Great Vandersteen article

[David Gatti]

...discusses the importance of linear phase, superiority of passive over active crossovers, and dealing with rear-wave energy.
Sometimes I think he's the most underrated designer out there.

http://www.soundstage.com/interviews/int07.htm

[inertial]

Hi David, (sorry for my english)
Very interesting article . The 5 seems to me very impressive.
Why people not clone it? People clone wilson ,avalon,proac,etc.......
A Mistery?
About your nice Diy speakers, why a Audio Technology 95cmq with a very big magnet instead a good 45cmq like Mr. Vandersteen ?
If I well understood , your speakers is placed "to the wall" (half-space).
Am I right?
regards,

[carlosfm]

I fully agree with this:

'If you are using second- or third-order crossovers and one of the better computer programs for speaker design, you can plug in stock drivers with the right specifications and assemble a crossover that that works well with the drivers and end up with something pretty close to a finished product. First-order crossover designs aren’t that easy. It takes a lot more work and incredible demands on the drivers themselves. It isn’t that doing the work on a good first-order speaker design is impossible or anything, but it is expensive and takes a lot more time than designing loudspeakers with second-, third-, or fourth-order crossovers. I look at this as another thing that separates high-end designs from other products: True high-end designs, to be worthy of being called that, should be paying attention to the difficult details.'

[carlosfm]

Very right:

'Stop trying to quantitatively analyze the bass, the midrange, the dynamics, the transparency and all that and concentrate on your emotional response to the music being played. Remember your feelings about the music and you’ll find that all of a sudden, differences exist where they did not exist a few minutes ago. If you keep trying to be objective about the sound quality, everything just runs together and you find yourself unable to form an opinion.'

[David Gatti]

Originally posted by inertial
Hi David, (sorry for my english)
Very interesting article . The 5 seems to me very impressive.
Why people not clone it? People clone wilson ,avalon,proac,etc.......
A Mistery?
About your nice Diy speakers, why a Audio Technology 95cmq with a very big magnet instead a good 45cmq like Mr. Vandersteen ?
If I well understood , your speakers is placed "to the wall" (half-space).
Am I right?
regards,

Yes, I did design mine for proximity to a rear wall. Like most people, I just don't have the space to put my speakers 1 or 2 metres away from a wall.
Yes, they are interesting comments regarding internal reflections off the driver magnet. I have no idea of the magnitude of this phenomenon. In Vandersteen's case a small magnet is critical because his enclosure is so narrow, so he must have a small magnet to allow some air flow around it.

[AVWERK]

The magnet size has nothing to do with the width of the enclosure. It is a specific design to remove reflections that would reflect back to the midrange and color the midrange output.

Very clever

David

[inertial]

Hi guys,
Look at the new TangBand W4 BAMBOO at partsexpress..........
It seems to me a good candidate for a fac-simile of the 5A.
Very nice driver.
regards,

[carlosfm]

Indeed.
Seems like a good driver to be used as a mid, with first order crossover.
And it has a small neodymium magnet.

[mike.e]

superiority of passive over active crossovers, and dealing with rear-wave energy.

Thats a rather outragous claim to make. Il start reading


The problem with everyone claiming that their crossovers sound best,is who do you listen to? Id prefer to see what the majority enjoy

Linkwitz couldnt hear the time distortion from a 4th order LR.

In this case, "natural" refers to how accurately the driver or drivers under test reproduced sounds and music we recorded. Besides musical instruments and voice, we would record things like a shovel scraping on concrete or shaking car keys. We’d then use the same shovel on the same bit of concrete in the test area, live, to compare how drivers (and crossovers) sounded playing the recordings of the same sounds. It was really helpful to be able to duplicate these recorded sounds live right in the same space where the drivers and crossovers were being tested

[phase_accurate]

I don't mind if Linkwitz heard the phase-distortion or not. Regarding the waveshape it is the most extreme distortion we do to our signal in the whole chain, so it would be good to do something against it IMO .
I also like Vandersteen's mentioning of the problems regarding multichannel sound using speakers with differing phase distortion.

Smearing from back reflections isn't that new and he is not the only/first one mentioning it.

But some parts are definitely marketing BS, and the one about active crossovers definitely is.
Active crossovers are the only possibility to make phase accurate speakers with low IMD.

Regards

Charles