We (Americans) don't extrapolate quality from "Made in America", we just want to know where it is made and we can't identify China or Italy on a map. Ok, that is not fair... We can't identify Germany or France on a map but we can identify Italy because it looks like a boot 👢. 😂🤣
B&C is one of the top companies global.I own 25 units from 18s to 1 inch the last 20 years in pro use never had failed one and i am always amazed by they performance.A lot of people they don't know how to use speakers or set up properly and chose the right driver and right amplifier for specific job.Today all italian made companies rules the pro audio world on big rate all big box manufacturing companies have italian speakers inside.
that's because we in America only get the better European stuff. we don't import the stuff you use on the daily basis - only the stuff you aspire to. the daily basis stuff we import from Asia. same as how you in Europe probably don't get stuff made in America except things we are actually good at like software. but i guess you don't think of Google as "made in America"
so when we buy something made in Europe it is usually good. doesn't mean that Europeans can do no wrong - only that when they do wrong we don't import it.
the China stuff we import regardless of how bad it is - because it's cheap.
I had the 3/4 " tweeters ( DE 07) which got stolen together with the (precious) die-cast horns
It's also because our minimum quality norms are higher in the EU than in the US.
A lot of (low quality) food that is eaten in the US, is straight illigal in the EU. Especially on meat and processed food our rules are way strickter, and that is very good. And then certain US Politicians says we don't want their food. That is not true, we don't want the cheap crap food full of chemicals that we forbid because they are dangerous. But US food that fits our norms is no problem at all.
And like that it's with a lot of things. We don't like most american cars because we think ours or even japanese and korean cars are way better, and more fit for our smaller roads and densely build old cities. If Americans would make cars that fit that (Ford does, and in lesser degree Tesla) we don't have any problem with it and they sell. But most are not fit for our roads at all, they are to wide, to heavy and to petrol hungry for Europe.
Last edited:
quick physics and marketing lessons. "the sun always shines on TV" everything is always 3 steps forward if you listen to marketers, which is why they always refer to ribs as "stiffening" when in reality they are the opposite - they are there to soften.
any corrugation will stiffen the material in one direction and soften it in another. speakers have both radial and axial breakup modes:
for radial modes indeed the ribs will stiffen the cone but it is axial modes that are dominant.
the "ribs" on a woofer cone are really accordion surround rolls that have partially migrated to the cone. whereas surround is used to decouple the cone from the basket the "ribs" decouple inner parts of the cone from the outer ones strategically to break up axial modes. this optimizes both frequency response and off-axis response because now the center of the cone can act as a smaller speaker at high frequencies.
but this does in fact reduce cone stiffness, which is what i meant by "soft cones" ...
of course that was trolling speak. they are simply cones optimized for wide bandwidth operation, whereas a cone without corrugations would be stiffer at low frequencies but have potentially deal breaking behavior at higher frequencies.
a lot of these decisions are trade offs but B&C always seems to err on the side of simple and boring ( like Toyota ) whereas other companies like 18 Sound, Beyma, Faital try to explore things that are more exciting.
prosound industry is like trucking industry - they don't care about exciting - they just want reliable. Toyota trucks are of course legendary. but i don't want a truck - i want an Italian supercar that spontaneously combusts in flames as any proper Italian supercar should.
joking. i also want reliable, but i want exciting first and reliable second. after all as DIYers we don't have to simultaneously please a crowd of 10,000 people and some superstar on stage and if the sound goes out for even 5 minutes because of something we did we end up homeless as a prosound tech would.
prosound techs are paid to deliver reliability. DIYers pay to make something fun, unique and exciting.
prosound guys should keep using B&C or anything that works for them but DIYers should use something more interesting.
i mentioned before i consider Radian not a true prosound brand, but in-between Prosound and Audiophile. i also think Beyma is trying to be Prosound, Car Audio and Audiophile at the same time. I actually used Beyma drivers that were specifically made for car audio in my car. By contrast JBL has spun off Selenium as a car audio brand made in Brazil ... and also JBL professional is kind of a separate brand than just "JBL"
Eighteen Sound and BMS are fully prosound but focus on making products that are unique or interesting ...
most of JBL's drivers are kind of long in the tooth but they don't care because they don't need you to buy their drivers - they buy their own drivers. they would rather have older drivers which they understand how to use than newer drivers that are less understood. but they do have still legit innovation like the D2 compression driver.
nothing more to add about B&C i think everything has already been said.
Last edited:
reality is our most popular vehicles like Ford F150 Truck are too big even for our own cities in America - that's why most Americans live in suburbs
i drive a mid-size sedan but even for me as soon as i get out of the city i breathe a sigh of relief to finally have wide straight roads
the truck guys don't even bother driving into the city
this is also why American cities are dying - because anybody who is able to leave them - does so
the oldest, most densely built cities like NYC, Chicago and San Francisco are hit the hardest.
and the fastest growing cities are the ones that are all highways and sprawl like Orlando.
By "DIYers" you refer to yourself (and yourself only), I suppose.
I agree with your analysis here, and stiffness in the axial mode direction is enhanced by means other than concentric ribs. This can be thickness/stiffness of the cone material, cone profile shape, size and placement of the dustcap (to a lesser extent on a large cone), or something else.
Well presumably DIYers are DIYers because they find loudspeaker design and/or loudspeaker building sufficiently interesting to be worth their time. What they find interesting about it and what they want to focus on is completely theirs to choose. It can be "interesting" drivers; it can be "interesting" system design; it can be "interesting" enclosure design; it can be "interesting" crossover design; it can be "interesting" room interaction; it can be "interesting" aesthetics; it can be "interesting" bang-for-the-buck; or it can be any "interesting" combination of attributes whether on this list or not. I would not presume to tell a DIYer what he or she should use for the sake of doing something that I think is "interesting". That choice is not mine to make for someone else.
Last edited:
You seem to know a lot about America, and Europe, and probably the whole world. And you also seem to know a lot about what Americans are good at, and you also know a lot about what people do and about what people should do. And you have the gift to speak for other people, also.
I am deeply impressed. My final thought on all this: Did you ever consider to give up DIY speaker building altogether and instead prepare a presidency within the next 4 years? Just an idea of mine, and excempt of any suggestive intent - I certainly do not want to pretend to know what's good for you.
Last edited:
Even (relative) old American cities have way bigger streets than our old, often medieval city centers. This is the Steenstraat (Stone Street) in the center of Bruges, and that is one of the main streets in the center. Most American cars don't fit in here. Sidestreets are even smaller.
Most travel even by foot or bike in the city center, because even with a smaller car like the one i drive now (BMW 1 series) it is tricky to move around. Big American style cars can't move in here and often got stuck while trying to turn into an other street. Most parking spots are also to small for those cars so they need to take several spots or find a large place to park (mostly truck spaces). Villages, also often centuries or even millenia old (i near in a hamlet that is inhabitated at least 6000 years now), have often even smaller streets.
You can't change the street here in Bruges and many other places as most buildings here are historical monuments and listed and protected. Many in Bruges of them are build before 1500AD actually and got renovated over the centuries to their actual form. And this is not only Bruges, this is almost any historical city in my country (and most cities are quiet old). Bruges goes back to about 100BC (as far as we know), when it was a small harbor called Bruccia (Germanic) or Bryggia (Belgic Celtic) used by local (mixed Frissian/Saxon Germanic/Belgic Celtic) tribes to trade with the related Britonnic Celts in the UK. These streets were not made for cars, and the city is not adapted at all like American cities for big vehiclies, as they did not exist when the city was build millenia ago. Even horse pulled cars were rare at that time.
And those big american trucks are the only one that are a bit popular here by some drivers. But taxation is very high for such gas gugglers and they are not allowed to come in inner cities like here mostly as they are to big, heavy and have emissions that far exceed the local limits. You mostly see them also on the countryside, not in cities. The most sold European car in the last decades was the Volkswagen Golf, as that is the perfect size for our roads.
i offered @mark100 the vice presidency but he politely declined
jokes aside, you must wonder what it feels like when only the president of America and world's richest man have more haters than me ?
it feels like this:
yes i know. Ford F150 is the most sold "car" in USA but you won't see them in Manhattan for example, even though the streets in Manhattan are decently wide - but parking spaces are small and more importantly Manhattan has a more European rather than American culture.
in real America you have 15 year old girls driving monster trucks in white socks with no shoes. in Manhattan it's all Toyota Hybrid taxis and Ubers driven by people who can't speak English.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0780536/
have you seen this movie ? LOL
For some reason, you brought up the iPal, an example of an unusual niche market speaker that never will achieve much market share because of its cost/performance ratio.
The Ipal has only slightly better performance/weight ratios than the old JBL 2269 or newer 18sound18NTLW5000.
The B&C18SW115 weighs slightly less than the 18NTLW5000, slightly more than the 2269, performance/weight of the three drivers quite similar. New JBL 2269 do not appear to be available currently.
From a cost/performance ratio, the 18SW115 has around a 10/7 advantage, ten drivers for the cost of seven 18NTLW5000.
None of the drivers mentioned above look more interesting from the outside of the box.
The D2 has very few design elements that were not already done long before by BMS.
Seems price/performance has little to do with with any choice you might make, if you were to actually ever design and build a speaker system.
Art
i used iPal as example of their latest and greatest to show it's still worse than decades old JBL
i am curious by what metric you judge "performance" ? B&C doesn't even list AES power on their spec sheets. i can only assume the AES power of their drivers is lower than "continuous program power" or they would list it.
the D2 is tuned very differently from any BMS driver. it's a 1.5" exit HF driver with dual 3" VCs. BMS doesn't have anything remotely similar. they do have a lot of dual VC drivers but they are either coaxial or midrange - none of them are HF and BMS doesn't have any HF drivers with exit larger than 1"
in fact no company on the market has a driver comparable to the D2.
the B&C coaxial is a much more of a copy of the BMS than the D2 is. MUCH MORE.
to me D2 beats them both handily. i have a design with D2 but would not use either BMS or B&C coaxials except for the BMS 4599HE midrange, which is the only driver between BMS and B&C that uses two similar diaphragms like D2 does and which is the only correct way to do it.
Joseph Crowe measured it wrong. D2 and BMS 4599HE are two best compression drivers in the world. no contest. my design uses both of them with about 2.5 khz crossover.
i designed and built a speaker system in high school in the 90s because i was frustrated with commercial offerings at the time. then i built a few car audio systems and some subwoofers. then i realized i can just buy Studio Monitors and PA speakers that are already designed to my liking.
unlike most here i don't build for the sake of building. only when i want something that i can't find commercially.
it so happens that for years i have had more speakers than i need and i am not interested in building more unless they are on a completely different level from what i already have.
i already have both JBL studio monitors that are ruler flat and JBL PA speakers that are painfully loud ... the only thing that makes sense to me to build is something that would combine the fidelity of my monitors with the SPL of my PA speakers.
but considering my past designs were original and worked out great i have zero interest in building something that isn't original now that my understanding of how speakers work is greater than it was then. i could just clone a Genelec 1236A:
but anybody can do that. and i am the president, remember ?
honestly if anything in my life was as easy as building the best speaker in the world i would be a happy man.
i told @mark100 that my goal was to beat his 6-way Danley horn system. but that was a lie i made up so he didn't think i was insane. i think he thought i was insane anyway. my actual goal is to design an objectively unbeatable system. which is to say a system that cannot be beat at the same budget level and the budget is flexible.
by flexible i don't mean that i am rich. sadly i am not. but rather i mean the budget will adjust in order to maximize the odds of the resulting system being unbeatable at said budget.
obviously i would like to keep the number as low as possible but with smaller budgets there is less room for creativity and remember - boring is the enemy !
PS: Art you need to lighten up. You can't win every argument. And nobody wins arguments with me. That's one of the laws of thermodynamics. If you adjust your attitude towards learning together instead of trying to win you will be much happier.
Last edited:
"B&C’s specified Nominal Power Handling is measured according to the AES2-1984 standard."
https://www.bcspeakers.com/en/products-overview/power-handling
that is good to know. i think B&C could do a better job with presenting information - for example it appears from the pictures of the recone kit that 18SW115 has inside-outside wound VC but it doesn't mention this anywhere on the page or in the PDF spec sheet - pretty dumb IMO. it's like selling a car with a turbo but not mentioning it anywhere so the specs look suspicious and you only find out about the turbo by opening the hood. Foolishness.
anyway it seems 18SW115 and 18NTLW5000 are indeed almost perfectly matched in all aspects except price and depth, good job @weltersys
let me do some numbers side by side for these two drivers B&C / 18 Sound
power: 1700-3400 / 1800-4000
Re: 5.3 / 5.5
BL: 30.3 / 31.3
Mms: 275g / 295g
Xmax: 14mm / 17.5mm
Le: 1.9 / 1.85
EBP: 100hz / 96hz
Net Weight: 26.2lb / 26.46lb
It's uncanny how closely most of these match - good job @weltersys on coming up with a great apples to apples comparison - better than my comparison to the iPal for sure.
it seems the NTLW pulls away slightly in Xmax and Power handling, but not by a wide margin. intuitively you would expect NTLW to have a bigger power handling advantage since it literally has double the voice coils for heat dissipation, and they're the same 4.5" diameter as B&C:
but the cooling for both VCs is by the same air - that is when the woofer pumps the air through the VC gap the same air has to cool both coils, which means the total power handling is not double, but a more modest gain.
there is, however, one important spec missing and that is Xmech. an easy way to control the weight of a motor like in 18SW115 is by making it shallower which will cause the VC to smack into the back plate on long excursions but reduce the amount of iron required to make the motor. with Tetracoil motor no such compromise exists because VC travels all the way through the motor on both ends.
so NTLW5000 can work in the same subwoofer box as SW115 but has more power, more xmax and probably more Xmech while only weighing 1/4 pound more ... which means that if the total weight of the subwoofer system ( driver + box + rigging ) is say 150 lbs then with NTLW you're getting 10% more output with only 0.01% more weight ( 150.26 lbs vs 150.00 lbs ).
is this worth the difference in price of $700 vs $1000 ? well if you can get 9 flown subs to do the work of 10 then you're looking at $9,000 in drivers versus $7000 in drivers but you're saving about $1,000 on not needing an extra cabinet with associated rigging and the remaining $1,000 in price difference will be covered by not having to lug around that extra cabinet everywhere and constantly mounting and dismounting it.
so for a flown touring application the NTLW is worth it. for any other application that doesn't call for absolutely maximum power density it is a waste of money.
thank you @weltersys for forcing me go through this analysis. as a result i will no longer recommend NTLW5000 and 2269H for home use. instead for home use i will recommend what the guys on AVS already know - simply using more subwoofers.
push-pull motor remains king for flown touring application, which is what it was designed for.
I haven't been on diyaudio as much in recent years, but when did it merge with Reddit?