A high technical performance consists of rather more than flat from 2-300 Hz up to 15 kHz at a few Volts. Compared to a midrange driver there is a price to pay in order to extend both the high and low frequency response. What might that be?
There is no overlap between what Scan-Speak market as midrange drivers and those they market as fullrange drivers. Ditto for SB Acoustics with their midrange and widebander drivers. You and some other DIY folk may not appreciate why wideband drivers are not a suitable replacement for midrange drivers in high technical performance 3 way monitors but commercial manufacturers have little option but to stick with what can do the job. Now this is not necessarily the case with audiophile speakers for the home where studio-type technical performance can be unimportant compared to other factors. An example might be something like the Boenicke W5 which seems to have a following despite it's technical performance, price and remarkably far from neutral sound quality.
Do you meann technical performance as the posssibility to hit 100 dB and over without a flaw ?
Maybe...
The fact that a 4-5" woofer needs a 2" midrange is clear to you for obvious reasons.
Difficult to find tweeters with little faceplate ( magnets are now neo) ...well, those are not the high tech studio grade for sure.
Neutral sound....
Neutral sound?
C' mon!
Maybe...
The fact that a 4-5" woofer needs a 2" midrange is clear to you for obvious reasons.
Difficult to find tweeters with little faceplate ( magnets are now neo) ...well, those are not the high tech studio grade for sure.
Neutral sound....
Neutral sound?
C' mon!
can you tell me what wideband drivers you have used in the past. what sort of implementation you tried, what design, ect.
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It is at least possible with a multiway, I have yet to see a single fr driver/speaker doing anything close to 20hz-20khz. Most have difficulties producing 8khz and 40hz at normal spl already (here I also mean not beaming like a laser)....
And a single full range is one of the most compromised way to create seamless full range sound.... Compromises that come to mind are excessive beaming due to having a too big radiating surface in relation to the played frequency which is needed to produce any mid and bass frequencies, doppler distortion due to playing the whole frequency range, diffraction from surround due to the need to also play lower frequencies etc.
Your first argument has nothing to do with crossovers but with using multiple drivers not on the same point in space, in fact using a (steeper) crossover even helps against this problem. Second argument is also illogical, a first order filter often only makes it (the ability to disappear) worse by having more interference (lobing) due to the wide overlap and more distortion due to higher amount of out of band energy. You are justifying your design ideas based on false premises, I seriously see no reason based on common speaker building/acoustics and psychoacoustics literature why crossovers are evil and would like to hear further arguments for this argument from your side.
Most systems that do a decent job to 20 Hz is “multiple subwoofers”. Whether it is multiway or FR. With FR it is a WAW and it really is a 2-way but with an XO low enuff that most of the evils of the XO can be avoided.
dave
Anytime you have a physical C-C of greater than a quarter wavelength at XO you have problems. You can only get the phase right over anything more than a spot, and you can throw that away with any not-first order XO. Greater listening distances help somewhat,
It is all about your choice of compromises. I will not compromise really good 3D imaging/soundstage, and put that XO right where we are most sensitive and you can throw that idea out.
dave
Not directly. I was asking what you thought the difference was between a wideband driver and a midrange driver.
Have you heard the speaker? I was surprised to hear the tonal balance of tiny $50 plastic PC speakers at an audio show (albeit with some bass present). The speaker is an excellent example of the difference between audiophile speakers and high fidelity speakers. Nothing wrong with liking audiophile speakers or wideband drivers for that matter but sound quality in a technical sense does exist and is valued by some.
Scan-Speak sell large numbers of wideband drivers so why would a representative want to dismiss them? A representative would of course know the difference between a wideband driver and a midrange driver and what each was best suited to.
Countless ones in TVs, radios, soundbars, PC speakers, phones, doorbells,... and just about anything required to make a sound that doesn't need to be high fidelity. I have used one or two at work to control sound but not for home audio uses. I am interested in high fidelity sound as a hobby and obviously haven't used any for this purpose because they are not appropriate. Did come close to using one in a boombox-type thing for my mum but she came home with a new Roberts radio (with a pretty poor 2.5" full range driver!) before I could get started.
I have heard a number of DIY and commercial speakers using small wideband drivers often with complicated cabinets and they have generally been poor to mediocre at best. No "coherence" was ever heard by me. About the best of the bunch was a speaker with Mark Audio drivers in a small room at an audio show. The sound quality was reasonably in step with their modest price. Mass produced in Asia 2 ways would likely edge it for the price but that isn't really comparing apples with apples.
I know I'm opening myself up to criticism from the "full range" crowd... But personally, (aside from output issues in the lower regions) I have yet to hear a full-range speaker that wouldn't benefit from a tweeter. My experience, and I've heard a LOT of speakers over the years. Not saying I've heard them all, maybe you guys have "the one", but I haven't heard it yet.
wideband drivers are not hifi because youve heard them in your phones and tv and dont like the result?
what is going on here?
youve admitted that you have never tried wideband drivers in your systems. nor never design any system using them
you couldnt hear coherence at a audio show therefore "anyone who claim wideband give better coherence are wrong"??? again, because at a audio show you couldnt hear the coherency of a wideband system.
im convinced. ill throw my wideband drivers in the garbage, quick!
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No, not the Boenike...nor others.
Follows that I don't know what an audiophile speaker Is...I'm an audiophile for sure, so my speakers GOTTA be audiophile speakers, but High technical content/ state of the art either.
Oh, and yes! The difference between wideband and midrange...that must be in the whole structure of the speaker: Mass, compliance(?!),weight, friction, magnet force, coil travel... everything! Ok, I might NOT know the small differences that the specialized drivers might have ( that belongs to the manifacturer) but One thing that I remember Is (often repeated ) to use 1st order filters the drivers should have a gentle behavior, i.e. not abrupt changes etc.
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I was trying to point out that a particular speaker can be good or bad depending on what you value. The Boenicke W5 is an extreme example in possibly being the most coloured "hi-fi" speaker I have ever had demonstrated to me and yet at £6k it finds customers with plenty of audiophiles saying good things about it. It may be the antitheisis of high fidelity in a technical/studio sense but this simply isn't what some people value. There's nothing much wrong with this but there is in claiming such speakers have a high performance in a technical sense. Which is possibly why the wideband driver enthusiasts and conventional speaker enthusiasts wisely have separate forums. (We're in the one for conventional speaker enthusiasts).
All driver design involves compromises in order to best meet the design requirements. The laws of physics dictate that getting "full range" from a single driver is going to involve giving up technical performance in the low, mid and high frequency ranges compared to drivers designed only to cover those ranges. This is obvious although what is given up may not be. I was asking if those suggesting using a wideband driver instead of a midrange or tweeter knew what had been given up to get a wide bandwidth.
Yes.
I used a 2" (Tymphany NE65) as the wide band tweeter in a large system. I started with a 500Hz crossover, moved it up to 700Hz. I liked it a lot.
However, the small driver was the weak link for SPL/distortion. That's just how it is. I was always tempted to pust the X-over up a bit more.
And that was with a "very wide baffle" - I had my 2" loaded into a simple ~70cm wide horn. If I had have used a normal (small flat baffle) little box, the SPL would have needed to be about 15dB less, or the crossover point bumped up by an octave or so, to have acceptable distortion.
The NE65 was also a little bit "steely" in the HF, despite being among the best FR drivers in theis respect - it has a very smooth FR and its breakup is higher than most (right at the upper edge of human hearing). The steely quality was only a minor annoyance on some material, but it was there. In my experience, a good "real" tweeter does give better treble.
I too, used to be really sceptical of wide/ full range speakers. But as I learned more, I found that there's more than one way to skin a cat. Have you ever wondered why the full-range crowd put such high value on amplifier quality?
Is it snake oil -- buying into tubes with >1% THD, so obviously there must be something wrong with them? No. There's a scattering of technical articles and sites detailing why certain types of amplifiers (namely: current feedback, low damping factor, etc) tend give very good results with "difficult" signals. If all your FR speakers sound bad to you, then it's probably the amplifier! Solid state amplifiers generally use classical negative feedback techniques to minimise their "internal" distortion, and whatever thought they put into potential side effects once a real speaker is plugged in, obviously wasn't enough to make them change their topology. Long story short, the amplifier promotes unwanted reverberation and breakup modes because the full-duplex nature of most speaker loads is unacknowledged. A "high damping factor" is really a deceptive misnomer, because it's a LOW damping factor that allows the voice coil to yield in response to delayed energy in the cone. A high damping factor is of interest for subwoofers and bass tuning, where the entire cone mass is moving as a piston. Everywhere else, it creates more problems than it solves.
How is this relevant to FR speakers? They rely on cone flex rather than pistonic motion for most of the frequency range. So a decent amplifier helps disproportionately more than it would help a 3-way burdened with a passive crossover.
A 3-way with dedicated midrange is just a different set of compromises.
Pros:
-multiple amplifiers running band-limited parts of the signal.
-separate floating boxes to minimise mechanical interactions (reverb) between the drivers.
Cons:
Cost, complexity, separate point sources (assuming that a point source is what you arbitrarily wanted in the first place).
Yep, break it into 3rds (average flat BW of a driver) and we get 20-200 Hz/2,000/20,000.
The rising impedance curve is one thing I always look at on spec sheets. The impedance changes depending on the coil's position in the magnetic gap, so it can be a source of IM distortion if not accounted for (eg. with those pesky current source amplifiers). Small, short coils with low overhang have the advantage. FR drivers and entry-level pro / guitar drivers seem to make a good effort by downsizing Xmax, but of course tweeters are ultimately a lot smaller and lighter.