact square + 1) so you can never compensate by magnetic field strength or amplifier power. This becomes even more important when you listen to music. Music, on average, is a mix of 30% sinusoid and 70% very steep short signals (impulses, transients and such). If a sinusoidal wave is easily reproduced, transient spikes are far more difficult to render properly. For that the mobile equipment (cone + spider + leads + voice coil) should have an infinite slew rate i.e. zero mass. That's impossible of course but you must come as close as possible to 0. You need a very light cone that is rigid enough and features progressive fracturization in an hyperbolic-exponential profile. Only paper with long and short fibers can accomplish that, plush a small-diameter voice coil where one layer is inside and one outside of the former to transmit the movements of the coil with the fewest possible losses (I use impregnated vellum). It is simply in respect to basic PHYsical laws that I made these choices, not to return to the roots per se. But surely it is not a random coincidence that people from the 30s to 70s made drivers like this. They were not stupid as it seems a lot of people today like to believe. These physical laws haven't changed. Obeying them once again not only makes for better drive units, it is also a very nice way to keep alive the knowledge about these technical matters........... Specs are only based on sine waves, i.e. a mere 30% of what constitutes a complete and complex music signal. We have no simple affordable tool to look at the other 70%. That is why measurements alone give so few indications. Even if you can read and understand measurements, you'll see how incompletely they correlate to what we hear."
Norman
""New technology has also allowed us to design--for the first time in history"
It is a new design for them, even though it sounds like they invented the cone with no whizzer, lol. What is this new technology ?
I'd be interested in a 12" (seeming my preference, at least temporarily).
Eminence can do beta 12lta but with changes (again, 100 lot quantity, maybe $50 each) that would make it close to the hammer 12 kit. Maybe a lighter cone, a stronger magnet, maybe softer suspension all the way around, maybe (I doubt it) a copper cap on the pole piece, then lastly a smaller, straighter whizzer. The design would be a pain with many versions, especially finally being happy with a cone with ideally a climbing response, then the whizzer knocking down the response past 2khz but then extending up to say 10khz.
Way back, you could order different cones with different magnets on eminence drivers. They basically stuck this cone with this magnet, and you get the alpha series, the beta series, etc, etc.
Seems Philips already did the design work years ago (love my 12"), maybe even calrad. Even the greatest drivers from 30's to 70's, the pinnacle of full range drivers, seems to be lost to time. People want 2 and 3-ways, unlike most of us here.
The phy drivers are probably great (even the 8") given the attention to detail, the long and soft fibers, etc, etc, but the price is also way high.
But I do like the "demodulating" rings in the calrad and the WE's.
perhaps they should read phy's story.
http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/phy/phy.html
""About good drive units in general, it's really very simple. Physics tell us that we must have very light moving mass since mass operates as the square of the inertial position (in fact square + 1) so you can never compensate by magnetic field strength or amplifier power. This becomes even more important when you listen to music. Music, on average, is a mix of 30% sinusoid and 70% very steep short signals (impulses, transients and such). If a sinusoidal wave is easily reproduced, transient spikes are far more difficult to render properly. For that the mobile equipment (cone + spider + leads + voice coil) should have an infinite slew rate i.e. zero mass. That's impossible of course but you must come as close as possible to 0. You need a very light cone that is rigid enough and features progressive fracturization in an hyperbolic-exponential profile. Only paper with long and short fibers can accomplish that, plush a small-diameter voice coil where one layer is inside and one outside of the former to transmit the movements of the coil with the fewest possible losses (I use impregnated vellum). It is simply in respect to basic PHYsical laws that I made these choices, not to return to the roots per se. But surely it is not a random coincidence that people from the 30s to 70s made drivers like this. They were not stupid as it seems a lot of people today like to believe. These physical laws haven't changed. Obeying them once again not only makes for better drive units, it is also a very nice way to keep alive the knowledge about these technical matters........... Specs are only based on sine waves, i.e. a mere 30% of what constitutes a complete and complex music signal. We have no simple affordable tool to look at the other 70%. That is why measurements alone give so few indications. Even if you can read and understand measurements, you'll see how incompletely they correlate to what we hear."
Norman
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Most of the Calrads (& Electra -- i have seen the same units that differ only in labeling (and cone colour on some of the drivers)) i've had thru here were Coral OEMs
dave
Nick never did say who had it AFAIK or what, if anything, they planned to do with it. There was a rumor that GPA might do something, but enough time has passed now that I guess it was just that.
I guess the main problem with it commercially is that while it was a 'FR' driver at the time it was introduced, today it's really best suited as an ultra-wide BW mid for a three way.
GM
Yeah, a 12" is a good compromise, but RCA's 15" LC-9A spoiled me early on, so I'm curious to see if CSA adapts this 'new technology' to its 15".
GM
I can't stand the idea of a whizzer, but they do work.
It's like wacking your knee with a hammer and watching your toes fly around.
Roy Johnson (green mountain audio) doesn't like them either.
"If it has a whizzer cone for the highs, like a Lowther, then there is a time-delay (phase shift) between cone and whizzer, seen as a wiggle in the driver's impedance curve. At that mechanical crossover frequency, the idea is that the cone stops moving as the whizzer starts moving. Yet the amount of time delay between those two parts is far more than some electrical crossovers would've imposed. Even as the whizzer moves, the cone is also breaking up- parts of it "rattle on" in non-pistonic motion, so the phase change is not smooth with frequency. Finally, since the forward edge of the whizzer is un-terminated (not damped or otherwise constrained), it has its own breakup modes. Which makes complex, loud, high tones sound hazy, fizzy, fuzzy or dirty (depending on the whizzer's breakup modes)...... "
AudiogoN Forums: Time coherence - how important and what speakers?
"One important thing: What we often hear reported from single driver set-ups, is the revelation of minute details in the recording, things we have never heard before. BUT, if we increase a narrow frequency band some 3-4 dB - and from fullrange drivers with whizzer cones we often experience major peaks in frequency response, much more than 3-4 dB - we will always hear things we never heard before. What we may experience here is sometimes not the ability of a certain driver to reveal details much better than other drivers, but simply a matter of amplitude (linear distortion) revealing certain parts of the recording more "transparent". If we linearise an e.g. Lowther driver - which, by the way, is very difficult - it sounds no more transparent or "transient" than most other drivers. "Oohh, but you take the "life" out of my drivers" the response may be. Damn, yes I do, because what we perceive as "life" and "transient capability" is nothing more than low-fi linear distortion and if you want to continue listening to severe linear distortion - and morn about certain recordings being troublesome - be my guest."
High Efficiency Speakers
ouch.
It's like wacking your knee with a hammer and watching your toes fly around.
Roy Johnson (green mountain audio) doesn't like them either.
"If it has a whizzer cone for the highs, like a Lowther, then there is a time-delay (phase shift) between cone and whizzer, seen as a wiggle in the driver's impedance curve. At that mechanical crossover frequency, the idea is that the cone stops moving as the whizzer starts moving. Yet the amount of time delay between those two parts is far more than some electrical crossovers would've imposed. Even as the whizzer moves, the cone is also breaking up- parts of it "rattle on" in non-pistonic motion, so the phase change is not smooth with frequency. Finally, since the forward edge of the whizzer is un-terminated (not damped or otherwise constrained), it has its own breakup modes. Which makes complex, loud, high tones sound hazy, fizzy, fuzzy or dirty (depending on the whizzer's breakup modes)...... "
AudiogoN Forums: Time coherence - how important and what speakers?
"One important thing: What we often hear reported from single driver set-ups, is the revelation of minute details in the recording, things we have never heard before. BUT, if we increase a narrow frequency band some 3-4 dB - and from fullrange drivers with whizzer cones we often experience major peaks in frequency response, much more than 3-4 dB - we will always hear things we never heard before. What we may experience here is sometimes not the ability of a certain driver to reveal details much better than other drivers, but simply a matter of amplitude (linear distortion) revealing certain parts of the recording more "transparent". If we linearise an e.g. Lowther driver - which, by the way, is very difficult - it sounds no more transparent or "transient" than most other drivers. "Oohh, but you take the "life" out of my drivers" the response may be. Damn, yes I do, because what we perceive as "life" and "transient capability" is nothing more than low-fi linear distortion and if you want to continue listening to severe linear distortion - and morn about certain recordings being troublesome - be my guest."
High Efficiency Speakers
ouch.
Depends who you call 'we', but technically it's been done since the '80s & possibly earlier with laser interferometers. I believe Celestion were one of the first in home audio to use it to measure driver (and box) performance -it was used in the development of the SL6 & SL600. IIRC, the Manger and Mark Audio drivers also use it to varying degrees, and presumably many of the brand-names (Seas, Scan Speak etc.) do too.
Go for it if you can. FWIW, not that you need me to say it, don't get sucked into the (semi) mythology of 'pistonic behaviour.' OK for multiway speakers, although many of them struggle / don't really achieve that either, but wideband drivers by definition rely on controlled flex / resonance / call it what you will to produce most of their BW, especially single-cone types, or those that progressively decouple to a smaller central region with increasing frequency. The trick of course is to ensure said cone remains controlled.
FWIW, not that you need me to say it, don't get sucked into the (semi) mythology of 'pistonic behaviour.' OK for multiway speakers, although many of them struggle / don't really achieve that either, but wideband drivers by definition rely on controlled flex / resonance / call it what you will to produce most of their BW, especially single-cone types, or those that progressively decouple to a smaller central region with increasing frequency. The trick of course is to ensure said cone remains controlled.
if it's resonance, it's uncontrolled. Or, to say it better, it is so difficult to control that we can - with perfectly acceptable estimation - assume it to be uncontrollable. This isn't a receiver, where we use resonance to tune to a station. The driver's excursion must linearly follow the amplitude of the current fed to it (that is, x(t)=α*I(t+δ), x being the excursion, α [m/A], δ constants and I [A] the current).
perhaps a middle ground where the density and flexibility of the diaphragm is variable from dustcap (softer) to surround (harder), trying to benefit from and address the issue that for high frequencies, far less area and far higher power is needed.
I'm rambling.
edit: that would still be a crossover, now that i think about it.
perhaps a middle ground where the density and flexibility of the diaphragm is variable from dustcap (softer) to surround (harder), trying to benefit from and address the issue that for high frequencies, far less area and far higher power is needed.
I'm rambling.
edit: that would still be a crossover, now that i think about it.
'Resonance' in my above = a convenient handle rather than a literal.
Right. And that's how most sans whizzers work. The 755 being the classic example. Makes it in effect a coax, albeit one with a mechnaical XO rather than an electrical. Better that than a parasitic whizzer blanking off part of the main diaphragm though IMO, plus other issues associated with them. I believe Theile took this one to a bit of an extreme in one of their drivers by physically decoupling a central dome from the main cone with some form of rubberised substance (I can't remember the precise details of what they used, but you get the idea). Possibly not a bad idea in principle, but alas, by memory, it measures no better or worse than some (Jordans, MAs, certain Fostex units) that don't, so if it has any benefits, that particular driver doesn't appear to be reaping them, at least in terms of the FR.
Right. And that's how most sans whizzers work. The 755 being the classic example. Makes it in effect a coax, albeit one with a mechnaical XO rather than an electrical. Better that than a parasitic whizzer blanking off part of the main diaphragm though IMO, plus other issues associated with them. I believe Theile took this one to a bit of an extreme in one of their drivers by physically decoupling a central dome from the main cone with some form of rubberised substance (I can't remember the precise details of what they used, but you get the idea). Possibly not a bad idea in principle, but alas, by memory, it measures no better or worse than some (Jordans, MAs, certain Fostex units) that don't, so if it has any benefits, that particular driver doesn't appear to be reaping them, at least in terms of the FR.
Don't know about Thiele, but Altec did the dual cone 8"/12"/15" bi-flex series in the early '50s, which was a woofer with separate, suspended mid/HF wide BW 'driver':
http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/catalogs/1954-home/Page10.jpg
2nd row of drivers: http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/catalogs/1954-home/Page11.jpg
GM
http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/catalogs/1954-home/Page10.jpg
2nd row of drivers: http://www.lansingheritage.org/images/altec/catalogs/1954-home/Page11.jpg
GM
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