If you review your MTM speakers against Lynns criteria you may find you can improve the lovely MTM towers beyond your expectation. I am not sure what your mids are but the tweeter looks familiar.
My 2011 speakers are TMM ported baffle. I do not like subwoofers, as they do not integrate to my standard. Subwoofers can sound good but not state of art. As you have a specialist cross over, this may be as good as you can get but, cross overs can make or break or rather can be used to get a particular sound, <distant window> to < in your lap> The mids will account for most of this. The big Krell sized amp I use is not really anything like Krell inside but it is fast and powerful. The Quad II. were not even on the same planet with the Quad ELS57, but the ELS57 were just too low output at 98dB rolling of rapidly at 18KHz.
I do not like using any driver that needs to be attenuated back. It does not matter how it is done, for me it is always audible, especially in the lower dB of normal violin or piano. Louder than 95dB and the ears begin to lose their way.
Linkwitz did a comparison of the excellent Orion with the Behringer Truth B2031P. I read the article on the Web last year. I already had these. For my taste I had to strip out the drivers and rebuild using totally different parts. Guess why ?
You may have tried different drivers and cross overs but it may be worth reviewing some of the latest drivers with Neo magnets. Ferrite can be a problem in cheaper drivers if secondary coil field is not shorted out with copper at least in the pole piece.
Unless I wanted heavy kick in the gut dynamics I avoid driver overkill. You almost need a separated system for classical and another say horn based with presure driver for pop, rock etc. Keep and maybe modify the MTM s and like I think you are saying make the new Lynn Arial replacement when it is a finalised tested MK1 if the MTM s cannot be improved
No slam in accoustic music, go to a concert with Kodo japanese temple drummers and get slammed to an adrenaline level of a bungie jump!
Or Kroumata percussion ensemble, I have been to several of their concerts and the records by BIS records bis.se are totaly uncompressed so you get quite a good impression even by the canned music. The grandness of a large hall simply can not be reproduced in a small room, but still
Or Kroumata percussion ensemble, I have been to several of their concerts and the records by BIS records bis.se are totaly uncompressed so you get quite a good impression even by the canned music. The grandness of a large hall simply can not be reproduced in a small room, but still
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This was a really social show this year, and I was distracted by a fair amount of shoulder and neck pain, thankfully resolved on the Monday after the show (Kaiser Medical has good alternative-care chiropractors in Colorado).
I was busy, busy, busy, meeting Peter Ledermann (SoundSmith), David Fletcher (Sumiko, Oracle), John Atwood (co-founder of Vacuum Tube Valley magazine), Rene Jaeger (HDCD, Berkeley DAC), John Broskie (TubeCad, Aikido linestage), Gary Pimm (PimmLabs, 47 direct-heated-pentode amp), Matt Kamna (former Tektronix), and a bunch of other Portland/Tektronix guys. I also chatted a while with Steve Nugent of Empirical Audio (OffRamp USB -> S/PDIF bridge), Duke LeJeune of AudioKinesis, and several others I can't recall at this moment.
Most of the room-cruising was done with Gary Pimm along, picking up on info from other folks which rooms were worth visiting. When I was by myself I ran out of energy and just sat anywhere convenient. Although visibly depleted this time (family stuff as well as show stress), my hearing is mostly recovered from the tinnitus of several years back, the hyperacusis is all gone, and the leg is just fine, thanks to working with a really good personal trainer.
As usual, the expected sound-good rooms were a mixed bag, from awful to fair, and there were maybe five rooms that sounded actually pretty decent. The blight of overpriced, horrible-sounding music servers has finally gone away, replaced by quality DACs fed by JRiver, Pure Music, or Audirvana on laptops. Rooms with phonographs or tape decks (Nagra!) usually sounded good; it's digital that still has to prove itself. On my own system and at the show, DSD128fs is far better than DSD64fs (SACD rate), and anything from 88.2/24 upwards is usually pretty decent.
I heard the AudioKinesis room, one of the better demos, but not surprisingly I prefer the sound of the AH425/Radian combo to the horn/driver (Econowave?) that Duke was using. God help me, I'm turning into a hornie.
The big JBL was really disappointing, although some of the blame might fall on the 500-watt Class D Mark Levinson amplifiers, a match made in hell if there ever was one. But the JBL's have to stay in the Harman International brand group, so no boutique DHT amplifiers for them, or even a decent phonograph or tape deck as a source. Just dreadful, extremely expensive music servers. So they may have been good, no way of telling with the all-Harman system they were connected to.
The new-generation, low-efficiency (coaxial) TADs are truly dreadful, in the Wilson class. It doesn't bother me that Wilsons sound awful, they always have, and some people like that sound. It's Bose for rich people, and I'm OK with that. Somebody has to buy Rolex watches and Cadillac Escalades. You expected rich Americans to have taste?!
It's painful to watch the slow destruction of the TAD legacy. The traditional high-efficiency TAD systems were the pinnacle of the high-efficiency studio-monitor world, and justifiably a legend in Japan and Europe. Many of the famous Alnico bass drivers are out of production, and the new low-efficiency coax drivers are not even remotely flat. All that remains is the name and the beautiful cabinetry.
Regarding the LC-1A, a different kind of disappointment: the tiny "twiddler" tweeter has a very high crossover, if I recall right, and only really picks up extreme HF. The LC-1A is mostly a full-range 15" driver in a large reflex box, so there's really not much crossover to mess with. But maybe I'm wrong, and the tweeter level was far too high.
The RCA LC-1A is very different from the speaker it directly competed against, the Lansing Iconic, the original 2-way 15" bass/horn HF studio monitor. It might be said that the traditional TAD system, as well as the new speaker I'm developing, continue the Lansing Iconic format, with a 15" paper-cone woofer, a crossover in the 700~800 Hz region, and a horn/compression driver that covers the range from mids to highs.
Materials science hasn't changed that much in 80 years; the best cone for the 15" driver remains a paper composite, we're only just now contemplating a change from an aircraft-aluminum alloy to a more exotic diaphragm, and as a result of materials limitations, the crossover is pretty much at the same frequency. Way better filter theory, horn modelling (thanks Bjorn!), and measurement techniques, though, as well as far superior signal sources. Progress does get made.
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I'd categorize "Slam" as a subset of bass dynamics, and while it may not apply to some acoustic music, there are certainly many pieces that benefit from an impactful bass presentation or "slam".
What I'm trying to get at is which features you associate with bass dynamics- how would you characterize the dynamic mismatch, what are the worst offenders and your theory on why, and likewise, which bass systems have been very dynamic in your experience, and what do you think made them that way.
I agree with your assessment of Wilson, but not as much on the TADs- they're not what I go for but they're still trying to do something specific and well, it just doesn't align with our shared preferences. That said, KEF seems pushing that coaxial envelope much more effectively.
Duke uses the econowave waveguide in some models, and what I believe to be the DDS ENG-90 in his pricier models. The compression driver, as far as I know, is always the venerable DE250.
Glad to hear your leg has recovered well!
What I'm trying to get at is which features you associate with bass dynamics- how would you characterize the dynamic mismatch, what are the worst offenders and your theory on why, and likewise, which bass systems have been very dynamic in your experience, and what do you think made them that way.
I agree with your assessment of Wilson, but not as much on the TADs- they're not what I go for but they're still trying to do something specific and well, it just doesn't align with our shared preferences. That said, KEF seems pushing that coaxial envelope much more effectively.
Duke uses the econowave waveguide in some models, and what I believe to be the DDS ENG-90 in his pricier models. The compression driver, as far as I know, is always the venerable DE250.
Glad to hear your leg has recovered well!
I was thinking exactly of Kodo and taiko drums when I said "rare".
Tons of fun those drums. Still a different feel from speaker slam, to me.
No slam from a drum kit? Last concert I was second row right on top of the drummer. The clarity and dynamics were awesome.
Rob
A friend refers to this quality as "pop" in the bass, and that conveys the quality of live drum sound. It doesn't sound as loud as it really is, but the transients sound nothing like hifi at all. Horn bass seems to get the closest, but it can be filled with bizarre artifacts if the horn-mouth is too small or the horn is folded.
Live drum sound is great, and thrilling as all-get-out, but I care more about piano, which is tonally and dynamically really hard to get right. We've all sat close to a piano at a live gig, and most hifi systems are nowhere close to live-piano sound. In particular, the sheer beauty, depth, and power of the tone, and the dynamic and expressive shadings, are completely lost in most hifi playback. Frustratingly, it's actually there on the mastertape and just the right playback system.
Voice isn't easy, either. Very few speakers sound like somebody's actually standing there in your living room; I certainly didn't hear that at the show.
I don't listen to classical music all the time; right now, I'm listening to London Grammar, Groove Armada, and Ulrich Schnauss. Sound quality? Kind of dodgy, and obviously processed through a lot of VST software plug-ins on a laptop. PCM coloration all over the place. For this kind of music, the last thing I want is "accurate", replicating the brutal sound of Westlake, JBL, or B&W monitors in the studio. If the system sounds more beautiful, more human, and more musical than the original sound in the studio, that's just fine with me.
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There's something weird going on with loudspeaker headroom, and I have no explanation for it. If a loudspeaker has excess (as in unused) headroom, you can hear it, even at low levels. And it's driver-specific; if one driver has 5 or 10 dB more headroom than the others, it jumps right out at you. Well, it does for me, I can't speak for anyone else. Maybe some people hear it, and others don't.
You can play a horn system at quite moderate levels, 50 to 70 dB, and it's obvious that the dynamics are different than a low-efficiency direct-radiator. If the direct-radiator is really low efficiency, like an MBL, or magnetic-planar, it's really, really obvious in the dynamic rendering, as well as tone color and shadings. It seems to take a locomotive to push these guys into sounding much like music, and even then odd things seem to happen to the dynamics ... you hear the loud stuff, but the little expressive wiggles aren't there.
The ultra-high-priced German and French systems that combine audiophile, low-efficiency direct-radiators with horn mids have a real problem here. The horns have one kind of dynamic rendering, and the direct-radiators have another. The character of the sound is different in different parts of the spectrum. This is truly bizarre and hard-to-describe mismatch, and it tears the music apart (if the music has an acoustic origin).
The ribbons crossed-too-low to direct-radiators have a subtler fault. Ribbons have no trouble above 8 kHz, but that's a range where there's not much tonality. The 2 to 8 Khz world is very different; plenty of tone and dynamics there, and mismatches are more obvious. Simply put, ribbons have very limited excursion capability, and go into peculiar inharmonic modes when asked to move too much. These modes have a very different sound than a cone driver, and the dynamic onset of this region can be quite abrupt. So the system does OK with quiet little tinkly stuff, but a dynamic swing from massed violins, or massed choral, upsets the balance and leads to a sudden flattening of apparent acoustic venue (not soundstage), as well as blur and hash.
After a while, the listener is tempted to gain-ride the volume control, to avoid the hardening of the sound. The great virtue of the old cone tweeters was they dynamically tracked the cone driver beneath them; the match was partly lost with the transition to dome tweeters, and not many ribbons seem to mesh with cone mids. One way around the mismatch is selecting metal-cone mids, but that has its own set of problems (very high-Q modes and violent breakup).
Say what you want about full-range drivers (and they have plenty of faults), but they don't do this. The sound is all one piece.
Aside from the technical considerations and manufacturer's specs, there's a subjective aspect to every driver. A big part of that are the dynamic limits of the driver; for example, the power-handling of ribbons drops like a stone below 8 kHz, and this is audible if you listen for it. In a similar sense, if the MF horn has 10 dB more dynamic range than the woofer beneath it, yes, it will be audible.
Part of what guides the selection of the high-pass crossover frequency for the AH425/Radian is the sudden onset of grain; that's the subjective experience of the diaphragm of the compression driver moving too much and probably creating turbulence effects in the very small compression region just behind the phase plug. Just a guess, but that's what it sounds like.
So there are clear dynamic limits with all types of drivers. Electrostats are beautifully clean until they're not ... and sometimes that's too late for the diaphragm. Compression drivers become grainy and harsh as the horn cutoff is approached. Direct-radiator cones drivers are very gradual in their overload characteristics, until the onset of gross breakup (cone cry). AMT's have a lot of punch in the critical 2 to 5 kHz region, far more than ribbons, but can get really screechy when they finally do break up.
The skill of crossover design isn't just flat response and good polar characteristics, but also avoiding pushing the drivers into regions they don't want to go, and that's a subjective assessment on the part of the designer. From what I've heard at the show, a lot of designers can't hear what driver overload sounds like, or perhaps don't care. From my perspective, the most important task of the crossover (active or passive) is keeping the drivers out of nonlinear regions, and everything else is secondary to that.
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Same here
My current reference speakers are ESL63, though I am a huge fan of the original ESL57 as well. The thought of a speaker with similar tonality, but better dynamics and extension is too exciting. One of the recordings I use to evaluate midrange tone is Annie Fischer's Beethoven piano sonatas on lowly silver CD, the Boesendorfer is not an easy instrument to reproduce.
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That's for sure. Back when I had season tickets to the Portland orchestra, they had a Boesendorfer on stage, and it didn't sound any piano I'd heard before. Beautiful bell-like tonality along with enormous scale and power; the orchestra had to work to keep up. Kind of a disappointment to go back to the usual Steinway in the next concert in the series.
The Ariels are really good on voice, but the piano sound, although natural and realistic, doesn't have the scale and power of the best horn speakers I've heard. The trick will be gaining scale and power while not lowering quality on the voice; from what I've heard of the first prototypes, it seems within reach.
The question in my own mind are the potential issues with dual woofers compared to small bass horns. If I go with an asymmetric bass alignment (closed-box for one woofer, vented for the other), that implies a vertical layout for the drivers. How will that sound compared to side-by-side? The reflected floor image is a big deal in the 200~400 Hz range, and the different woofer layouts will sound different.
Crossover tricks can't do much for the relationship between the reflected floor image and the direct sound from the drivers; that's a function of geometry and acoustics. Single-bass-driver loudspeakers are omnidirectional in this range; while bass horns retain pattern control, and the choice of vertical versus horizontal layouts will have a different room/spectral interaction.
When you include the floor image, the vertical layout results in a 4 drivers in a line (2 above and 2 below the floor), while the side-by-side results in pairs of drivers about 3 to 4 feet from each other.
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I'm starting to believe that everything we hear is indeed captured in the frequency response, on- and off-axis, as all the scientific tests have shown. This might not be news to many of the well-read members on this forum. Bass "slam" and the lack thereof, can be completely defined by the frequency response and radiation pattern. There are no magic drivers, crossovers, or topologies. Get the response right and you can have everything.
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The sad irony is that those speakers that do slam & (lower freq.) punch best - generally don't do tone nearly as well. To much mass required by the driver for a better tactile quality (..and add-in a chunk of damping to reduce non-linear effects for that greater mass) - all of which contributes to a tonally "bleached" sound that at best represents clarity and order, and worst low-freq. drone.
It's why I recommended the use of something like a good sub(s) (Rythmik) to integrate into the design - i.e. sum-in some of that tactile nature while trying to preserve the upper bass and lower midrange tonal behavior of the main loudspeaker.
Piano is *tough*, particularly in the bass region. Not only is it prone to recording/mic error, its very context/venue sensitive - coupling to the room at lower freq.s. Of course the rest of the range isn't easier either..
Getting that to sound mostly correct (broad-band) will be a difficult challenge, made all the more difficult trying to get it at higher efficiency in a relatively small package.
Just for the recent discussion,
Here is the JBL Everest with Taiko drums (at 2:20 and 5:30):
Mark Levinson No532×2 ?????????JBL DD67000?(???)?????? ? - YouTube
I think a lot of the reason that people like mid-bass horns owes to the driver's lower Qe and Mms relative to fs (and loading). A "dynamic" driver is still dynamic regardless of it's horn loading - it's just that the horn-loading provides a lot of gain and lower excursion at lower freq.s relative to that type of driver (which would otherwise sound attenuated at those lower freq.s).
That lower excursion potential (all else equal) provided by the horn allows the driver to operate more in that area where both the flux in the gap is more uniform (and strongest), and particularly where the suspension exhibits less resistance (once "broken in"). Better reproduction of harmonics and lower spl detail is usually the result.
You can get a similar result just by using more drivers of the same type (and of course with much more net volume to the enclosure(s)). (..each driver should be "broken in" individually.) The thing is - no one ever seems to use similar drivers in this manner, instead looking to improved low freq. gains from higher Qe drivers. Once you do that - different sound.
My AKG 240s have plenty of slam, thank you. It's not visceral, like a 15" can do, but it's essentially the same. Headphones are headphones at the end of the day.
Displacement and headroom are necessary, agreed. But beyond that, we are only describing different frequency responses. Someone likes slam... maybe that's a boost in the 80 Hz region (maybe it's somewhere else, or maybe it's a range, I don't know)... someone else likes clarity, maybe that's a notch at 125 Hz. But the subjective description can be completed defined by the frequency response. It's not like only alnico drivers can have slam, or not have it. That's the point. There are no magic drivers, crossovers, or topologies. Everything ultimately serves the FR, the flatness and smoothness of which is all we hear.
It appears that we all like horns here. I think it's because they create a greater direct to reflected ratio, thereby promoting clarity and dynamics. That's again down to the radiation pattern.
In my brief experience, every time the FR has improved (become flatter and smoother), I've been able to enjoy more music and different types of music. You get closer to what the artist is trying to do.
I wish I shared your confidence. Devices like the DEQX can precisely compensate for time, phase, and amplitude errors, leaving only issues with polar patterns.
The DEQX gets rid of the worst problems, but it doesn't make a speaker that isn't good on piano suddenly sound like the real thing. After correction, the speaker is less bad, but the piano ain't in the room yet. Same for vocals.
If the speaker has gross faults, like poorly chosen crossover frequencies, large phase angles between drivers, standing waves in the bass enclosure, or allowing drivers to enter chaotic-breakup regions, system equalization will not help. The faults will still be there, and a listener familiar with acoustic music will notice them as unnatural and artificial sound.
I don't find a "black box" approach to audio particularly productive. I take the opposite approach, working from the available devices outward, and letting the physical properties of the devices set the overall performance limit. Since loudspeaker drivers have many faults in many different domains, I pick and choose where to optimize performance. We are many decades away from loudspeakers that cannot be distinguished from acoustic reality.
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everything you want to know about RCA LC1 , from reputable source , you can ask Aleksandar RAAL ; he was responsible for surround replacement for my pair , several years ago
Since you've "been there, done that" I take your comments seriously. Chasing LF extension in a high-efficiency system is silly; Hoffman's Iron Law, and the 3rd-order power term in the T/S equations, are not going to be broken. LF extension is the domain of multiple subwoofers with powerful, restricted-bandwidth amplifiers. Class AB, or Class D, are no big deal if all you want is below 50 Hz.