Greetings All,
Onkyo has a new, very expensive, loudspeaker model they just introduced - read about it here:
http://shoponkyo.com/detail.cfm?productid=D-TK10&modelid=134&group_id=1&detail=1&ext_war=0
The reason I'm bringing this up in a DIY community is that I thought it was pretty well established that cabinets that are allowed to, or designed to, resonate in any way are BAD for sound reproduction, and that it is virtually impossible to improve it in any way.
If I'm reading what they're doing here correctly (and if I'm not the following tirade is gonna make me look really stupid!), ONKYO wants us to believe that they have somehow "tuned" the cabinets of these speakers to enhance music reproduction, by adding to the reproduction by the drivers. They have modelled this after guitar cabinets, arguing that, since guitars make music using a resonating wooden chamber to amplify/enhance the sound of vibrating wires (a la violins, pianos etc.), a wooden speaker cabinet should do the same.
Nonsense - the logic here is fundamentally flawed. When music is recorded the unique sonic signature of each instrument is captured in the recording - it is the loudspeaker drivers that reproduce those sonic signatures, while trying to keep their OWN sonic characteristics below our level of detection. Thus having another medium set in motion by the drivers and producing it's own audible signature is adding something to the reproduction that was not a part of the original recording.
It's like saying room modes excited by your subwoofer make that pipe organ sound more "natural." Nope - we try to minimze room modes in a variety of ways because they produce stuff that is not a part of the recorded material. It's not music - we don't want to hear it. We want loudspeakers that disappear, and they can only do that if we hear only what was recorded.
Another silly thing about ONKYO's concept is that these resonating wooden cabinets are supposed to make ANY instrument sound better, not just wood ones. By that argument I want a metal cabinet to make trumpets and trombones sound better. Sheesh. Besides, we all know that any material of a particular thickness and surface area will have it's own "resonance frequency" - just as drivers do (and we know what THAT does when you can hear it) - so these cabinets will have a tendency to vibrate more (read: more loudly) at certain frequncies than others, so their "contribution" to sound reproduction cannot possibly be evenly distributed across the audio spectrum.
Which brings me to what I think ONKYO may be up to - this may be a thinly disguised attempt at making small speakers sound like big ones by purposely designing resonance into the enclosures to enhance the bass, something (mass market) speaker designers have been doing for decades. So I suspect the most audible region of the cabinets' resonance is in the low frequencies.
Having said all this, I have to give the big "O" cudos for a very handsome speaker IMO, grill-less no less, and their drivers appear to be proprietary and look well made. Points off though for that tweeter that can go up to 100k - yeah it may mean break-up modes are way above the audible range, but that's overkill - the tweets will never see a 100k signal and we'd never hear it if it did.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I just had to sound off. If speakers sounded better with resonating cabinets we wouldn't be killing ourselves preventing them from doing so (and neither would the high-end makers) - speaker design and construction would be an order of magnitude simpler. These ONKYOs may actually sound very nice - you never know - but for $2,000 a pop no thanks - I'll stick to building thank you very much.
Cheers everyone.
Onkyo has a new, very expensive, loudspeaker model they just introduced - read about it here:
http://shoponkyo.com/detail.cfm?productid=D-TK10&modelid=134&group_id=1&detail=1&ext_war=0
The reason I'm bringing this up in a DIY community is that I thought it was pretty well established that cabinets that are allowed to, or designed to, resonate in any way are BAD for sound reproduction, and that it is virtually impossible to improve it in any way.
If I'm reading what they're doing here correctly (and if I'm not the following tirade is gonna make me look really stupid!), ONKYO wants us to believe that they have somehow "tuned" the cabinets of these speakers to enhance music reproduction, by adding to the reproduction by the drivers. They have modelled this after guitar cabinets, arguing that, since guitars make music using a resonating wooden chamber to amplify/enhance the sound of vibrating wires (a la violins, pianos etc.), a wooden speaker cabinet should do the same.
Nonsense - the logic here is fundamentally flawed. When music is recorded the unique sonic signature of each instrument is captured in the recording - it is the loudspeaker drivers that reproduce those sonic signatures, while trying to keep their OWN sonic characteristics below our level of detection. Thus having another medium set in motion by the drivers and producing it's own audible signature is adding something to the reproduction that was not a part of the original recording.
It's like saying room modes excited by your subwoofer make that pipe organ sound more "natural." Nope - we try to minimze room modes in a variety of ways because they produce stuff that is not a part of the recorded material. It's not music - we don't want to hear it. We want loudspeakers that disappear, and they can only do that if we hear only what was recorded.
Another silly thing about ONKYO's concept is that these resonating wooden cabinets are supposed to make ANY instrument sound better, not just wood ones. By that argument I want a metal cabinet to make trumpets and trombones sound better. Sheesh. Besides, we all know that any material of a particular thickness and surface area will have it's own "resonance frequency" - just as drivers do (and we know what THAT does when you can hear it) - so these cabinets will have a tendency to vibrate more (read: more loudly) at certain frequncies than others, so their "contribution" to sound reproduction cannot possibly be evenly distributed across the audio spectrum.
Which brings me to what I think ONKYO may be up to - this may be a thinly disguised attempt at making small speakers sound like big ones by purposely designing resonance into the enclosures to enhance the bass, something (mass market) speaker designers have been doing for decades. So I suspect the most audible region of the cabinets' resonance is in the low frequencies.
Having said all this, I have to give the big "O" cudos for a very handsome speaker IMO, grill-less no less, and their drivers appear to be proprietary and look well made. Points off though for that tweeter that can go up to 100k - yeah it may mean break-up modes are way above the audible range, but that's overkill - the tweets will never see a 100k signal and we'd never hear it if it did.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I just had to sound off. If speakers sounded better with resonating cabinets we wouldn't be killing ourselves preventing them from doing so (and neither would the high-end makers) - speaker design and construction would be an order of magnitude simpler. These ONKYOs may actually sound very nice - you never know - but for $2,000 a pop no thanks - I'll stick to building thank you very much.
Cheers everyone.