Pulling any voicing from any good drivers

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Can any "voicing" be coaxed from any sufficiently good drivers using crossover/cabinet tweaks?

I bought ProAc One SCs on ebay, and for me that is "the sound." Cloning is tempting but the correct drivers are not available and reports are mixed about success cloning ProAcs (Toels, etc). I have never seen another pair for sale.

If that sound can be coaxed from any great drivers, I could just buy the Madisound Lumine One kit w/ Scanspeak Illumintor drivers, and play with the crossover and cabinet til it sounds like a One SC. Assume I can borrow some One SCs for reference.

Am I way off base? Thanks.....

Jim
 
I would think you are looking at low inductance polypropylene cones along with a fairly standard high quality SEAS fabric dome tweeter. It's an established route for an uncoloured speaker that gets away with a simple crossover. Quite hard to find drivers with good plastic cones, perhaps Morel get close here, but I wouldn't know how to model one.

The other masters of plastic cones are Spendor. I'd expect some of their models come close:
Spendor Audio Systems

Oh, just remembered. SB Acoustics make some good polycones too. I think there is a 5" and 6" unit that look promising for this sort of design:
http://www.madisoundspeakerstore.com/approx-5-woofers/sb-acoustics-sb15mfc30-8-5-poly-cone-woofer/
 
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Hi,

The answer is yes pretty much if you know what you are doing :

ProAc Response One SC loudspeaker Measurements | Stereophile.com

pr1fig3.jpg


Note the measurement technique used shows baffle step as a bass boost.
Not well explained and baffle step is a well fudged issue in stereophile reviews.
In reality response is pretty flat with mild peaking around 80Hz.

rgds, sreten.
 
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Yes. I was thinking more along the lines of the baffle transition and of diffraction in general.

On a tangent, this would seem a good opportunity to treat the baffle for diffraction and to put the tweeter back in the centre of the baffle, but to what point is this offset tweeter placement considered a part of the original sound?
 
Well, I wasn't a million miles away with the low inductance polycone bit. It's an OEM version of an old SEAS driver, with a Scanspeak or Hiquphon 3/4" tweeter. All very series crossover, if you recall...:D

Troels had a stab at it with the usual 1kHz notch filter:
T14RCY-P

I'm hard pressed to see how you clone that one really, and you're never going to do it with paper cones, but he does a poor man's version too with a Peerless polycone and a Vifa XT25 that won't be too far different. The crossover is similar, along with the box.
Peerless HDS PPB 830860
 
Because you can't get the SEAS driver anymore, never mind know what ProAc did to it to get it how they wanted, which was possibly to lower the inductance even more.

You're in a better position to know what the crossover is, but it all looks very BBC LS3/5A with a reflex to me! 3rd order butterworth.

You'd need some serious modelling to line it up on phase with a different tweeter too. All a bit of an ask.
 
Hi,

FWIW no way am i suggesting you should lash out $1.3K on the Lumine
kit and then try and make them sound like a different speaker, forget it.

A used pair of Usher S-520's ($200?) and some line level passive EQ
on the bass and treble end might give the Pro-Ac sound on the cheap.

rgds, sreten.

1205usher.4.jpg


Boost the bass end a lot and probably the treble end a little.

usher_14.jpg


They look part, sort of .....
 
Can any "voicing" be coaxed from any sufficiently good drivers using crossover/cabinet tweaks?

you can try, but I seriously doubt you'll even come close. There's such a broad spectrum of things that contribute to the "sound" of a speaker - the sound power response, the impulse response, thermal behaviour etc - that perhaps can't be faked without DSP - and that's assuming you're starting from a speaker that doesn't have its own colorations.

The only thing you should aim for, is accurate sound reproduction.
 
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