Active also allows easier design in that it is a snap with something like a DCX2496 to play with slopes and crossover frequencies. Not easy or cheap with passive, where you are constantly having to buy or custom wind inductors. Having said that, as an owner of two sets of Ariel 6c and a set of ME2's (they are for sale), I wouldn't bother playing around with the crossover. Just messing with the tweeter cap and padding resulted in significant changes. That design has been tweaked to its fullest, IMO and an active will not improve on it.
Note how the 10uF cap in the woofer's LPF has a 3.3 ohm resistor in series. That really fixed the "MTM coloration", as he put it. How ya gonna do that with active?
Note how the 10uF cap in the woofer's LPF has a 3.3 ohm resistor in series. That really fixed the "MTM coloration", as he put it. How ya gonna do that with active?
I do have 4 Vifa P22WP's (8.75 inch, midwoofers apparently used in the Mackie HR 824 studio monitors)
Specs are..... (WT3 added mass method)
fs 38.36
re 3.27
Z(max) 25.38
Qm 2.35
Qe .348
Qt .303
Vas 38.7L (1.366cf)
Le .92 mH
SPL 89.87 1w/1m
mms 36.14g
BL 9.05
Cms .48mm/N
piston dia 175mm (you don't get much return for your 8.75 inches these days)
Now these do rattle windows and the like with no trouble at all, and they do give a fairly tight and punchy bass noise from a small box but, they don't have what I would call good extension. Probably no better extension wise than the P13's in a decent TL. I had them packed in 23l boxes with a 8wx5hx22L (cm) rectangular port, these boxes were built before I had the ability to take my own measurements.
So 4 of these can shift a lot more air than 4 p13's, i'm not sure that they could go any deeper than the TL, what do you think?
Specs are..... (WT3 added mass method)
fs 38.36
re 3.27
Z(max) 25.38
Qm 2.35
Qe .348
Qt .303
Vas 38.7L (1.366cf)
Le .92 mH
SPL 89.87 1w/1m
mms 36.14g
BL 9.05
Cms .48mm/N
piston dia 175mm (you don't get much return for your 8.75 inches these days)
Now these do rattle windows and the like with no trouble at all, and they do give a fairly tight and punchy bass noise from a small box but, they don't have what I would call good extension. Probably no better extension wise than the P13's in a decent TL. I had them packed in 23l boxes with a 8wx5hx22L (cm) rectangular port, these boxes were built before I had the ability to take my own measurements.
So 4 of these can shift a lot more air than 4 p13's, i'm not sure that they could go any deeper than the TL, what do you think?
Thanx a heap guys!!
If I could put a different angle on this whole thing. The idea is not to mimic the Ariel, that's impossible, the idea is to get a better bottom end than the BR MTM I currently have. It has ALL the same issues I would have with the TL and more, ie "step off" bass reflex response, and port colorations. At the end of the day, I will have built already the chassis to go the whole hog later down the track.
I think of it as "getting it wrong" with a nice safety net, and a lot to learn along the way. Um, DIYing, if you will.
Zigzag, How indeed!?
If I could put a different angle on this whole thing. The idea is not to mimic the Ariel, that's impossible, the idea is to get a better bottom end than the BR MTM I currently have. It has ALL the same issues I would have with the TL and more, ie "step off" bass reflex response, and port colorations. At the end of the day, I will have built already the chassis to go the whole hog later down the track.
I think of it as "getting it wrong" with a nice safety net, and a lot to learn along the way. Um, DIYing, if you will.
Zigzag, How indeed!?
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Well, yeah, there's that.
It was very difficult finding a Center speaker that sounded even a little bit like the Ariels. Many and various HT offerings - no way. B&W - not even close. Sonus Faber - nope. All the time going up the cost scale - $1000, forget it. $2000, still not there yet. $3000 - OK, at least in the same quality ballpark, but all too many of the HT speakers, even at surprisingly elevated price points, had obvious and very unmusical presence peaking. The Dynaudio Contour CS was OK, but dynamically challenged compared to the Ariels - and had an absurdly low crossover frequency. So I reluctantly stepped up to the Contour CS X, which is more-or-less similar, but still a bit different and not quite as sweet. (Old-school ScanSpeak (D9000, D9300) and the Dynaudio Esotar tweeters do not sound the same.)
Attempting to equalize the center speaker in the Marantz pre/pro with Audyssey was a disaster - worthless EQ, obviously aimed at low-fi, nonflat home theater speakers. I'm not aware of any HT equalization that optimizes the first-arrival spectrum, and leaves everything above 300 Hz alone.
So I tolerate the tonal imbalance - which isn't too large, but still noticeable, and will replace the CS X with a single ME2 when I raid the piggybank. I expect I'll buying a pair and setting one aside, since the seller would be nuts to sell just one.
Yes, I'm still working on the Beyond the Ariel project - I've gone into radio silence because I have two new collaborators and we're going into heavy-math mode right now. By summer there may be more progress to announce.
You might think I'm nuts myself to attempt to match the eventual ME2 center to the new high-efficiency speakers (at least 97~100 dB/meter/watt). I'm not too worried about that - I'm the one voicing the new speaker, and all of my speakers have a similar balance - a Quad/Spendor balance with a lot more efficiency and headroom. The person who balances the speaker is the one that gives the speaker it's "sound" - and no, I've never heard a speaker with zero coloration, despite confident and ambitious claims from many designers over the decades. Even the flat ones sound remarkably different from each other. (Well, on a good amp they do. If the amp is bad enough, they all sound bad, and more alike.)
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I'm fairly crazy.....
It would be easier to part with a single cabinet, than to release my P13 prisoners. Do you have any spare woofers, or is that the hangup?
Crossovers are so 'to taste' I assume you would just want to make your own?
heck, it even matches fairly well
Attachments
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No, no spare drivers at all - plenty of drivers for the Beyond the Ariel project, most of which will be unusable and resold (here? on Audiogon?). But no replacements for the poor original Ariels, which are by now on the full second set of drivers (new tweeters, new midbass units). The Ariels really are in an end-of-life situation, with no replacements on the horizon, like Japanese electronics with custom ASICs (Technics SP10, nearly all digital-interface receivers). Sad.
A new midbass would mean a crossover redesign for sure - and there aren't many candidates that have the beautifully flat upper-midrange response of the 5.5" Vifas. You certainly don't see it in the similar-looking larger Vifa models, which convinces me that the 5.5" is a special design, designed by a different engineer than the rest. You don't get special drivers by accident - it's the hand of a talented designer, somebody who probably retired or left the company. What you always want in the hifi business is the right designer - the name of the manufacturer doesn't matter unless there are troublesome QC issues. Not by accident, high-end manufacturers usually conceal the names of the engineers, who are the real people responsible for a product's sound - they like to pretend the internationally-famous CEO, the namesake of the company, is the engineer. Almost never is this the case - those guys are the paper-shufflers and deal-makers, but not engineers.
Moving on, it took me a while to figure out that Vifa was subtly altering the midbass unit over the years, making it unwise to replace just one driver when it failed - to retain a good pair-match, you must replace both drivers, using units made at the same time. This is the real reason commercial manufacturers use "special versions" of XYZ drivers - it's a self-protective measure to avoid the kind of running changes that are rolled into standard-model drivers. An appalling discovery, to be sure, but I can assure you it is a widespread practice across the industry - heck, lots of very expensive speakers at price points above $10,000 are entirely made in China, with similar-looking but actually rather different drivers. Even the smallest changes to adhesives results in measurable and audible changes, not mention altering the silk domes and paper or poly diaphragms.
So whither the Center speaker? I've plenty of projects - as usual - and don't really want to build an ME2, just buy one (or two). Any crossover twiddling would be limited to replacing the tweeter cap with the Jupiter 4.7 uF cap, but probably not that important for a Center speaker.
The future of the Ariels? That's a hard question. If the existing cabinet with its moderate flaws in midbass is retained, what compact midbass driver is similar in character? Maybe some of the Skanning Flex-Units, which seem to have the old-school sound (and measurements) that I like. I've heard the Skannings, and they are very very good, and have a deeply musical character that is rare in modern drivers.
There are a number of overlapping innovations that give the Ariel its sound. Extensive use of golden-section ratios in the driver layout, including asymmetric and large cabinet-edge radii, fine-tuning the phase relationship of the lowpass filter for the midbass units, dissimilar woods for bracing and exterior cabinet, choosing drivers with both a musical character and extremely well-behaved out-of-band behavior, which in turn enables very close phase-tracking across the crossover region (with 3 degrees, as good as any in the industry). I guess it has some of me in it too - I love beauty with all my heart, and I try to my best to make my speakers and amplifiers sound beautiful.
The question of beauty in audio is more important than ever, with so many extremely expensive and ugly-sounding products on the high-end market - and I won't even go into the horror show of home theater. There's always been a minority of designers who aim for beauty, and I guess by now I am one of them - all of my designs, going back to the Shadow Vector Quadraphonic Decoder, have a certain kind of sound - big, sweeping, expressive - that is the polar opposite of the hard-edged and metallic products that are now popular in the high-end.
I've been influenced by the sweeping sound of 70mm widescreen movies of the late Fiftes and Sixties, which I now know was the result of a small group of Western Electric and Altec engineers - the results of no more than ten or twenty people, really (including Stokowski as a musical consultant). Also by the classic British sound of the Quad ESL57 and BBC monitors, which I heard at the BBC Research Labs in the mid-Seventies on Studer-made first-generation quadraphonic mastertapes.
A new midbass would mean a crossover redesign for sure - and there aren't many candidates that have the beautifully flat upper-midrange response of the 5.5" Vifas. You certainly don't see it in the similar-looking larger Vifa models, which convinces me that the 5.5" is a special design, designed by a different engineer than the rest. You don't get special drivers by accident - it's the hand of a talented designer, somebody who probably retired or left the company. What you always want in the hifi business is the right designer - the name of the manufacturer doesn't matter unless there are troublesome QC issues. Not by accident, high-end manufacturers usually conceal the names of the engineers, who are the real people responsible for a product's sound - they like to pretend the internationally-famous CEO, the namesake of the company, is the engineer. Almost never is this the case - those guys are the paper-shufflers and deal-makers, but not engineers.
Moving on, it took me a while to figure out that Vifa was subtly altering the midbass unit over the years, making it unwise to replace just one driver when it failed - to retain a good pair-match, you must replace both drivers, using units made at the same time. This is the real reason commercial manufacturers use "special versions" of XYZ drivers - it's a self-protective measure to avoid the kind of running changes that are rolled into standard-model drivers. An appalling discovery, to be sure, but I can assure you it is a widespread practice across the industry - heck, lots of very expensive speakers at price points above $10,000 are entirely made in China, with similar-looking but actually rather different drivers. Even the smallest changes to adhesives results in measurable and audible changes, not mention altering the silk domes and paper or poly diaphragms.
So whither the Center speaker? I've plenty of projects - as usual - and don't really want to build an ME2, just buy one (or two). Any crossover twiddling would be limited to replacing the tweeter cap with the Jupiter 4.7 uF cap, but probably not that important for a Center speaker.
The future of the Ariels? That's a hard question. If the existing cabinet with its moderate flaws in midbass is retained, what compact midbass driver is similar in character? Maybe some of the Skanning Flex-Units, which seem to have the old-school sound (and measurements) that I like. I've heard the Skannings, and they are very very good, and have a deeply musical character that is rare in modern drivers.
There are a number of overlapping innovations that give the Ariel its sound. Extensive use of golden-section ratios in the driver layout, including asymmetric and large cabinet-edge radii, fine-tuning the phase relationship of the lowpass filter for the midbass units, dissimilar woods for bracing and exterior cabinet, choosing drivers with both a musical character and extremely well-behaved out-of-band behavior, which in turn enables very close phase-tracking across the crossover region (with 3 degrees, as good as any in the industry). I guess it has some of me in it too - I love beauty with all my heart, and I try to my best to make my speakers and amplifiers sound beautiful.
The question of beauty in audio is more important than ever, with so many extremely expensive and ugly-sounding products on the high-end market - and I won't even go into the horror show of home theater. There's always been a minority of designers who aim for beauty, and I guess by now I am one of them - all of my designs, going back to the Shadow Vector Quadraphonic Decoder, have a certain kind of sound - big, sweeping, expressive - that is the polar opposite of the hard-edged and metallic products that are now popular in the high-end.
I've been influenced by the sweeping sound of 70mm widescreen movies of the late Fiftes and Sixties, which I now know was the result of a small group of Western Electric and Altec engineers - the results of no more than ten or twenty people, really (including Stokowski as a musical consultant). Also by the classic British sound of the Quad ESL57 and BBC monitors, which I heard at the BBC Research Labs in the mid-Seventies on Studer-made first-generation quadraphonic mastertapes.
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I'd feel better about a custom Flex-Unit from Skaaning in the 5 to 7-inch range. At least they have integrity, and won't be outsourcing to China while pretending to manufacture in Europe. It's also why I'm sympathetic to the guitar-speaker crowd - the kind of casual alterations that are common in the high-end are not well accepted by tone-oriented professional musicians.
The time I heard Skannings in a speaker designed by Wally Malewicz (of Wallytractor fame), they sounded absolutely beautiful - and that's something that's very important. Crossovers cannot "add beauty". It has to be there in the first place, in the drivers themselves. The task of the system integrator is to make the whole thing into an artistically pleasing whole - that's what the crossover and, to a lesser degree, the cabinet design does. And, Wally has taste - something not too common in the high-end business. I don't mean this in a snide way, it's just that many designers, and more importantly, powerful reviewers who act as the gatekeepers for the industry - don't care about beauty. They just don't. And the sound just keeps departing further and further away from what we hear in the real world.
I regard it as very significant that Western Electric/ERPI/Altec retained noted conductor Stokowski as a musical consultant, and the BBC (before Thatcher) walked between the control booth (using BBC monitors) and the symphony hall to cross-check the realism of the monitoring setup - not many design organizations have access to live symphonies and chorales as a reality check for what they design.
This is the real reason that Western Electric/ERPI/Altec and BBC designs have gained the status of legends - look at how they were designed, and what they were meant to do. The majority of modern high-end speakers are designed to satisfy the reviewers of $tereophile, Absolute $ound, and $ix Moons. That's why they sound different.
The time I heard Skannings in a speaker designed by Wally Malewicz (of Wallytractor fame), they sounded absolutely beautiful - and that's something that's very important. Crossovers cannot "add beauty". It has to be there in the first place, in the drivers themselves. The task of the system integrator is to make the whole thing into an artistically pleasing whole - that's what the crossover and, to a lesser degree, the cabinet design does. And, Wally has taste - something not too common in the high-end business. I don't mean this in a snide way, it's just that many designers, and more importantly, powerful reviewers who act as the gatekeepers for the industry - don't care about beauty. They just don't. And the sound just keeps departing further and further away from what we hear in the real world.
I regard it as very significant that Western Electric/ERPI/Altec retained noted conductor Stokowski as a musical consultant, and the BBC (before Thatcher) walked between the control booth (using BBC monitors) and the symphony hall to cross-check the realism of the monitoring setup - not many design organizations have access to live symphonies and chorales as a reality check for what they design.
This is the real reason that Western Electric/ERPI/Altec and BBC designs have gained the status of legends - look at how they were designed, and what they were meant to do. The majority of modern high-end speakers are designed to satisfy the reviewers of $tereophile, Absolute $ound, and $ix Moons. That's why they sound different.
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Another little design tid-bit about the Ariels - the efficiency of the paired midbass units was chosen so the tweeter would need little or no attenuation. This turned out to be rather important, more than I expected, really, since series resistors, against all expectation, turned out to have noticeable effects on tweeter dynamics. Part of the "wide-open" quality of the Ariel is the result of that decision.
FWIW, I haven't noticed a significant difference with 5 uF Jupiters over 5 uF Hovlands. Tried the North Creek Crescendos, and took them out immediately.
Having 6 spare woofers, I could probably part with 2. They are Vifa, not Peerless, and have similar date codes. It's your design, after all. If you hadn't published it, who knows what I would be listening to.
Since there are left and right speakers, would you still mount them vertical, and would one or the other matter?
Having 6 spare woofers, I could probably part with 2. They are Vifa, not Peerless, and have similar date codes. It's your design, after all. If you hadn't published it, who knows what I would be listening to.
Since there are left and right speakers, would you still mount them vertical, and would one or the other matter?
Where to with no P13s?
It's a question that's close to many hearts - I have a relative who wants to make some Ariels and has been collecting bits for a while.
I'm not looking forward to breaking the news that the P13 is no longer. :-(
It's a question that's close to many hearts - I have a relative who wants to make some Ariels and has been collecting bits for a while.
I'm not looking forward to breaking the news that the P13 is no longer. :-(
Ive been looking at SEAS ER15RLY a replacement for my aged P13's (Fs 150Hz!) with a reasonable price tag, but as Lynn says there are no drop in replacements. I have yet to pluck up the courage to commit to the risk and deal with the crossover tweaks to accommodate.
I saw SB Acoustics at High End 2011 in Munich recently, the had some interesting pre- production premium drivers on display. The 6" preliminary data looked very promising and there will be a 5" too.
I saw SB Acoustics at High End 2011 in Munich recently, the had some interesting pre- production premium drivers on display. The 6" preliminary data looked very promising and there will be a 5" too.
Spooky, I'm going to give these people a ring in the morning
Vifa Speakers and Drive Units
The webpage says new stock of P13's available from 2010/2011 manufacture!
Vifa Speakers and Drive Units
The webpage says new stock of P13's available from 2010/2011 manufacture!
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