Ok, ask urself about the mechanics of the JBL and how that effects its performance below 1kHz, perhaps. I don't see a good reason that it should have a jump up in harmonic distortion below 1000Hz. unless it is due to the way the diaphragm itself works.
(also, maybe this is an issue with the throat of the horn, or similar?)
The 555 differs from almost all of the more modern compression drivers in this regard. WE tested it to 75Hz. on their plane wave tube.
Regardless of all the issues you raised, I still maintain that I would prefer a whole slew of compromises - me personally - that avoid the xover in the mid band.
_-_-bear
(also, maybe this is an issue with the throat of the horn, or similar?)
The 555 differs from almost all of the more modern compression drivers in this regard. WE tested it to 75Hz. on their plane wave tube.
Regardless of all the issues you raised, I still maintain that I would prefer a whole slew of compromises - me personally - that avoid the xover in the mid band.
_-_-bear
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I must be fooling myself then, David. I've heard them, and they sound much better than modern gear, within their limits. All gear has it's limits, it's just physics.
Surpassing today's units in what way?
I've said this over and over, but I'll say it again. Modern gear IS better, in many ways. Smaller, lighter, louder, cheaper, more reliable. All those are very good things. But in sound quality for normal room listening levels? No, the modern gear is not as good. Anyone who says otherwise without having heard the top end W.E. gear is simply guessing. Period.
David, I find this claim rather odd. Do you think you could name a few direct radiators, at say 90 or 95 db at 1 kHz, that produce less distortion than horn counterparts? This is an honest request. I would really like to get my hands on these direct radiators if I can.
The issue is one of diaphragm excursion. Most modern compression drivers are designed for only a couple of mm of excursion. That means the diaphragms are close to the phase plug (best HF response), the coils are short and light (again, for best HF) and the surrounds are narrow to push the primary surround resonance high, since it shunts output above resonance(again...).
You could design the same compression drivers to work an Octave or two lower by greater spacing to the phase plug, longer coils and wider surround, but of course you would pick up at the bottom end only to lose at the top end. I suspect that the 555 drivers were more in that mold and optimized for the 100 to 3000 Hz range, as this is the best solution to reproducing film dialog with a one way speaker.
Even such a driver optimized for the lower range will have the throat distortion issues that are inevitable due to the very high SPLs in a long, low cuttoff spiral horn.
If you only need 95 to 100dB at 2 meters then a lot of cone drivers in the 5" to 6" range will measure with considerably lower distortion than the usual compression/horn combo. This shows up in most distortion curves where high 2nd harmonic is the typical horn sigature (and I've seen and measured a lot of units in the past). I'm talking about for all frequencies from say 200 to 1000Hz.
The reason for using horns is when you need 95 to 100 dB at 50 to 100 feet . At that point you will find no direct radiator to do the job. Also, in PA applications where you must evenly cover a defined seating area while still trying to minimize the reverberent field. Now, there is nothing wrong with using older PA components in a domestic environment for your musical pleasure. It just might not be the highest performance solution as it is far removed from their design intention.
Testing a unit on a plane wave tube doesn't really mean anything in terms of output capibilities. We used to measure JBL compression drivers on 1" or 2" tubes from 20 to 20,000 Hz. The level was low, they were probably driven at 100mV, as this would create over 100dB in the tube. That is not to say that the unit would have high output at 75Hz, as we are still stuck with our excursion limitations.
In the era when good theater and PA system design meant horn loading for as wide a range as possible (3 and 4 way horn systems), the most typical drivers for midrange horns opperating below 500Hz was 8, 10 or 12" woofers optimized as horn drivers (extremly high Bl and as low as possible moving mass). Nobody used compression drivers below 500 Hz after the 1920s, except for use as full range voice paging speakers of generally low quality.
David S.
A few quick thoughts:
1) I'd love to hear a WE snail-horn setup--'cause all the hype has me intrigued.
2) I wish someone like JMMLC could do a test, and add it to his test lineup. Just 'cause I like to see pretty graphs.
3) Maybe some throat distortion is a good thing. Mostly second-order, which can sound rich and mask nasty higher orders.
4) There are a number of paging and siren drivers available today that are direct architectural descendants of the 555. I wonder how different or similar some of them would sound on these 15a horns? I understand that the vast majority of any horn system's sound comes from the horn flare itself, and less from the driver, which is counter-intuitive to most...
5) Maybe this system is low-distortion. But even if it has relatively high levels of certain types of distortion, I'm open-minded about the possibility that it may still sound very good. Sometimes doing a few important things write forgives a multitude of sins that just aren't as audible.
1) I'd love to hear a WE snail-horn setup--'cause all the hype has me intrigued.
2) I wish someone like JMMLC could do a test, and add it to his test lineup. Just 'cause I like to see pretty graphs.
3) Maybe some throat distortion is a good thing. Mostly second-order, which can sound rich and mask nasty higher orders.
4) There are a number of paging and siren drivers available today that are direct architectural descendants of the 555. I wonder how different or similar some of them would sound on these 15a horns? I understand that the vast majority of any horn system's sound comes from the horn flare itself, and less from the driver, which is counter-intuitive to most...
5) Maybe this system is low-distortion. But even if it has relatively high levels of certain types of distortion, I'm open-minded about the possibility that it may still sound very good. Sometimes doing a few important things write forgives a multitude of sins that just aren't as audible.
Unless - as Pano, Morrison, J-Rob, et al have continued to attempt to point out - one is not using measurable analysis as the sole point of reference for adjudicating its performance.
Fun. Fun! Fun, Dave! They were fun(!!) to listen to music with! The performance they gave when listening to a dynamic medium over time was fun for those experiencing it in the moment!
Let me speak for myself, and possibly, some others here. When listening to music on a transducer I do not care about its measurable behavior. I only care about its emotional behavior. The former can be measured by anyone who knows how and what to measure. The latter cannot be measured by anyone other than myself.
Therefore, my version of your statement above reads thus:
"Its fine to admire these units for their performance relative to their design era, but anyone who thinks they surpass todays units is fooling themselves unless the criteria for evaluating their performance is not based on what can be measured, but instead on what might be enjoyed."
I realise I look like a complete idiot spelling this out, but fun is an emotion. Fear, joy, melancholy, and the need to shake one's booty cannot be measured by a piece of audio software.
Please please please, Dave. I get you feel the need to defend the honor of the products you've designed. But don't denigrate and insult the intelligence of those whose products you've not designed and make them out to be part of the kool-aid, mystical fairy-dust brigade because they produce in the listener an emotional response rather then an analytical one. It makes you look far more bitter and myopic than you probably are.
In that case let's just smoke some weed every time we fire up the Magnavox 1970's era all-in-one "stereo" and save ourselves some REAL money.
"Can be measured ",so far no one has that owns the transducers.
I get the impression he's defending the objective rational of which I am a member and not the products he designed.
Bitter? Please show me where he came across as being bitter.But isn't the goal reducing excursion? Most compression driver/horn combos are about 110db/W near 1 kHz. Going a little lower, say to 700 Hz, the big 2" ones are still above 100db/W on a large enough horn. I would assume the diaphragm is not hitting the phase plug at this level. In other words, you are saying that a compression driver on a horn produces more distortion at 1W, at say 1m, at say 700 Hz than a 5" to 6" direct radiator at some higher power level.
Pardon my intrusion but no one owns this kind of equipment because of how they "measure". It's as simple as that.
Just as well, I'm pretty sure that after listening to this kind of setup, no one dares to ask "how do they measure?".
You can call this scientific ignorance or whatever (and be happy) but there is this artistic side to loudspeakers because they have to reproduce a work of art.
The show report you allude to above was discussing a different room with an open-baffle system, not the Silbatone room.
Older Klipschorns crossed over to a 1" screw-on compression driver at 400Hz, I think they changed that to 350Hz sometime in the '80s, but list the current version at 450Hz. And in a home listening environment one would imagine that the compression drivers would be much less stressed than when being used to entertain an audience of hundreds or thousands of people.
In that case let's just smoke some weed every time we fire up the Magnavox 1970's era all-in-one "stereo" and save ourselves some REAL money.
"Can be measured ",so far no one has that owns the transducers.
I get the impression he's defending the objective rational of which I am a member and not the products he designed.
*Sigh....*
(So, er, how many times are you gonna say you're gonna bow out only to come back in, exactly?)
David, I totally get that you believe you can exist and "be a member" within a rational, objective construct devoid of subjectivity. That's fine. Many, many people do.
But it's not supported by science.
Read Damasio, De Sousa, Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, and the research on cognitive neuroscience and those with damaged ventromedial prefrontal cortex. As I'm sure you're way too busy to find out for yourself, let me summarize the current literature thus:
Patients with the inability to process emotions (due to prefrontal damage) struggle to make rational decisions. Because, according to the research, emotions play a vital part in our cognitive processing. Our past, that is, our emotional response to history is an important part of how we make comparative (i.e., analytical) decisions in the now. (I know, I know... How could Plato, Descartes and Kant get it all so wrong?!)
This becomes more problematic when one is asked to compare events where the context is an emotionally constructed one, i.e., listening to music.
Dude, seriously - that's what the science suggests. I know it may be a little uncomfortable to digest, but for a dude who wants the facts - there they is.
I get the impression he's defending the objective rational of which I am a member and not the products he designed.
SpeakerDave said:
"W.E. can't pull off any miracles that later designers with computer aided design and modern materials still can't achieve."
It's not, it's not, it's not about miracles. It's about engineering. Some engineers produce transducers that deliver flat response, some produce transducers that get people shakin' their a**.
The reason I'm here is 'cause I'm way tired of the former, and especially, the attitude of those who denigrate the past with fanciful notions and label those of us who are interested in it as religious zealots.
I was not alluding to the show report , It was a question to JC, My beef is not with the WE speaker, it's their premise that nothing else can approach what it's doing and why. Also not sure if this was mentioned before, JC was quoted as saying ..
"I’m afraid to say how much this amplifier costs. It’s $80,000 or $100,000. We’re not really trying to sell anything here. There’s not a market for any of this stuff. This is educational; we’re just trying to educate. Everything we’ve done here is really fun.”
Now could one build a direct radiating system 6 ft+ tall with a wall of woofers, powered by 100K worth of amplifiers and match what is being done by Silbatone ..
Absolutely ....
Makes one wonder how any of the primitive audio cavemen could design anything without CAD. sims, a battery of the most expensive test equipment and the most elaborate anechoic chambers etc...their products nothing but smoke and mirrors according to some here...no measurements...ergo no credibility?
The camps in this debate showing the greatest inflexibility seem to be the so-called objective crowd and the new manufacturing/design/technology proponents who can't seem to brook the possibility of a vintage driver/loudspeaker sounding and performing spectacularly.
I really haven't heard any of the WE proponents saying that there are not new technologies and drivers that offer superior performance or characteristics at some level (perhaps, even all levels of measurement) but, that is only one part of the equation for them, and, indeed, many others here.
The camps in this debate showing the greatest inflexibility seem to be the so-called objective crowd and the new manufacturing/design/technology proponents who can't seem to brook the possibility of a vintage driver/loudspeaker sounding and performing spectacularly.
I really haven't heard any of the WE proponents saying that there are not new technologies and drivers that offer superior performance or characteristics at some level (perhaps, even all levels of measurement) but, that is only one part of the equation for them, and, indeed, many others here.
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He keeps promising, but never takes his bow. Maybe we need the hook
As for me, I can't attest to the measurements of the W.E. gear I've used, never got a change to measure it. It did sound very low distortion, but sounds can be deceiving.
What impressed my, beside the clean sound, was the openness, the lack of "speaker sound", the real life scale of the music. Never got the impression of listening to speakers, just musicians in a real space. From girl with guitar to jazz combo or chamber music all the way to orchestra and choir, it all seemed the right size and height. Yes, height. I've never heard anything else do that sense of space and absolute ease. Not even bigger systems. The term Holographic gets thrown around a lot, this really was.
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