Commercial speaker using multiple Purifi drivers

Yesterday I went to a hi fi show and heard some “Matilde” speakers made by Kroma. It was the debut of the speakers. They use 2 x 6.5 Purifi mids, an 8” and the new 10” plus a Mundorf ribbon. I have to say they are some of the best box speakers I’ve ever heard and the Purifi drivers are surely a major factor in that.
Stupid money of course - £62k - but they really showed the potential of the Purifi drivers.

I have no affiliation with either Kroma or Purifi.
 
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stv

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2 x 6.5 Purifi mids, an 8” and the new 10”
Intersting driver choice.
was it some kind of cardioid configuration?

Edit: just saw photos. It's not cardioid.
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Correct. One port at the back as you can see in the pic. Very clean and dynamic and that 10” goes plenty low enough. Cabinets are made of Corian. I’m sure they could have used Panzerholz for similar cost which has a far better damping factor than Corian.
 
How many times people can be caught on the same bait? Apparently infinite amount of times every other year . Dynamic transducer technology is not progressing much for decades already. The " breakthrough " products have incremental amounts of improvement over the predecessors or its a simple change in character without any improvement at all following the change of fashion. Yellow and white is out let's get back to good old black and comfy wide pants.
I was joking about Magico. They sound good enough for the people they were manufactured for.
 
My Ole Living Voice Avatars based on old Danish speaker with those cheap resurrected Vifa/ Seas 17cm drivers..As far as I remember the last price for those cheap stamped metal frame paper drivers was in a range of $15-25 each. A new remanufactured Scan replicas set costed me close to $800 shipped from LV ( no complaints, they have to make living in a small market ) The most expensive speaker in this line based on those drivers is probably over $20k. Still the same " special " particle board enclosure.
It's more important who designs the speaker than what the bits are. My Proac Response 1 clone sounds like a bucket of rusty nails and I followed Troels to the last bit.

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I think the most important part of a speaker is the crossover design but if you think there’s not much to choose between a ultra cheap stamped frame driver and a SOTA driver like a Purifi then all I will say is good luck to you.
I'm not going to say that but if you think that a gifted designer won't get better results with relatively cheap drivers than a hack with computer program and SOTA drivers than you delude yourself. Purifi drivers are not more SOTA than other advanced drivers and they may or may not sound better than cheap drivers. That's the thing in audio where often horrible measuring devices kill the champions in the ears of everybody else but " experts " . Having said that Purify drivers may be great and I hope to hear speakers based on those designs. I'm just commenting on general excitement surrounding those drivers partially driven by class D amps coming from the same circle of Mola Mola ( Moolah , Moolah ) $$$ design group.
 
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Speakers in the background are vintage Sonus Faber Signum porcupines.
My GF went for an extended vacations so I unloaded my audio closet in her house to listen to old stuff I accumulated :)
And sell some junk too he he

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My Ole Living Voice Avatars based on old Danish speaker with those cheap resurrected Vifa/ Seas 17cm drivers..As far as I remember the last price for those cheap stamped metal frame paper drivers was in a range of $15-25 each. A new remanufactured Scan replicas set costed me close to $800 shipped from LV ( no complaints, they have to make living in a small market ) The most expensive speaker in this line based on those drivers is probably over $20k. Still the same " special " particle board enclosure.
It's more important who designs the speaker than what the bits are. My Proac Response 1 clone sounds like a bucket of rusty nails and I followed Troels to the last bit.

View attachment 1290610

Hmm.

So you have one of TOTL tweeters at the time (Scan-Speak D2905/9x00 series large soft domes released in 1990-1995) and Vifa midwoofers drivers which have some of the flattest smoothest frequency response available (at the time/all time). A pair in parallel probably needs little more than 10W to sing, because as you probably know, a big cabinet does wonders for bass.

It’s not sure your argument holds all the water…

Good drivers clearly matter, and rational design matters. Otherwise, you could have dropped any replacement drivers into it instead of getting the original classic drivers. The processes of the design matter.

Perhaps if your argument was “stamped frames are not as bad as people believe” or “you don’t need fancy unobtainium materials” then I’m totally with you.
 
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I heard these…they don’t cost an arm and a leg, the lower woofers are Purifi and the crossover blending is seemless as is the the horizontal dispersion. It’s a wide dispersion design which isn’t my cup of tea for most rooms but in the room I auditioned them in (no real side wall in sight), they were very, very good. Long term listening pleasures in this one. It would be a little challenging to build the exact same speaker for substantially less money than what they are charging for retail. With the Modulus 686, it was bliss.

Unless I see measurements near the resolution level of a Klippel, the rest of it is all subjective mumbo jumbo anyway. I’ve listened to enough speakers to know now that drivers are just a commodity and the secret sauce is in the proper blending and the acoustic design. You may have a little bit more detail here and a little more ”PRAT” there but if the timbre isn’t right and the directivity control isn’t spot on, I’m walking out. No mushroom clouds on the polar plots for me. Thank you Geddes, Toole, O’Keefe of KEF, etc…

Best,
Anand.
 
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Anand, I think you may have heard a different speaker as all the drivers in the Matilde except the ribbon tweeter are Purifi ones and it does cost an arm and a leg (well in my book) at £62k! They also said it was making its debut. Apparently its the first speaker anywhere to become available with the new 10” woofer.

That said they also had a 2 way stand mount playing and that was also really good, albeit not at the scale of the big ones. I’ve previously heard other Kroma models and always liked what I’ve heard, so they seem to know what they are doing, well as far as I’m concerned.
 
I did hear a different speaker. Just mentioning it since it did use a few Purifi drivers, not ALL Purifi drivers. My apologies as I may have misled when I started my post with “I heard these…”!!!

But my point still stands in that what attracted me to the speaker I listened to wasn’t the Purifi drivers but in the prowess of the designer and of course the measurements (I won’t lie!). I also listened to them in a room that was completely untreated, so it was impressive to say the least. I will say as a datapoint for your thread here, the bass was very clean and delineated, fwiw. I’m sure that was a combination of the Purifi woofer drivers, and the pseudo transmission line design.

Sorry for the OT post.

Best,
Anand.
 
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