The ultimate Grand Piano

[geraldfryjr]

Oh very much so!
You are on the right track.
I plan on using them as nearfield recording monitors in front of my mixer.
As the whole idea is to have a speaker that has absolutley no coloration.
If one where to ask me what do they sound like I would have to say they don't sound like anything at all.
That is just the nature of the beast.

My little panels should be crossed over about 800hz to 1200hz technicaly speaking.
But at a low level and only 18" away I run them fullrange and get a very reasonable output so that any more than that ear fatiuge sets any very quickley.

Only because of my many years of high volume rock-n-roll giutar playing.

But my goal is to cross them over in the 200hz to 300hz region as to retain the body of the low registers of the vocals.

That 8" sub that you saw in the picture is good till 1200hz and the crossover for that setup was some where in between 350hz and 700hz by my measurements.
And believe it or not they melded together very nicely.

I can't tell you exactly because it was cobbled together and I eventualy biamped the thing and used the eq's on my mixer as a crosssover so I haven't built a proper crossover yet.

I basicaly just just took out everything below 80hz that I could and added a little bit of around 300hz to 500hz to make up the difference too bring out the low end due to the back wave cancelations and ran the rest flat.

As far as bass is concerned in nearfield they certainley hold there own on stuff like the spin doctors and that snare OMG!
Even with no eq.
As well as that awesome vocal from spandel balette's "true" and then on to the delicate sound of crowed house's " don't dream its over" after the intro the at bass run just punches right through and stands on its own with it own independence without getting muddied and buried in the mix.
And the same with david bowe's "golden years" you can literaly feel the depth of the reverb, even in mono, the detail is just that great!
The moody blues,boston and as I already mentioned Kansas and the list goes on.

It is those impressions as to why I have become lazy to hook up the other channel. Besides the fact that I was looking to hear any flaws or descrepincy's from the driver itself.
And I didn't want to become distracted from having the other channel that might have been mismatched from the one that I was trying to judge.

I have found that both of the panels are an exact match to each other as well as the other one that uses just spray paint as the stator coating.
Only that it doesn't with stand as high of a bias voltage as the powder coated ones do.
But this is an extreme limit.
And is almost irrelevent as they do have there limits aswell and this is because of the voltage breakdown of the air itself.

I did lose one of those painted ones some where while I was out one night showing it to some friend and forgot where I had left it (like a dumbass).

Passive cross overs are a tremendous PIA to figure out for an esl due to it being completely reactive and the combined reactance of the transformer and transformation ratio however it can be done.

As the frequency raise's the impedence lowers.

The THD of a an esl is generaly that of the electronics driving them.
And usally < .1% thd and typicaly < 0.01% or less across the entire audio bandwidth.

I would like to hear common box speaker do that with no resonance's typicaly found in boxed systems. jer

[sprinter]

Question: Is it difficult to end up with a well matched pair when you are making everything from scratch like that?

Passive cross overs are a tremendous PIA to figure out for an esl due to it being completely reactive and the combined reactance of the transformer and transformation ratio however it can be done.

I just wouldn't want to do it. Not with gadgets like MiniDSP available for active xo and 6 channel PEQ to boot. Even pretty decent amps can be had cheap. Reminds me: What kind of spl efficiency do these things have? Are they friendly to low watt amps like SET, Tripath, chip, etc?

The THD of a an esl is generaly that of the electronics driving them.
And usally < .1% thd and typicaly < 0.01% or less across the entire audio bandwidth.

I would like to hear common box speaker do that with no resonance's typicaly found in boxed systems. jer

That is pretty amazing. However, a lot of people seem to dig the sound of speakers with some harmonic distortion, especially even harmonics. Has anyone ever accused these of sounding dry or anything like that? For monitor application, it's only a good thing. Box-originated resonances, of course, have no socially redeeming value at all, and one reason I'm building some OB full rangers (high SPL) (bass augmented) (active xo).

[sprinter]

To Tylersphile: I didn't mean to go off topic there. Actually, I'm very interested in the topic myself. I get what you're doing. At the risk of sounding too simplistic, it sounds like you've found yourself with an extremely nice empty "cabinet" and you want to do it justice. Admirable, as is the willingness to sail into uncharted waters. I respect a big challenge.

[geraldfryjr]

I had another whole page of stuff written and it raining and the power glitched and lost it all!
so will answer quickly and we should consider continuing this dicussion on the other thread we started for respect to the rest of the diyer's here.

It is very easy to make matched panels by using the same dimensions and following the same cronstruction procedures for every panel.

I don't have an SPL meter anymore.
But provided the bias voltage I am using and the very high transformation ratio of 1:200 to 1:400 I would have to say that it is fairly high.

As a midrang/tweeter they can take everything That my crown DC300A can muster up.
And can cause pain although I am quite immune to such levels .
But the average person would not be able to stand the loudness even as far away as 10 or 20 feet let alone nearfield.

They way the are setup up they should only purpose an 8 ohm load.
But they are actualy around 1 ohm at 20khz because of the capacitance of the transformer is about 6 to 8 times that of the panel.
This will be corrected when I do a rewind of the transformer.

I started out using my cheap AIWA 80 watt amp and used it with good sucsess at a fair listening level.
But because of the very low impedence at the high frequency's it would shut down from self protection quite often.

And has even brought that crown to its knees due to heat.
Because of the low impedence.
But this is a small problem that can be fixed easily. jer

[LineArray]

Originally Posted by Andersonix

Would this method make an array of narrow ESL panels' radiation pattern more string-like
...

The sound radiation is predominantly from the sound board, which is excited by the string's vibrations.

The direct radiation component originating from the strings is fairly low.

[JAMESBOS]

Might I make a suggestion, Why not build a full range planar using neos, and make it the same size and shape of the soundboard of the grand piano. You wouldn't need any crossovers or transformers.As it radiates from front and back it would be like the original soundboard.

[JAMESBOS]

Tylersphile,
If you could send me the dimensions of the soundboard cut out and the surrounds, I could if your interested build a full range planar of that size, using neo magnets. I have been building these speakers for the last 20 years. And I have 13 of these speakers in the living room at the moment. All plugged in to my ONKYO receiver. They sound great even with mp3 cards.

[JAMESBOS]

I am in the process of building a very small baby grand, using 3 diaphragms using 1,560, 25 x 6 x 3 mm neos. It,s about 41" x 31" at the moment. When I have finished it, I will let you know how it sounds, using the game setting L C R to drive the 3 diaphragms individually. Using the separate tonal settings on my Amp to help with the separate sounds of the diaphragms, integrating them separately.