I shot some video of my crummiest Unity horn, versus my JBL Control Nows.
I think you'll notice a few things:
- The Unity horn has a really eerie 'you are there' quality in the midrange. I shot the video with an iPhone, and despite the crummy recording, the Unity gives a reasonable illusion of a real person speaking
- The JBL Control Now is very nice, but it sounds like a vented box loudspeaker.
- The JBL Control Now is clearly muuuuuch lower in distortion than the Unity horn. This is my fault. This is the worst Unity horn I've ever made, and not remotely in the same league as my previous projects. The entire crossover is one capacitor.
- The reason I ditched this project was due to some funky distortion - at this point I believe the problem was the compression driver, not the midranges. (whoops!)
This post would make a lot more sense if I included the link
Video 1 (my crummy unity horn) unity-horn-crummy-xover.mov - YouTube
Video 2 (JBL Control Now - compare it to link #1) jbl control now.mov - YouTube
Some more ramblings on this: Audio Psychosis • View topic - Under Dash Horn Alternative
I studied my horn math this morning, and finally 'grokked' why the points above matter in a horn. Because I didn't 'get this' until today, it invalidates some of the design decisions I made in my previous Unity horn. It also seems to indicate that the Yorkville U15 is a bit compromised.
Details here:
Audio Psychosis • View topic - Under Dash Horn Alternative
Note that my designs aren't a complete failure - just saying that it appears that the reason that I had better results from the 5cm woofers versus the 13cm woofers was because of the things he's saying here. (IE, I didn't factor what he's saying into my design decisions.)
I like how this thread slowly progresses towards giving a better understanding of what is implied in Unity design..
I've read the detailed explanation on Audio Psychosis and I still try to wrap my head around this. Is it me or it seems that the Unity design is then very strictly linked to conical horns? Is there a similar concept of flare rate for an oblate spheroid waveguide? Or a LeCleach profile?
I've read the detailed explanation on Audio Psychosis and I still try to wrap my head around this. Is it me or it seems that the Unity design is then very strictly linked to conical horns? Is there a similar concept of flare rate for an oblate spheroid waveguide? Or a LeCleach profile?
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PB, Interested in why exactly you should say this? Compared to a Synergy Horn? I know it's better than the original Unity Horn. I've owned/own both so have listened extensively (and even done some measurements
)
Straight or fixed angle wall horns/waveguides work best because of their constant directivity nature. You need something that allows for a flat power response across the audio band. Curved walled horns like the tractrix, exponential, LeCleach have a narrowing directivity as frequecny raises. This does not work well in a Unity/Synergy style horn. In addition, the curved wall horns have a singular flare rate. The fixed angle horns/waveguides have a variable flare rate that allows us to place the mids and woofers along the horn wall where the flare rate is appropriate for its operating range.
PB, Interested in why exactly you should say this? Compared to a Synergy Horn? I know it's better than the original Unity Horn. I've owned/own both so have listened extensively (and even done some measurements
As I understand it, the U15 was designed by Yorkville, and licensed from Sound Physics Labs. Not sure if Danley had anything to do with it whatsoever.
Not saying it's a bad design - just that there's a reason the horn is square.. It's possible the Yorkville guys didn't realize this. I've been studying this thing for over half a decade and I didn't get that the tweeter doesn't "see" the midrange ports. It's a combination of things, as JLH noted in that post. The area of the horn where the midrange ports come in, and the crossover, plus a few other elements.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
Bottom line - if Danley was using square horns simply because it was easier, he probably wouldn't have opted for a square mouth on the SM-60F, since that's a molded plastic horn.
Again, I want to be careful not to whine about the U15 - it looks like a quality product. And I know my oblate spheroidal Unity horns sounded pretty good.
Just seems like the square shape is there for a reason, and that reason is to allow larger midranges, larger ports, and smoother frequency response.
Danley did have a fair bit to do with the Yorkville and from what I understand he learnt as well from the process of design. (drivers for example). The Yorkville designers added to the design as well so it really is the ultimate Unity horn design. Synergy does a few things better but it's not a quantum leap
The trick is not the square or round but the added 15 degree flare to improve pattern control. I would say smoother frequency response would be highest on the list. Something that Keele had already worked out but ultimately became a feature of all DSL products.
Geddes has said that his waveguides are not designed to a cutoff in the normal sense, but that the significant factor in the size of the device is its pattern control.
In regards to
this is not to say that the wave will be immune to diffraction as it passes the port.JLH said:
Hi guys
Fwiw, at the time we were selling Unity speakers at the old Servodrive / Sound physics company I designed for. I had convinced my partner to allow the sale of some Unity kit though Nick NcKinney who had a DIY company called Lambda acoustics.
There were several threads on diy forums and Todd the loudspeaker engineer at Yorkville was one of maybe the first people to figure out how they worked, like a lot of you guys, he is a diy’r also.
He built one and then approached me about a license and that began our relationship what about 12 years ago now.
The U-15 and U215 design was Todd’s following the constraints he had to work under and I got to play with some samples as it progressed.
Honestly, I thought it sounded great for the price which was my general impression of Yorkville products, they are a good deal and honest folks. Todd did turn me on the the BMS drivers which I had known about but had not used, some of which work very well in the more conical horns like this due to the exit waveshape and now we use several of them.
The funny thing is when you are pursuing this kind of thing on your own, there isn’t anything to go by, all you can do is build measure and modify the mental model of “how it works”. With the Unity speakers the drivers coupled acoustically with no lobes or nulls but the time was in between one source and multiple sources depending.
The first Synergy horn was a modified td-1 used in the patent example but the first new product was the SH-50. It can reproduce a square wave over more than a decade wide bandwidth, from good to fair looking on an oscilloscope, covering all three frequency ranges and not dependent on a critical location out front. With that one we could do generation loss recordings and go several generations farther than our competitors.
That is not a measurement but still I think it’s has been a useful tool in refining the Synergy horns. While not an ideal system yet, it is within sight of the neighborhood of the place.
That SH-50 speaker was the beginning and now there are more than twenty different Synergy horns.
A recent development which when it is shown at the patent office I will explain here is a combiner that has allowed the out puts of multiple compression drivers to be summed without the interference and cancellation that Y throats and manifolds produce.
The quarter wavelength requirement for coherent summation is a problem / limit when the wavelength is so much smaller than the driver and so the breakthrough was that combiner used first in the JH-90. When i told mike i thought i saw a way to do it, it didn't expect it would be the hardest thing i have worked on in many years, it took four months to arrive at the design and it actually was much like the fleeting idea i had in my head when i said "yeah i think so".
Here is the first prototype, try this with headphones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk54IFD4znw
That guy has 3 BMS coax compression drivers, 6X 6.5 inch mid horn drivers and 6X horn loaded 18 inch woofers.
That lead to a number of football stadium installations like BYU and then I designed a more powerful speaker the J2.
That has 12X hf compression drivers, 24X 5 inch mid drivers and 6X 18 inch horn loaded woofers (42 drivers) radiating from one horn. Here is a demo of it at a stadium which will be upgraded at the end of next season.
There are three speakers being used here, they are the black blob under the score board. They are a JH90 facing right and left and J2 facing forward.
Penn State University Beaver Stadium Jericho Horn Demo | Facebook
Those are big heavy speakers so the newest one is the J3, it will fit through a home door, is perfect for a dorm room, desktop stereo or football stadium. It has four coax compression drivers, eight 6 inch horn drivers and six 15 inch horn loaded woofers so it’s a little stronger than a Jh90 but doesn’t have the extended lf response of the Jh90. Normally it would be used with subwoofers.
While the mouth is only 4 feet tall, it still has a lot of pattern control and it is array able too. I think I already posted a link to those two videos, one up close and one at 500 yards but I will again if interested.
This was pretty loud, to get the scale of this, turn the headphone volume so that the guy’s voice is in perspective at about 1 min when a person walks up and talks to the person next to the camera guy..
His mics get squashed when he gets close to the 812 subwoofer.
At 2+min he pans out to a field where he people are listening the ridge they are standing on is at 450 feet, note the location of the building.
Danley Sound Labs - YouTube
With constant directivity, the spectral balance changes very little with distance or angle and one could only walk 900 feet away at the demo so a bunch of people piled into cars and driver farther away. Unlike an array which radiates a complex interference pattern, when the wind blows it has little effect on these, you can hear it buffeting the microphone here but not really swishing the sound.
Same song at 1500 feet, note the building as you can’t see the speaker anymore.
J3 Premier. | Facebook
Funny too (as they weren’t after me and I didn’t get the citation) the cops came looking to bust the terrorists or whatever they thought. Don’t get the wrong idea, we had permission and a large space.
What would be possible is a large scale acoustic “prank” one could hide a bunch of these and remotely power and drive them. I hid some speakers out next to a swamp once and played frogs as loud as it would go but with these, well Halloween for example could be fun.
Anyway, it’s cool seeing you guys figure these out, they really are a system where everything is connected but when you can get all the drivers to act like one driver with no crossover, there really is something about the sound and stereo imaging.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
Danley Sound Labs, Inc. | Facebook
Danley Sound Labs - Home of Tom Danley - Innovative Designer of Pro Loudspeakers & Subwoofers
Fwiw, at the time we were selling Unity speakers at the old Servodrive / Sound physics company I designed for. I had convinced my partner to allow the sale of some Unity kit though Nick NcKinney who had a DIY company called Lambda acoustics.
There were several threads on diy forums and Todd the loudspeaker engineer at Yorkville was one of maybe the first people to figure out how they worked, like a lot of you guys, he is a diy’r also.
He built one and then approached me about a license and that began our relationship what about 12 years ago now.
The U-15 and U215 design was Todd’s following the constraints he had to work under and I got to play with some samples as it progressed.
Honestly, I thought it sounded great for the price which was my general impression of Yorkville products, they are a good deal and honest folks. Todd did turn me on the the BMS drivers which I had known about but had not used, some of which work very well in the more conical horns like this due to the exit waveshape and now we use several of them.
The funny thing is when you are pursuing this kind of thing on your own, there isn’t anything to go by, all you can do is build measure and modify the mental model of “how it works”. With the Unity speakers the drivers coupled acoustically with no lobes or nulls but the time was in between one source and multiple sources depending.
The first Synergy horn was a modified td-1 used in the patent example but the first new product was the SH-50. It can reproduce a square wave over more than a decade wide bandwidth, from good to fair looking on an oscilloscope, covering all three frequency ranges and not dependent on a critical location out front. With that one we could do generation loss recordings and go several generations farther than our competitors.
That is not a measurement but still I think it’s has been a useful tool in refining the Synergy horns. While not an ideal system yet, it is within sight of the neighborhood of the place.
That SH-50 speaker was the beginning and now there are more than twenty different Synergy horns.
A recent development which when it is shown at the patent office I will explain here is a combiner that has allowed the out puts of multiple compression drivers to be summed without the interference and cancellation that Y throats and manifolds produce.
The quarter wavelength requirement for coherent summation is a problem / limit when the wavelength is so much smaller than the driver and so the breakthrough was that combiner used first in the JH-90. When i told mike i thought i saw a way to do it, it didn't expect it would be the hardest thing i have worked on in many years, it took four months to arrive at the design and it actually was much like the fleeting idea i had in my head when i said "yeah i think so".
Here is the first prototype, try this with headphones.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk54IFD4znw
That guy has 3 BMS coax compression drivers, 6X 6.5 inch mid horn drivers and 6X horn loaded 18 inch woofers.
That lead to a number of football stadium installations like BYU and then I designed a more powerful speaker the J2.
That has 12X hf compression drivers, 24X 5 inch mid drivers and 6X 18 inch horn loaded woofers (42 drivers) radiating from one horn. Here is a demo of it at a stadium which will be upgraded at the end of next season.
There are three speakers being used here, they are the black blob under the score board. They are a JH90 facing right and left and J2 facing forward.
Penn State University Beaver Stadium Jericho Horn Demo | Facebook
Those are big heavy speakers so the newest one is the J3, it will fit through a home door, is perfect for a dorm room, desktop stereo or football stadium. It has four coax compression drivers, eight 6 inch horn drivers and six 15 inch horn loaded woofers so it’s a little stronger than a Jh90 but doesn’t have the extended lf response of the Jh90. Normally it would be used with subwoofers.
While the mouth is only 4 feet tall, it still has a lot of pattern control and it is array able too. I think I already posted a link to those two videos, one up close and one at 500 yards but I will again if interested.
This was pretty loud, to get the scale of this, turn the headphone volume so that the guy’s voice is in perspective at about 1 min when a person walks up and talks to the person next to the camera guy..
His mics get squashed when he gets close to the 812 subwoofer.
At 2+min he pans out to a field where he people are listening the ridge they are standing on is at 450 feet, note the location of the building.
Danley Sound Labs - YouTube
With constant directivity, the spectral balance changes very little with distance or angle and one could only walk 900 feet away at the demo so a bunch of people piled into cars and driver farther away. Unlike an array which radiates a complex interference pattern, when the wind blows it has little effect on these, you can hear it buffeting the microphone here but not really swishing the sound.
Same song at 1500 feet, note the building as you can’t see the speaker anymore.
J3 Premier. | Facebook
Funny too (as they weren’t after me and I didn’t get the citation) the cops came looking to bust the terrorists or whatever they thought. Don’t get the wrong idea, we had permission and a large space.
What would be possible is a large scale acoustic “prank” one could hide a bunch of these and remotely power and drive them. I hid some speakers out next to a swamp once and played frogs as loud as it would go but with these, well Halloween for example could be fun.
Anyway, it’s cool seeing you guys figure these out, they really are a system where everything is connected but when you can get all the drivers to act like one driver with no crossover, there really is something about the sound and stereo imaging.
Best,
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs
Danley Sound Labs, Inc. | Facebook
Danley Sound Labs - Home of Tom Danley - Innovative Designer of Pro Loudspeakers & Subwoofers
How immuned it will be from diffraction will depend on how close the cross sectional area of the horn is to the wavelength of the lowest frequency reproduced. The further apart you can space the crossover in regards to the physical placement of the mids makes a big difference. In the ones I've constructed, there are no signs of interference from the mid ports. It is possible, but it takes a lot of work. To be completely honest, it is pretty much impossible to hear a difference between the ones with some measurable diffraction effects and the one that has none. In other words, I have no way to quantify how much would be too much. I'm guessing it would be subjective and vary from person to person.
The Jericho 3 is a heck of an achievment! I've never seen anything like that.
Also - I love these videos! The first time I heard a Unity horn was at Ra Nightclub in Las Vegas. I was already into horns, and audio, but when I walked into that club, I could tell the sound system was something special.
I just shot a video of my (incredibly crummy) Unity horn playing some music:
deadmau5 on unity horn.mp4 - YouTube
Keep in mind, this is an incredibly crude prototype. (The crossover is a single capacitor.) It's also the 2nd worst Unity I've ever built - it's very compromised by the funky shape. (It's designed to fit under the dash of a car.)
But in the video, you can still hear that awesome articulation, and there isn't a car stereo horn in the world that can do 300hz like this one can. (They run out of steam a couple of octaves higher.)
Here's the original track, for comparison's sake. To hear what the Unity is doing right, I'd recommend listening over headphones, or a single driver speaker. The magic is in the midrange, and most two-way speakers will obscure what the Unity is doing there.
YouTube
[/font]
Also - I love these videos! The first time I heard a Unity horn was at Ra Nightclub in Las Vegas. I was already into horns, and audio, but when I walked into that club, I could tell the sound system was something special.
I just shot a video of my (incredibly crummy) Unity horn playing some music:
deadmau5 on unity horn.mp4 - YouTube
Keep in mind, this is an incredibly crude prototype. (The crossover is a single capacitor.) It's also the 2nd worst Unity I've ever built - it's very compromised by the funky shape. (It's designed to fit under the dash of a car.)
But in the video, you can still hear that awesome articulation, and there isn't a car stereo horn in the world that can do 300hz like this one can. (They run out of steam a couple of octaves higher.)
Here's the original track, for comparison's sake. To hear what the Unity is doing right, I'd recommend listening over headphones, or a single driver speaker. The magic is in the midrange, and most two-way speakers will obscure what the Unity is doing there.
YouTube
[/font]
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Tom, so how about licensing a design for DIYers, so each doesn't have to figure out the magic for himself?? I'd be interested in trying something like PaulSpencer's Synergy DIY build (Red Spade Audio: Synergy prototype #2 - construction 3) but he won't give out any plans in respect of your patent (rightly so)...
Because I need a project that puts a set of meter-wide horns in my living room, just ask my wife
Because I need a project that puts a set of meter-wide horns in my living room, just ask my wife
Speaking of magic, check out this phase plot of Jericho J2 that was posted on another forum:
There's something like 25 drivers in the cabinet and it has better phase behavior than your average two-way. What the heck.
Credit where credit is due: More Danley impressiveness
What I think would be really interesting, and this is what I'm considering doing, is to start with a Synergy that already performs very well, and then use an advanced DSP like Bodzio Ultimate Eq. It's an Aussie product and it's very cheap ... good audio things come from Australia!
Bodzio Software
Ultimate Equalizer
It will create an ideal frequency and phase response with an ordinary speaker in just one sweet spot. I have experienced a system like this and it was very impressive. However with the Synergy you have a more ideal starting point because you are starting with constant directivity and a point source. The room interaction will be better and the correction will apply to a bigger area.
Bodzio Software
Ultimate Equalizer
It will create an ideal frequency and phase response with an ordinary speaker in just one sweet spot. I have experienced a system like this and it was very impressive. However with the Synergy you have a more ideal starting point because you are starting with constant directivity and a point source. The room interaction will be better and the correction will apply to a bigger area.
The best idea of all is to get rid of the digital DSP stuff in your chain, and do a purely passive crossover, with a really optimized well-thought-out Synergy design.
The purists will figure out a way to build a Synergy and get rid of these digital crutches.
Imagine a really well made SE 2A3 amp, (I do know how to build that!) with no feedback, playing a Synergy Horn with perhaps a tapped horn subwoofer.
Everyone has their prejudices, so I just voiced mine. Yes Paul, I know what you told me about DSP at the audio shows, I've heard that, but "no thank you ", not for my long term Synergy listening.
Digital : All the King's Horses, and all the Kings Men, could NEVER put poor ole' Humpty Dumpty together again !!
Cheers, I LOVE this direction we are seeing audio go in. I THANK all you guys who are smarter and more experienced than I in speakers, for bringing this innovation into this world. Someone make me a passive crossover GOOD one please !!!! I have 10,000 LPs just a waitin'.
Jeff Medwin
The purists will figure out a way to build a Synergy and get rid of these digital crutches.
Imagine a really well made SE 2A3 amp, (I do know how to build that!) with no feedback, playing a Synergy Horn with perhaps a tapped horn subwoofer.
Everyone has their prejudices, so I just voiced mine. Yes Paul, I know what you told me about DSP at the audio shows, I've heard that, but "no thank you ", not for my long term Synergy listening.
Digital : All the King's Horses, and all the Kings Men, could NEVER put poor ole' Humpty Dumpty together again !!
Cheers, I LOVE this direction we are seeing audio go in. I THANK all you guys who are smarter and more experienced than I in speakers, for bringing this innovation into this world. Someone make me a passive crossover GOOD one please !!!! I have 10,000 LPs just a waitin'.
Jeff Medwin
PB, Interested in why exactly you should say this? Compared to a Synergy Horn? I know it's better than the original Unity Horn. I've owned/own both so have listened extensively (and even done some measurements
I'm glad this thread has kept things objective, because I'm afraid Paul's measurements seem to provide the 'smoking gun' in my hypothesis. (My hypothesis being "I think the Unity horn is square for a reason.")
Red Spade Audio: Synergy horn measurements
In Paul's measurements, we see a *dramatic* narrowing of directivity in the Yorkville Unity, begining at 5khz and continuing for a full octave. And if you look at the pic, you'll see the culprit:
There's something 'tripping' up the compression driver, likely at a point where the waveguide is between 6.8cm and 13.6*cm. And looks what we see in the waveguide at those dimensions? Yup, our midrange ports.
Details on the math and all my other ramblings here:
Audio Psychosis • View topic - Under Dash Horn Alternative
If it's any consolation, it's not just the Yorkville guys that missed this; my own waveguides are compromised too.
Also, kudos to Paul, because his measurements are excellent, and the results he's getting with his design is spectacular. I'm learning a lot from his blog.