Kindhornman, we're all looking forward to your new driver. Not many drivers are made for serious audiophiles.
DeonC, the 515 is suitable for horn loading and mid to upper-bass applications, but the Qts is really, really low, somewhere around 0.16 to 0.19, depending on which set of old Altec parameters you look at. It might be an interesting combination with a 416, though, depending on how the responses were overlapped. According to Bill of GPA, the moving parts of the current-production 515 and 416 are the same; the only difference is the magnet (much larger on the 515).
Joshua_G, I'm afraid to say that none of my projects are suitable for first-time builders, from the Ariel, through the Amity and Karna, to this project. They are not kits. There are other sites that have projects that would be a much better choice for first-time builders. In addition, the Ariels and the new speakers are intended for people who already own moderate-power triode amplifiers; there aren't as many speaker choices when the most power you have is 20 watts.
jpak, the pair of prototypes were auditioned with a stereo 45 SET amplifier, which put out a mighty 1.5 watts/channel. Despite the low power (some headphone amps put out more than that), I measured peaks around 102 dB (at the listening position) with no subjective compression or distortion. (Which speaks well of the overload characteristics of the amplifier.) The Karna has a lot more headroom and much lower distortion at 1.5 watts (the driver section alone has 3 watts of power, and all it does is drive a pair of 300B grids).
What I don't like about the bass horn + direct-radiator woofer setup is the necessity for another amplifier, since the efficiencies don't match. The Karna amplifiers are not exactly small, with four chassis. I could press the JWN (Jim Nichols) amplifier into use, but that's kind of a waste of a really good-sounding full-range tube amp. (The JWN is the compact amplifier to the left of the Karna amplifiers.)
DeonC, the 515 is suitable for horn loading and mid to upper-bass applications, but the Qts is really, really low, somewhere around 0.16 to 0.19, depending on which set of old Altec parameters you look at. It might be an interesting combination with a 416, though, depending on how the responses were overlapped. According to Bill of GPA, the moving parts of the current-production 515 and 416 are the same; the only difference is the magnet (much larger on the 515).
Joshua_G, I'm afraid to say that none of my projects are suitable for first-time builders, from the Ariel, through the Amity and Karna, to this project. They are not kits. There are other sites that have projects that would be a much better choice for first-time builders. In addition, the Ariels and the new speakers are intended for people who already own moderate-power triode amplifiers; there aren't as many speaker choices when the most power you have is 20 watts.
jpak, the pair of prototypes were auditioned with a stereo 45 SET amplifier, which put out a mighty 1.5 watts/channel. Despite the low power (some headphone amps put out more than that), I measured peaks around 102 dB (at the listening position) with no subjective compression or distortion. (Which speaks well of the overload characteristics of the amplifier.) The Karna has a lot more headroom and much lower distortion at 1.5 watts (the driver section alone has 3 watts of power, and all it does is drive a pair of 300B grids).
What I don't like about the bass horn + direct-radiator woofer setup is the necessity for another amplifier, since the efficiencies don't match. The Karna amplifiers are not exactly small, with four chassis. I could press the JWN (Jim Nichols) amplifier into use, but that's kind of a waste of a really good-sounding full-range tube amp. (The JWN is the compact amplifier to the left of the Karna amplifiers.)
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Here's a couple of photos of the first prototypes ... sorry about the quality, iPhone 4S with flash.
The next versions will have the resistive vent on the floor, but the slant-front will be retained. I'm considering a dual-woofer version where one woofer is closed-box, and the other is resistive-vent.
The crossover pix shows the MF/HF crossover at the top, and the LF crossover at the bottom. You can see the small metal-framed autoformer attenuator at the upper right, and some of the additional parts for the RAAL ribbon supertweeter at the upper left.
The next versions will have the resistive vent on the floor, but the slant-front will be retained. I'm considering a dual-woofer version where one woofer is closed-box, and the other is resistive-vent.
The crossover pix shows the MF/HF crossover at the top, and the LF crossover at the bottom. You can see the small metal-framed autoformer attenuator at the upper right, and some of the additional parts for the RAAL ribbon supertweeter at the upper left.
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Hi Lynn,
Thank you.
I know that neither the Ariel nor the 'beyond Ariel' are kits. I'm looking neither for kits nor for easy life. I'm looking for speakers to enjoy music better, for as long as I hear properly. I can live (barely) with my present speakers (Brodmann [Bosendorfer] VC2), but I know I can enjoy listening to music much more. I doubt if there is a kit with the sound quality I'm looking for.
With my no experience and knowledge, I cannot possibly design speakers, however I'm convinced I can build ones, given a shopping list and a diagram. If not all by myself, the wood work can be given to a carpenter.
As for proper amp, once there will be speakers, amp, or amps, will follow. I have ample experience in building amps.
I love the idea of having speakers which I could drive by low or moderate-power triode amp(s), preferably DHT. My present speakers are power-hungry and not as good-sounding as speakers should be and can be. My need is for as good sounding setup as I can possibly have. I know that good sound necessitates everything of adequate sound quality: source, or sources, amplification, speakers – and, of course, positioning, clean electric power, acoustics and vibrations damping.
For various reasons, I got at almost-decent sounding setup only few years ago. I have neither the time nor the finances to start 'the path' of designing and building a good setup from the beginning. I have to rely on others, whom I have good reason to trust their preferences of sound.
Commercial products? It takes more money than I have (and more money than their actual value) for lower sound quality than I strive for.
People like you and others on this website, who share their knowledge and experience willingly, are a rare gem. Regardless of if I'd change my sound setup, or not, it warms my heart to meet such people.
DIYing will not be a cheap hobby because the pursuit of great sound requires many different speaker drivers, different designs and time. But nobody can say you are doing it wrong because it is your ears and your taste. Soon you may even think you know more than the experts.
Unless you are easy to satisfy. Then accept the recommendation of anyone as the truth and your system will be affordable and probably OK.
If you somehow end up less than satisfied, the easy route to begin designing your own horn speaker is to purchase an active crossover, a few amps, where perhaps one or two are tube amps. And a bunch of different compression drivers and woofers that you find on Ebay. Avoid titanium diaphragms in compression drivers. I prefer pm4 and aluminum and phenolic, and beryllium diaphragms. Choice of magnet material is snake oil, at least in the beginning. Later, if you end up experimenting with field coils, please let me know what you learn.
Cabinets can be made of plywood. Woodshops usually have suitable sizes of plywood that they just throw away. MDF is not a very healthy material to work with. I recommend plywood that also has better tone. Or why not pure wood that looks so nice. Glue some together and start sculpting!
Horns can be made of newspaper, tape, carton or wood. Polyester resin is some nasty things I cannot recommend for a beginner.
Then build a lot of nice horns and cabinets on your free time. If your speakers are worth anything to you, don't forget a protection cap on each one. Tweeters are particularly prone to blow when introduced to bass signals.
Don't forget a suitable supertweeter. Personally I cannot stand systems that push a pair of upper midrange compression driver tweeters above 12kHz where they clearly do not belong. This is one reason why horn speakers can sound harsh. But far from everyone would agree.
This is true for every frequency band. Try not to stretch a speaker too much beyond its capabilities. Like a subwoofer is not a midrange driver. A midrange driver is usually not a subwoofer nor a tweter. Stuff like that.
That active crossover you found in the beginning might be crap compaired to more advanced and less adjustable alternatives. Getting that one right will take time.
Cheers and good luck!
Unless you are easy to satisfy. Then accept the recommendation of anyone as the truth and your system will be affordable and probably OK.
If you somehow end up less than satisfied, the easy route to begin designing your own horn speaker is to purchase an active crossover, a few amps, where perhaps one or two are tube amps. And a bunch of different compression drivers and woofers that you find on Ebay. Avoid titanium diaphragms in compression drivers. I prefer pm4 and aluminum and phenolic, and beryllium diaphragms. Choice of magnet material is snake oil, at least in the beginning. Later, if you end up experimenting with field coils, please let me know what you learn.
Cabinets can be made of plywood. Woodshops usually have suitable sizes of plywood that they just throw away. MDF is not a very healthy material to work with. I recommend plywood that also has better tone. Or why not pure wood that looks so nice. Glue some together and start sculpting!
Horns can be made of newspaper, tape, carton or wood. Polyester resin is some nasty things I cannot recommend for a beginner.
Then build a lot of nice horns and cabinets on your free time. If your speakers are worth anything to you, don't forget a protection cap on each one. Tweeters are particularly prone to blow when introduced to bass signals.
Don't forget a suitable supertweeter. Personally I cannot stand systems that push a pair of upper midrange compression driver tweeters above 12kHz where they clearly do not belong. This is one reason why horn speakers can sound harsh. But far from everyone would agree.
This is true for every frequency band. Try not to stretch a speaker too much beyond its capabilities. Like a subwoofer is not a midrange driver. A midrange driver is usually not a subwoofer nor a tweter. Stuff like that.
That active crossover you found in the beginning might be crap compaired to more advanced and less adjustable alternatives. Getting that one right will take time.
Cheers and good luck!
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<blush> Well, thank you! (Karna has been teaching me to accept compliments.)
I strongly agree with Rewind's comments, especially about not "pushing" drivers to give you more bandwidth. You can almost get away with it when using direct-radiators (but not really), but horns do not forgive trying to stretch bandwidth. The useful maximum is one decade, or 3.5 octaves ... that's if everything is perfect. I chose large-format because I wanted horn dynamics below 1 kHz, and "pushing" small-format to work below 1.5 kHz is challenging, to say the least. Large-format also sounds different than small-format in a way that is hard to describe ... the closest phrase is "relaxed" and "effortless", like a 12-cylinder car. I'm willing to give up the top octave in return for that.
In terms of commercial equivalents, it would be nice to be at the JBL DD66000 level. The dual-woofer JBL is surprisingly inefficient (94 dB/meter), so it's not ideally suited for DHT amplifiers (it was difficult to assess the sound since it was demo'ed with a 500-watt Class D amplifier). I couldn't tell much at the show, but it seemed to have the modern JBL/Harman International balance ... crisp, slightly forward, but smooth overall.
The Avante-Garde, Cessaro, and the other German exotics just sound weird; based on what I've heard at the RMAF and at local dealers, they're nothing close to flat. There were some vendors at the show that were demoing what seemed like updated Klipsch, but they sounded like old-school Klipsch, tons of dynamics, but all over the place in terms of FR.
There aren't many high-efficiency (97 dB/meter or higher) speakers with flat response; I guess the attitude is that it can always be fixed with DSP, which is cheap these days, and standard sound-reinforcement practice. In addition to flat response, I also want to good return-to-zero decay characteristics, preferably as good as electrostats. This is really unusual in high-efficiency speakers, which typically have plenty of diffraction, HOM's, and other time-domain artifacts. That's why much of the project time was devoted to the AH425 design, a flat-response, low-diffraction horn.
In terms of subjective qualities, the new speaker doesn't sound like the DD66000, the Avante-Gardes, Cessaro, or old-school Klipsch. Actually, it doesn't like any commercial speakers I've heard to date. The balance is BBC/Quad ESL, but with near-Klipsch dynamics, and imaging akin to MBL or large electrostats. Like the Karna amplifiers, it mostly sounds like itself.
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Thank you.
I'm far from being easy to satisfy when it comes to sound quality of my setup.
There is no way I'm going to accept recommendations from most other people, only from very few ones -- and that is also with a very big grain of salt.
As I wrote above, at the age of 70, with very little finances, it's impossible for me to start designing loudspeakers. Either I'll copy another's design, or stay with the speakers I have.
About the Avantgarde Trio, I built Trio replica from scraps, but It did not sound right so I switched to my own designs. I had great trouble with its lack of midbass and the compression driver midrange unit they use do not have a phase plug which is a huge flaw. Treble always leak through and without a phase plug I can here how wrong it sounds. But the two upper horn profiles in the Trio are my favourite right now.
The Cessaro seem very similar to the Trio.
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Hi Lynn,
Thank you.
As I wrote above, my educated guess (in a manner of speaking, since not that educated) is that I wouldn't find salvation (sound-wise) in commercial speakers.
As for DSP's, my inclination is to keep the analogue chain purely analogue. On top of that, I cannot write software of any kind.
Thus, I'd rather wait for what you may come up with.
Thank you.
As I wrote above, my educated guess (in a manner of speaking, since not that educated) is that I wouldn't find salvation (sound-wise) in commercial speakers.
As for DSP's, my inclination is to keep the analogue chain purely analogue. On top of that, I cannot write software of any kind.
Thus, I'd rather wait for what you may come up with.
That sounds right. The upper HF is pretty good, as I recall, but the mids and upper bass were pretty bad, and the overall FR balance was harsh and dull at the same time. The efficiency didn't seem all there, either: it seemed to ask a lot from 8-watt 300B amplifiers.
What puzzled me was the horn/cone midrange: a friend of mine uses a 5" Lowther/Alnico with a 36" LeCleac'h horn, and it sounds pretty good, much better than the AG Trio. The funky little whizzer cone must be doing terrible things to the wavefront in the 3~10 kHz region, yet it sounds way, way better than the AG. There must be something going on with the AG cone driver.
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I have tried Saba 8" fullrange units in the AG midbass horn and they can sound wonderful and ALMOST pull off being fullrange units. Unless you happen to have a Yamaha JA6681 in a Trio Kugelwellen replica with another JA6681B in a Trio tweeter horn replica, standing next to it for A/B comparison. The thought struck me for approx. 3 seconds to go for fullrange cone drivers instead of compression drivers.
Downside is that 8" fullrange units often lack the lowest part of the midbass, so I feel the need for a JBL 12" midwoofer to fill in the rest before the subwoofer. I never got how to pair these two. One plays low midrange, the other slightly lower low midrange. Sometimes you have to make choices and a working midbass is more important than a soft and prestine midrange.
The AG midrange compression driver is called Community M200A. I sourced its almost identical brother, the M200, and that driver is starting to have trouble around the region you describe: 3-10kHz, where apparently even a whizzer cone would sound better. I tried other compression drivers without a phase plug, including the JA6681 and they all shared the same kind of wrong sound that the M200 has. The JA6681B sounds very good WITH a phase plug so I could trace the main problem to the lack of phase plug. AG probably needs a 3rd or 4th order XO at 3.5kHz to get rid of that wrong sound. Or just add a phase plug.
However, there is a kind of open sound that I can enjoy for brief moments when not using a phase plug.
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They should be commended for trying at least. Those two upper horns have great profiles. Midbass horn, not so, but at least it will fit in a livingroom.
My version of midbass is anti-commercial in its very existence. It is drying in the garage right now. A three meter long monster with severe integration issues and a bad temperament.
My version of midbass is anti-commercial in its very existence. It is drying in the garage right now. A three meter long monster with severe integration issues and a bad temperament.
Thanks for the photos, Lynn, No need to apologize, a little grainy but well lit and clear.
Well, I'm 64, and I've been listening to the Ariels for 20 years. The last commercial loudspeaker that I've owned were the KEF 104's back in 1975, everything after that was one of my own designs.
I listened to the Audionics CC-2 (designed by Bob Sickler) from 1977 to 1993. There was a procession of visiting amplifiers after the Ariel was completed, mostly tube, and a few transistor amps. It didn't help that I wrote the first American reviews of the Audio Note Ongaku and Reichert Silver 300B; that set a quality level the new amplifier had to meet or exceed. Result, the Amity amplifier in 1997, and the Karna in 2003.
DACs ... uh, not gonna design my own. That's something I buy (very much enjoy the Monarchy N24 that I have now). Strong preference for ladder/R2R converters, particularly the Burr-Brown/TI PCM-63, PCM-1702, and PCM-1704 converters. Strongly considering the Audio-GD SA-2 DAC combined with the SA-31E linestage.
Another project waiting for completion is a working phonograph. I have a new-in-box Technics SL1210, and a Supex SD900E that's been remanufactured with a ruby cantilever by SoundSmith. Need a proper stand and a RIAA preamp that sounds good. I fell in love with the EMT 930 turntable and Ortofon SPU cartridge when I heard them in Zurich during the 2004 ETF, but both are far out of my price league.
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There are some very good ones. I can vouch for that. When I get started I shall assess both DHT and SS as I know it.
This posting ended up with the important reference of what it was about. Then my 1st pc went down after 5 years plus rebuilds.
I stated that I would probably go along the lines of the Radian project and see whether it performs well with a very good class A SS. I designed this in 1987 revised last year along with the DHT rev.
There is no special SS amp out there. They are just designs anybody could knock up to beat the stuff on the market.