Sprinter,
I like you ramblings! I'm looking into full ranges with "helper sub woofers and tweeters" as a way to control some of the obvious downfalls that full range speakers have. Bi-amped for bass with a single cap filtering at 8 KHz is the plan.
The reason for the issue with EQ is, from what I gather--a lot of people use full ranges with tube amps and LPs--analog. Throwing a digital processing EQ inline with a tube amp is like putting a turbo diesel in a 68 Camaro. You can but...
I like you ramblings! I'm looking into full ranges with "helper sub woofers and tweeters" as a way to control some of the obvious downfalls that full range speakers have. Bi-amped for bass with a single cap filtering at 8 KHz is the plan.
The reason for the issue with EQ is, from what I gather--a lot of people use full ranges with tube amps and LPs--analog. Throwing a digital processing EQ inline with a tube amp is like putting a turbo diesel in a 68 Camaro. You can but...
Well, I actually had a '69 Camaro once and I would have put anything in it that made it go faster! (okay, maybe not a diesel, though).
However, I can understand the purist philosophy. It's all part of the fun. But, I'm an experimenter and willing to try anything once even if it risks offending someone's sensibilities.
So where are you in your quest? I have my plan, but I'm still acquiring the stuff a bit at a time as I get the $$$. In my case, I don't think I would benefit from tweeter help because of my somewhat limited hearing and the FR's go high enough for me, but I may try it later. That's something that can be added anytime. I know a lot of guys here do that, and it actually makes some sense, even though it's just a different way of doing a 3-way. You are using a FR for a much wider part of the spectrum without any XO which does seem like a good idea. Regular 3-ways usually cross over right in the middle of the best part...
Another approach I see here is using a larger FR like a 12" or even 15" all the way from bottom to about 7K or so to a tweeter. That makes sense too, but then you have the problem of narrow dispersion.
You used the term "subwoofer". Did you really mean a conventional single sub, or a woofer with each FR driver? I assume you mean the latter. Most store-bought subwoofers don't seem to make good music speakers. Their use is mostly for loud movies in HT. I know. I tried my HT sub. It sucked.
So anyway I decided on a 15" woofer in an H-frame biamped with a 8" FR in OB as a good compromise for my situation. Cheap and simple but should work well.
Back on topic, I still am aiming for the AN Super8, but all this talk about the 206 has me second guessing again. I'm thinking they are so close that it is going to boil down to personal taste and without a lot of experience, I may as well take the best stab I can. Okay, AN.
Oh, hell, there I go again, rambling. My wife is away. I'm bored.
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If it wasn't for people screwing around with audio and mixing "bad" things together, we'd still be listening to cylinders vibrating a needle through a metal horn.
I use the term subwoofer to mean something that crosses at 100 Hz or lower--not a Best Buy special or anything. My home theater subwoofer uses PA woofers and a passive radiator so not conventional at any means. Works well though, very tight bass for music and it will go low when that passive "comes up on the cam" (sorry)
Since the HT/music system has to abide by the wishes of the overload (my wife) I get the garage for my musical experiments. The tapped horn sub can be loud, ugly and big--so can the speakers. Stick them anywhere I want for further experiments. Figure I could get both by using the Beta12LTA (modified with phase plug) and the Fostex bullet tweeter at 8 KHz. The Beta 12 sits at 97dB at one watt so a basic chip amp, old receiver, tube amps or anything will push them easily. Buddy comes over with his guitar? No problem.
Think of it as garage/party/PA speakers that will sound very good and I get to screw around with full ranges, bullet tweeters, wizzer cones, capacitors, phase plugs, tapped horns and call them mine. I'll make sure they look like utter hell so they won't get stolen.
After that, I'll gain the understanding how it all goes together so if I refurb a tube amp--I'll have an idea what would work well. Embrace the weirdness.
I use the term subwoofer to mean something that crosses at 100 Hz or lower--not a Best Buy special or anything. My home theater subwoofer uses PA woofers and a passive radiator so not conventional at any means. Works well though, very tight bass for music and it will go low when that passive "comes up on the cam" (sorry)
Since the HT/music system has to abide by the wishes of the overload (my wife) I get the garage for my musical experiments. The tapped horn sub can be loud, ugly and big--so can the speakers. Stick them anywhere I want for further experiments. Figure I could get both by using the Beta12LTA (modified with phase plug) and the Fostex bullet tweeter at 8 KHz. The Beta 12 sits at 97dB at one watt so a basic chip amp, old receiver, tube amps or anything will push them easily. Buddy comes over with his guitar? No problem.
Think of it as garage/party/PA speakers that will sound very good and I get to screw around with full ranges, bullet tweeters, wizzer cones, capacitors, phase plugs, tapped horns and call them mine. I'll make sure they look like utter hell so they won't get stolen.
After that, I'll gain the understanding how it all goes together so if I refurb a tube amp--I'll have an idea what would work well. Embrace the weirdness.
Hello 18Hurts!
I've been doing that very thing for about 15 months now and would never, ever go back to using just a single "full-range" driver again. This path started for me almost 3 years ago now, when I had Jeff Carder of Cardersound build me custom pair of Sachiko double-back-loaded horns, which came with Fostex FE206E drivers installed originally. I was immediately struck by their dynamics, transient response, transparency, clarity, detail, inner resolution and correctness of harmonics, timbre & pitch! This is the sound I had been looking for all these many years.
However I soon became troubled by their problems, which all whizzered full-range drivers have and is usually summed up & refered to as the "Lowther Shout". I thought perhaps using a better quality full-range driver would ameliorate or eliminate these problems. So I tried a pair of Lowther DX3 drivers, but I didn't like their presentation and removed them within 30 mins. Next came Fostex FE206ES-R drivers. This was more like it, better treble & bass extention, plus improved clarity, detail & inner resolution compared to the FE206E drivers. However the "Lowther Shout" was still an issue, that I had addressed to great sucess by a wonderful cone/whizzer treatment. Still if I turned the speakers up to play a song loud like I do when listening to prog-rock, there was a very noticable, strain, distortion and break-up.
So eventually the FE206ES-R drivers where removed and replaced with Fostex's FE208ES-R whizzerless drivers. What an improvement. Everything I loved about the FE206E & FE206ES-R drivers was present, except now there was no "Lowther Shout"! There was however another problem. The freq response that was truely usable was limited to 80Hz to 10Khz max. These weren't full-range, these were extremely wide-range drivers. So I tried a couple of different tweeters, using 6dB, 12dB & 18dB slopes until a discovered using the incredible 16 ohm, alnico magnet, Pioneer HW-7 horn tweeters with 12dB slope @ 8KHz and above was the ticket for me. The combination of Sachiko/FE208ES-R/HW-7 is incredible. I can cleanly hit 110dB peaks without the slightest hint of strain or distortion. Playing music with 110dB peaks isn't something I do very often being a mainly smooth jazz/jazzy new age kind of guy, but it's nice to know that when I get the urge to listen to some prog-rock, I can do so and as loudly as I want or would ever care to!
Thanks to a couple a friends who have loaned me the following components, I've also began biamping the Sachiko/FE208ES-R/HW-7 by adding a pro-solid state amp powering a pair of Hawthorne Audio 15", OB, "Augies" that kick in at 100Hz and cover from 100Hz and below. After 44 years of being in this hobby, I can honestly say there's no commercial or DIY speaker I've heard, that I'd prefer over what I own now. IMHO using full range, whizzerless drivers with "helper sub woofers and tweeters" is the ONLY path to take when using dynamic drivers...
Thetubeguy1954 (Tom Scata)
Hello Sprinter,
The treatment is a 7-step, proprietary treatment developed by a friend of mine. Unfortunately because I know the person who developed it, I get attacked for being a "shill" if I say too much about it. I'll say this much. To the best of my understanding, it's applied to the front & back of the cone and whizzer over 2-3 days and the driver is listened to after each application. It absorbs into the cone as opposed to sitting on top like dammar or C37. After it absorbs in, the excess is allowed to evaporate (IIRC that is) away and then another coat is applied and the process repeats itself until, by listening by ear Mike decides the treatment has been applied enough times and is finally done.
I highly suggest taking what I said above with a grain of salt and speaking with the developer himself, for a true understanding of what is actually happening. If you're interested in knowing more about it I can give you Mike R's ---{the developer}--- email and/or hook you up with a couple of his client's email addresses so you can get their opinion of his treatment and what it accomplishes sonically. If I talk about what I feel the process does in a postive manner, I'll probably be attacked as being a "shill" again. Finally to answer your question. I have never tried ENabl, but I'm told this treatment also covers what ENabling does.
Thetubeguy1954 (Tom Scata)
Tom, Mike's treatment obviously works for you, and there's certainly nothing wrong with keeping it a proprietary process - other than that it would disappear if not documented to be taken up by others when Mike's no longer willing/ able to do the work. However, EnABL is more than "simply" * a treatment of cone material per your description of Mike's process would suggest, so the two could well not be addressing all the same issues - as well, and not to re-open a can of worms, it might be difficult to quantitatively measure and identify specific data points that "prove" the efficacy of either, or exactly "how/why" they work.
* Not to demean the amount of work and evaluation required by the process you describe. The same could be said for EnABL - painting the morse-code dots and dashes themselves is meticulous work, but not a skill that couldn't be achieved by a careful amateur of any age - far more important however is the determination of just how many sets and their location, and the number of applications of pre and post gloss top coats - all of which can vary from driver to driver, even different models by the same manufacturer.
I'd much rather just build the speaker boxes.
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There has to be more to it than that, hasn't it? The shouting happens because the cone moves into breakup mode. I read in one of JBLs paper that even a 4" cone driver begins breaking up at around 600-800 Hz. Breakup means some parts of the cone start moving differently than the others. It doesn't move as a single entity. And these breakups happen all over the cone giving rise to different resonances. These resonances manifest themselves as peaks and dips in the FR and also have some stored energy.
I worry more about the stored energy part than the FR. You cannot clean up the stored energy by any type of EQ. These resonances will appear as a ridge on the CSD plot. A notch does help though.
I would take all these treatments for full range drivers with a pinch of salt. Whether they work or not is open to debate, but I wouldn't want to do anything to the delicate cones on these drivers. The lightness of these cones is key to being able to move fast and produce little nuances we love. By putting on some stuff on the cone, you definitely increase its weight and that's probably where the difference in performance comes from. Whether it is for the better or worse is up to the listener. I would much rather swap out one driver for another to hear a difference that bother with these treatments.
I worry more about the stored energy part than the FR. You cannot clean up the stored energy by any type of EQ. These resonances will appear as a ridge on the CSD plot. A notch does help though.
I would take all these treatments for full range drivers with a pinch of salt. Whether they work or not is open to debate, but I wouldn't want to do anything to the delicate cones on these drivers. The lightness of these cones is key to being able to move fast and produce little nuances we love. By putting on some stuff on the cone, you definitely increase its weight and that's probably where the difference in performance comes from. Whether it is for the better or worse is up to the listener. I would much rather swap out one driver for another to hear a difference that bother with these treatments.
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Well, I figured but I though I'd ask... and I've wondered what caused that effect anyway. As much into trying new things as I am, I've decided I'm not going to muck around with cone treatments. Too messy, too unpredictable and too easy to make it worse.
If whizzer cone effects turn out to be too objectionable to you, what options are there for good extended range whizzerless designs? Frankly, with my somewhat limited hearing range, I don't think I benefit from anything much past 11 anyway (khz, not on a knob), although there is another school of thought on that subject. Dang, I keep wanting to ask my father's audiologist about that but I keep forgetting.
And I don't have a big problem with adding a tweeter using just a cap at a high point anyway.
Whizzers have both advantages and disadvantages. I think fostex has at least two ways of getting that top end extension: whizzers and dust caps. I have a couple of fostex drivers with dust caps and they don't go past 10kHz. If you want that extension, you will have to live with whizzers. Crossing to a tweeter is an option, but the AN drivers go high enough that you can live without a tweeter. At least, I can.
Yeah, I read somewhere that they only made 250 of them or something. People are fighting over them
Well, I'm not going to lose any sleep over the issue. I'll give the AN8 a good long try and decide for myself. How much "burn in" time should I give them before I get too analytical with them? And what is a good way to do it without my wife throwing them away in the middle of the night?
Dear Sprinter,
After burning-in you may want to consider Dammar varnish for the cones.
Hi Scott
I have a new hobby: violins! Playing; collecting; restoring; improving. Where the two hobbies connect is obviously at the varnish...I applied Dammar diluted on Turpentine ("bain-Marie"; add a couple of pieces of broken glass to avoid re-solidifying of resin), one good coat, outdoors (Turpentine is volatile and toxic), with the speaker on his back to avoid varnishing the surrounds, to my AN10 and my Beyma KX15 coaxials My Autographs (Big and medium size) don't need an upgrade now. They never sounded so good.
For the good part: the excess varnish, after adding a little copal (another, harder, resin), received a good amount of powedered graphite from common pencils until a black-grey paste was achieved, and this varnish was apllied to every single low power chip, diode and transistor in every single piece of equipment I own...I won't describe the effect. You have to try it for yourselves.
I hope his helps,
M.
After burning-in you may want to consider Dammar varnish for the cones.
Hi Scott
I have a new hobby: violins! Playing; collecting; restoring; improving. Where the two hobbies connect is obviously at the varnish...I applied Dammar diluted on Turpentine ("bain-Marie"; add a couple of pieces of broken glass to avoid re-solidifying of resin), one good coat, outdoors (Turpentine is volatile and toxic), with the speaker on his back to avoid varnishing the surrounds, to my AN10 and my Beyma KX15 coaxials
My Autographs (Big and medium size) don't need an upgrade now. They never sounded so good.For the good part: the excess varnish, after adding a little copal (another, harder, resin), received a good amount of powedered graphite from common pencils until a black-grey paste was achieved, and this varnish was apllied to every single low power chip, diode and transistor in every single piece of equipment I own...I won't describe the effect. You have to try it for yourselves.
I hope his helps,
M.
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