Hi all,
I am a new member to diyAudio. And I am new to the single, full-range, high efficiency driver, no xover type speaker. And relatively new to flea-watt tube amps. But having stumbled across this thread, I felt I needed to chime in here and share my experience with my first set of these kinds of speakers. Which are based on the Audio Nirvana drivers - 12" cast frame Alnico's in 5.6 cu/ft cabinets to be specific.. basically of my own design only following Dick's cu/ft recommendation and port size/style.
First a little about how I got to where I have arrived. Having traveled to the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest several times in the last few years, each year I found myself "drawn" to rooms which featured strange(to me at the time) speakers that only had one driver and were always displayed with exotic looking, glowing glass bottle, amps that supposedly only made 2 or 3 watts. Having been in this hobby for over 30 years, and owning many of what is generally considered to be really good to as-good-as-it-gets solid state amps, I had trouble wrapping my mind around what I was seeing & hearing from these systems. A true cognitive dissonance. Long story short, the "hearing" part finally won and I spent a lot of time in rooms with these kinds of systems - literally hours over the course of the 3 days of the festival. The music just sounded so real and life-like. So detailed without being bright or forward, micro-dynamically alive, tonal density... WTF is going on here - this is really, really good!!! How come I've never stumbled upon this before now?
My next dilemma was... wow.. how do I go about attaining this kind of sound, without a second mortgage to finance these components. I will resist the urge to "name drop" here.. but let me point out that every pair of speakers I heard like this that really "drew me in" cost at least $10,000 and the associated flea-watt SET driving them was that much or more also. I just kept telling myself, there has got to be a way to get this kind of sound for reasonable $$ - there just has to be.
So on-the-hunt I went. I first stumbled across Audio Nirvana in the pages of diyAudio I believe, if memory serves - we're going back over a year now. A little research revealed... ha... commonsenseaudio is right across the great state of Missouri from me in St. Louis - I'm in Kansas City. So the answer was obvious - contact commonsense and arrange a visit, and that is exactly what I did. Mr. Dicks was a gracious and accommodating host. Me and a friend spent nearly an entire day there. We listened to alot of music, his and ours. And saw/heard a lot of his products. His own personal speaks in his room were the 15" cast frame neodymiums, which he feels are the best drivers he has. They were in huge boxes.. I think they were his std. 5.6 plan. As has been noted elsewhere.. Dicks doesn't believe in exotic cabinet construction, nor boutique wire - boutique anything for that matter. He is quite a curmudgeon in that regard to be honest. But to each his own, and everyone is entitled to their opinion. But that's a whole nother topic...so not to digress.... but I read somewhere on here that a person had heard an audio nirvana demo that was supposedly "rigged" with filters or something to produce "good sound". I assure you Mr. Dicks was not rigging anything when I visited - we could see the whole setup and he was very forthright, open and honest about the setup.
I ended up buying a pair of 12" super cast frame Alnico's. And I built a 5.6 cu/ft cabinet of my own design(narrower and deeper) than Dicks 5.6 plan. I also used multiple full 360 shelf braces in it. And I damped it internally much differently than Dicks suggest, using a combination of materials and techniques that I had read about from "well known and respected" speaker designers.. again - no name dropping. However, due to major family health issues taking higher priority, it was over a year before I actually finished the speakers and fired them up for the first time, just 3 weeks ago.
Now.. back to the beginning, my quest. I had found the speaker drivers that I thought would get me to my goal. Now I needed "amplification". Again, much searching, researching and time on the www forums, exchanging emails and gathering all the info I could find. What is the "working mans" SET amp? This leg of my journey led me to "Decware". A finer company, group of people and product you will not find, if their type of amps fit your needs. Let me give you some advice... if you own a "Lowther-type" based speaker. You need to hear it driven by the Decware Torii MK.III. The Decware se84 and the SE34.I are also great, but in my experience, there is something special going on with the Torii/Audio Nirvana 12" Alnico combination. At least with the ones I have. Noting that Decware was not too far away, and hosts a festival every year known as the Zenfest... off I went. Once again, very impressed with what I heard, what I saw and the people I met. So to obtain a Decware amp - Oh No... 3 month waiting list - built to order! Argh...
Well... I met many folks at Zenfest, and a few real Decware fanboys... like people who own at least one of everything Decware has ever made... and they were so kind as to sell me one of theirs - I was in business!
I have had other amps, tube and solid state connected to my Audio Nirvana's, but the Decware Torii mated to these drivers, in my 5.6 cu/ft cabinet is doing things that nothing else I've ever heard does. The solid state amps I tried, which sound superb on my other "normal speakers" were bright, dry, forward, irritating on the Audio Nirvana's. Tubes are a requirement in my opinion. The Decware Torii, is, well "nirvana" - so far.
The first thing that I expected, based on everything I've read, is that the AN drivers would have no bass, until a minimum of 30 hrs of playing time. For whatever reason, I experienced exactly the opposite. In fact, the first hour or two I was wondering what I was going to have to do to "tone the bass" down a bit to bring it in line with the rest of the frequency range. I have about 30 hrs on them now, and the bass has changed a bit, but it is still prodigious. I suspect, based on years of listening experience, that my cabs are producing a 50-60hz hump. I haven't attempted to determine exactly what yet with a test disk and spl meter... but I've heard this many times before. However, with the Decware amp driving them, even though I suspect I have a hump - caused by my somewhat intentional box/port tuning, the quality of the bass is exceptional.. fast, tight, snappy, punch you in the gut bass. I can follow bass lines like never before. This is the antithesis of one-note bass boom and bloom. And I am playing my speakers in a HUGE room... nearly an anechoic chamber. The room is not producing this bass - trust me on this one. The man-cave is basically a 2400 sq.ft. room with 9ft. ceilings, it has some corners and rooms off to the sides and behind, but it is basically an open area. This room has produced the best quality of bass I've ever been able to achieve in a system in over 30 years with numerous makes, models and types of speakers. With more conventional speakers, I typically use stereo subs in this room to pressurize this volume of air. I'm sure these speaks are not doing 20hz... not even 30... but they are very strong in the 50-60hz region and they sound really, really good.
The mids are spot on. And at about 20-25 hours playing time, the highs went thru a transformation, the one area I thought they lacked at first. But the highs have now opened up and are quite airy, delicate and natural sounding - fully resolved - everythings there - present and accounted for in the right balance. I just continue to be stunned and amazed at how all this sound can be coming from one single cone. And "resolution"... well you all know about that. No passive xover parts to muck that up. Resolution of low-level and micro-dynamic details is as good as it gets in my experience. I've had a few friends over to hear them lately - so far everyone has been at a minimum impressed all the way to "stunned" and "I'm going to build a pair - just like yours".
so there you have it - my very first DIY speaker project of any kind. And done with Audio Nirvana Super Cast Frame 12" Alnico's... and its already exceeded my expectations. Now... what to do next to keep the audiophile nervosa fed? Perhaps Audio Nirvana 15" Neodymiums in an OB augmented on the bottom by some OB woofers? The possibilities are nearly endless... and mind-boggling... but the quest never ends does it?
I am a new member to diyAudio. And I am new to the single, full-range, high efficiency driver, no xover type speaker. And relatively new to flea-watt tube amps. But having stumbled across this thread, I felt I needed to chime in here and share my experience with my first set of these kinds of speakers. Which are based on the Audio Nirvana drivers - 12" cast frame Alnico's in 5.6 cu/ft cabinets to be specific.. basically of my own design only following Dick's cu/ft recommendation and port size/style.
First a little about how I got to where I have arrived. Having traveled to the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest several times in the last few years, each year I found myself "drawn" to rooms which featured strange(to me at the time) speakers that only had one driver and were always displayed with exotic looking, glowing glass bottle, amps that supposedly only made 2 or 3 watts. Having been in this hobby for over 30 years, and owning many of what is generally considered to be really good to as-good-as-it-gets solid state amps, I had trouble wrapping my mind around what I was seeing & hearing from these systems. A true cognitive dissonance. Long story short, the "hearing" part finally won and I spent a lot of time in rooms with these kinds of systems - literally hours over the course of the 3 days of the festival. The music just sounded so real and life-like. So detailed without being bright or forward, micro-dynamically alive, tonal density... WTF is going on here - this is really, really good!!! How come I've never stumbled upon this before now?
My next dilemma was... wow.. how do I go about attaining this kind of sound, without a second mortgage to finance these components. I will resist the urge to "name drop" here.. but let me point out that every pair of speakers I heard like this that really "drew me in" cost at least $10,000 and the associated flea-watt SET driving them was that much or more also. I just kept telling myself, there has got to be a way to get this kind of sound for reasonable $$ - there just has to be.
So on-the-hunt I went. I first stumbled across Audio Nirvana in the pages of diyAudio I believe, if memory serves - we're going back over a year now. A little research revealed... ha... commonsenseaudio is right across the great state of Missouri from me in St. Louis - I'm in Kansas City. So the answer was obvious - contact commonsense and arrange a visit, and that is exactly what I did. Mr. Dicks was a gracious and accommodating host. Me and a friend spent nearly an entire day there. We listened to alot of music, his and ours. And saw/heard a lot of his products. His own personal speaks in his room were the 15" cast frame neodymiums, which he feels are the best drivers he has. They were in huge boxes.. I think they were his std. 5.6 plan. As has been noted elsewhere.. Dicks doesn't believe in exotic cabinet construction, nor boutique wire - boutique anything for that matter. He is quite a curmudgeon in that regard to be honest. But to each his own, and everyone is entitled to their opinion. But that's a whole nother topic...so not to digress.... but I read somewhere on here that a person had heard an audio nirvana demo that was supposedly "rigged" with filters or something to produce "good sound". I assure you Mr. Dicks was not rigging anything when I visited - we could see the whole setup and he was very forthright, open and honest about the setup.
I ended up buying a pair of 12" super cast frame Alnico's. And I built a 5.6 cu/ft cabinet of my own design(narrower and deeper) than Dicks 5.6 plan. I also used multiple full 360 shelf braces in it. And I damped it internally much differently than Dicks suggest, using a combination of materials and techniques that I had read about from "well known and respected" speaker designers.. again - no name dropping. However, due to major family health issues taking higher priority, it was over a year before I actually finished the speakers and fired them up for the first time, just 3 weeks ago.
Now.. back to the beginning, my quest. I had found the speaker drivers that I thought would get me to my goal. Now I needed "amplification". Again, much searching, researching and time on the www forums, exchanging emails and gathering all the info I could find. What is the "working mans" SET amp? This leg of my journey led me to "Decware". A finer company, group of people and product you will not find, if their type of amps fit your needs. Let me give you some advice... if you own a "Lowther-type" based speaker. You need to hear it driven by the Decware Torii MK.III. The Decware se84 and the SE34.I are also great, but in my experience, there is something special going on with the Torii/Audio Nirvana 12" Alnico combination. At least with the ones I have. Noting that Decware was not too far away, and hosts a festival every year known as the Zenfest... off I went. Once again, very impressed with what I heard, what I saw and the people I met. So to obtain a Decware amp - Oh No... 3 month waiting list - built to order! Argh...
Well... I met many folks at Zenfest, and a few real Decware fanboys... like people who own at least one of everything Decware has ever made... and they were so kind as to sell me one of theirs - I was in business!I have had other amps, tube and solid state connected to my Audio Nirvana's, but the Decware Torii mated to these drivers, in my 5.6 cu/ft cabinet is doing things that nothing else I've ever heard does. The solid state amps I tried, which sound superb on my other "normal speakers" were bright, dry, forward, irritating on the Audio Nirvana's. Tubes are a requirement in my opinion. The Decware Torii, is, well "nirvana" - so far.
The first thing that I expected, based on everything I've read, is that the AN drivers would have no bass, until a minimum of 30 hrs of playing time. For whatever reason, I experienced exactly the opposite. In fact, the first hour or two I was wondering what I was going to have to do to "tone the bass" down a bit to bring it in line with the rest of the frequency range. I have about 30 hrs on them now, and the bass has changed a bit, but it is still prodigious. I suspect, based on years of listening experience, that my cabs are producing a 50-60hz hump. I haven't attempted to determine exactly what yet with a test disk and spl meter... but I've heard this many times before. However, with the Decware amp driving them, even though I suspect I have a hump - caused by my somewhat intentional box/port tuning, the quality of the bass is exceptional.. fast, tight, snappy, punch you in the gut bass. I can follow bass lines like never before. This is the antithesis of one-note bass boom and bloom. And I am playing my speakers in a HUGE room... nearly an anechoic chamber. The room is not producing this bass - trust me on this one. The man-cave is basically a 2400 sq.ft. room with 9ft. ceilings, it has some corners and rooms off to the sides and behind, but it is basically an open area. This room has produced the best quality of bass I've ever been able to achieve in a system in over 30 years with numerous makes, models and types of speakers. With more conventional speakers, I typically use stereo subs in this room to pressurize this volume of air. I'm sure these speaks are not doing 20hz... not even 30... but they are very strong in the 50-60hz region and they sound really, really good.
The mids are spot on. And at about 20-25 hours playing time, the highs went thru a transformation, the one area I thought they lacked at first. But the highs have now opened up and are quite airy, delicate and natural sounding - fully resolved - everythings there - present and accounted for in the right balance. I just continue to be stunned and amazed at how all this sound can be coming from one single cone. And "resolution"... well you all know about that. No passive xover parts to muck that up. Resolution of low-level and micro-dynamic details is as good as it gets in my experience. I've had a few friends over to hear them lately - so far everyone has been at a minimum impressed all the way to "stunned" and "I'm going to build a pair - just like yours".
so there you have it - my very first DIY speaker project of any kind. And done with Audio Nirvana Super Cast Frame 12" Alnico's... and its already exceeded my expectations. Now... what to do next to keep the audiophile nervosa fed? Perhaps Audio Nirvana 15" Neodymiums in an OB augmented on the bottom by some OB woofers? The possibilities are nearly endless... and mind-boggling... but the quest never ends does it?
- Status
- This old topic is closed. If you want to reopen this topic, contact a moderator using the "Report Post" button.