My teacher has been experience, I have heard many exotic, high powered systems with mega speakers, or supposedly highly refined setups - and they have almost all failed badly at higher volumes. They turn into PA systems - yes, more refined than the run of the mill, but still you're aware of speakers bellowing away at you - the audio system is saying, it's all about me, forget about the music I'm supposedly reproducing ...
If the system is "correct" then the sense of a playback system doing the job of throwing up an illusion never intrudes - it always is "invisible". It most certainly is not trivial to achieve this - but, it is obtainable if the system is sufficiently refined. One of my tests is put on in succession, say, high energy rock, then string quartet chamber, old blue's recording, a symphonic work, and set of piano sonatas - all will work, all will sound 'right'.
The ability of the reproduction chain to completely disappear is crucial for this to happen - if one wants more peak SPLs then it's just a case of scaling up wherever there is a natural limit - but the sound itself should not change iota doing this, it just has an ability to go more intense, that you can move in closer to the musical event, so to speak.
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One day I'd like to see pictures of that wonderful setup of yours, all of it... I've heard a lot about it...
Wesayso,
We never get enough information to make sense of all of that. How loud is loud to Frank, what is he really saying I'm not sure. Even a large stadium system has an upper limit before you reach distortion, everything has a limit. All the other things Frank says tell me very little besides he tweaks things, whatever that really means?
In theory I agree that a system that can reproduce the entire bandwidth of at least 20hz to 20Khz at a realistic spl level that can handle any impulse response with no slew rate limiting and has extremely low distortion in both the electronics and the speakers should be able to reproduce any kind of music. That requires an excellent recording that captures the music, anything less than that will cause some type of distortion.
I think the conversation about voicing a speaker is just a way of saying you have chosen a particular type of distortion that you find pleasant for a specific type of music.
There truly should be no difference between a vacuum tube system and a SS system if they can handle the required power output and have the same low distortion, this is the real crux of the problem with audiophile thinking in my eyes. Never an apples to apples comparison, always some variables thrown in to make it impossible to achieve what should be the ideal systems.
We never get enough information to make sense of all of that. How loud is loud to Frank, what is he really saying I'm not sure. Even a large stadium system has an upper limit before you reach distortion, everything has a limit. All the other things Frank says tell me very little besides he tweaks things, whatever that really means?
In theory I agree that a system that can reproduce the entire bandwidth of at least 20hz to 20Khz at a realistic spl level that can handle any impulse response with no slew rate limiting and has extremely low distortion in both the electronics and the speakers should be able to reproduce any kind of music. That requires an excellent recording that captures the music, anything less than that will cause some type of distortion.
I think the conversation about voicing a speaker is just a way of saying you have chosen a particular type of distortion that you find pleasant for a specific type of music.
There truly should be no difference between a vacuum tube system and a SS system if they can handle the required power output and have the same low distortion, this is the real crux of the problem with audiophile thinking in my eyes. Never an apples to apples comparison, always some variables thrown in to make it impossible to achieve what should be the ideal systems.
Fas24, I've never heard any system do what you describe. Not in the home, not at a hifi show, and not at a reviewer's place.
Please describe the system (source/amp/speaker) that can do this. This isn't a troll or snark, it's a serious question, and I'm genuinely curious how it can be done. I'd really like to know.
What I've heard are systems that briefly create an illusion of disappearing, but something always comes along to spoil the illusion ... driver coloration, a transient peak that creates a splash of ugly sound, unrealistic and compressed spatial impression, flattened and dulled tonality, disjointed multiway drivers that don't track each other as levels go up and down, electronic colorations of various kinds ... a whole bunch of distracting and unmusical things that never happen with live (no PA) music.
I try and keep these artifacts to a minimum, but I've never completely succeeded, and much of time, don't even get close. If you have a system that is free of all artifacts, all the time, with every recording, my hat's off to you!
(But please tell us how you did it!)
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Lynn,
I follow your last post and the problems of having multiple drive units tracking each other as the level is raised and lowered or through the reaction to transients. I am just learning all the things that can be done with DSP's and it would seem that it could be possible with some advanced software control to ameliorate these changes in real time. I am just talking off the top of my head here, but it seems that the possibilities today are far beyond what we have ever been able to do before.
I follow your last post and the problems of having multiple drive units tracking each other as the level is raised and lowered or through the reaction to transients. I am just learning all the things that can be done with DSP's and it would seem that it could be possible with some advanced software control to ameliorate these changes in real time. I am just talking off the top of my head here, but it seems that the possibilities today are far beyond what we have ever been able to do before.
Lynn, thanks for the question!
"driver coloration, a transient peak that creates a splash of ugly sound, unrealistic and compressed spatial impression, flattened and dulled tonality, ..." ... yes, I agree these are the usual ogres that rear their ugly heads, and they drag down or degrade the illusion severely; and it is all about keeping the audible artifacts to a minimum.
Number one, I most certainly don't have a system active at the moment that is capable of doing it that well - the parts are about, but it's not running. For a variety of reasons, the main one being a lack of energy and motivation - if one conquers the mountain, once, twice, quite a few number of times, the hunger is no longer there as strong,
. Number two, keeping those artifacts at bay at all times is hard work, requires constant focus - the satisfaction is there when achieved, but going through all the steps is fiddly, time consuming - am I sufficiently motivated at any particular time to do all the necessaries? I did describe, reasonably well, the first system that got me quality sound in John Curl's Blowtorch thread a week or so ago. Its main problem was that the quality degraded fairly rapidly from a reset situation - reset meaning that I had to switch everything off, and then back on again to restore the quality - I didn't understand, and still don't in some senses, what were the factors dragging the quality down.
For me, it's always been about "electronic colourations", they have been the real pain in the side throughout, and it's been a battle over decades trying to understand the parameters that matter, and how to get them under control. I very specifically focus on these, because I get convincing sound from very average speakers, and nominally ordinary electronics if I take enough care - I found the challenge of making this happen to be the inspiration throughout.
The short answer, from where I stand, to the core of your question is that most systems are capable, but don't achieve the required quality because of various flaws, which are in essence electronic issues. So how I "do it" is to isolate each flaw which has an audible impact, and resolve it, in some fashion - one after the other. Eventually, one runs out of issues - and, convincing sound then pops out!
A lot of the fixes are by their very nature very temporary, so in one sense they are not true solutions - but, they do allow me to hear the intrinsic potential of the system. A classic example of this is that most audio components are not adequately robust against electronic interference effects - so, what I do is shut down the whole area local to the system - everything electrical nearby is switched off, and this is what gives the system enough "clean air" to produce the quality required. Of course, the real answer is to toughen up the electrics of the audio gear, do all the shielding, etc - but, a lot of work involved - do I want do this for that particular system?
Hopefully, this goes some way to explaining things - does it make sense?
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The key point is, whether it is realistic enough to chase the IDEAL speaker you have described.
I believe that you have no budget restriction to chase that ideal speaker, so the question is, have you been "there" with your perfect speaker? I honestly doubt it because imo perfect speaker without compromise is impossible. So, making priority and choosing acceptable compromises is what some of us believe we have to do.
From your avatar I can see that you are going multiway, then what do you think about what Steen Duelund had to say about the problems?
In multi-way, we use capable drivers to do perfectly what they are designed to do. Like I said before, "speed". A 3 grams cone cannot do 3kHz transient as good as 0.35 grams dome. So the consequence is clear when you choose 2-way big speaker to avoid issues with multi-way...
I have tested a popular audiophiles' big Tannoy (more or less similar to the approach used by speaker in this thread). No, sorry, it cannot produce specialized fast instrumental music or symphony well, especially when coupled with tube amp as usual (we used 100W tube amp).
Do you know the difference between class-A and class-B amps? Of course you do. But I believe there are differences that are not well exposed.
If our speaker is multi-way with complex crossover with it's huge group delay and low impedance, what kind of class-A amp you would choose? PGP? Extrema? Aleph 2? From this perspective alone it is imho justifiable to choose the best small power tube amp and design a speaker that can go with that amplifier.
Just a quick reply ... I look firstly for the ability to reproduce grand piano, as if that instrument were actually in the same room; we have an upright in the same space, so I can get my wife to give it some fortissimo, to get a perspective. And for normal classical piano recordings that's a few clicks from maximum, on the systems where I've "calibrated" such. That volume setting on a reasonably recent rock or pop recording would be ridiculous, my ears would be ringing in no time at all, so it gets set considerably down from that.
Normally I run classical close to clipping, so a very rough estimate is around 110dB peak - audience concert hall levels. The real point though is, that the sound is 100% clean, pleasurably intense, like the real thing.
Fas42, your post is much appreciated ... I was curious where you found the greatest payoff in the overall system.
I found that I had to teach myself about electronics to get the speakers I designed to reveal their full potential. I really didn't want to do this, but I tried the Ariels with about 20 to 30 different amplifiers in the first year of owning them. A couple (the Audio Note Ongaku and Reichert Silver 300B) were so compelling that I wrote a review in the local magazine, Positive Feedback. Many were shockingly bad, like a transistor radio that had been left out in the sun too long. None of them sounded alike, not even amps of the same general design class.
And there's nothing special about the drive requirements of the Ariels. Impedance falls in the 4 to 10-ohm range, they're about 91~92 dB/meter/watt efficient, and they're basically a more efficient and scaled-up LS3/5a with better-quality drivers. They're not exotic at all, and easier to drive than most audiophile speakers.
But ... picking a good-sounding amplifier was very difficult. The Ongaku is insanely expensive, and simply copying it without using the exotic Audio Note parts results in atrocious sound. The Reichert Silver 300B was about 1/12th the price, and I nearly bought them ... but the review pair ended up getting sold to a customer in Germany.
Besides, I wanted an amplifier with the gorgeous Technicolor sound of the Reichert but a bit less coloration, and some of the Ongaku's remarkable silence-between-notes presence and insight into musical textures. No such amplifier was on the market, at any price.
So I jumped in the deep end of the pool and learned about amplifier design; fortunately, I had my Tektronix friends look over my shoulder and test the results with their lab gear. This is where the first amplifier, the Amity, came from, followed by the unsuccessful Aurora project, and then the Karna, which I use now. The Karna is due for a Mark II revision, and I'll be working with Gary Pimm on the project.
DACs are far beyond anything I can do. For the present, I have the Monarchy N24, which uses the Burr-Brown PCM1704 current-output chipset, passive-resistor I/V conversion, and a 6DJ8 amplifying stage in SRPP configuration. The signal path from the switched-resistor array in the PCM1704 ladder DAC to the loudspeaker terminals is all-vacuum-tube, with two caps between the PCM1704 and the tweeter terminals. For those who care, interconnects and speaker cables are industrial Litz wire with cotton sleeving.
It's a semi-custom system with only the source components from the high-end market. When I finally get a turntable working, that might end up being semi-custom as well, since Thom Mackris of Galibier Designs is a neighbor.
I found that I had to teach myself about electronics to get the speakers I designed to reveal their full potential. I really didn't want to do this, but I tried the Ariels with about 20 to 30 different amplifiers in the first year of owning them. A couple (the Audio Note Ongaku and Reichert Silver 300B) were so compelling that I wrote a review in the local magazine, Positive Feedback. Many were shockingly bad, like a transistor radio that had been left out in the sun too long. None of them sounded alike, not even amps of the same general design class.
And there's nothing special about the drive requirements of the Ariels. Impedance falls in the 4 to 10-ohm range, they're about 91~92 dB/meter/watt efficient, and they're basically a more efficient and scaled-up LS3/5a with better-quality drivers. They're not exotic at all, and easier to drive than most audiophile speakers.
But ... picking a good-sounding amplifier was very difficult. The Ongaku is insanely expensive, and simply copying it without using the exotic Audio Note parts results in atrocious sound. The Reichert Silver 300B was about 1/12th the price, and I nearly bought them ... but the review pair ended up getting sold to a customer in Germany.
Besides, I wanted an amplifier with the gorgeous Technicolor sound of the Reichert but a bit less coloration, and some of the Ongaku's remarkable silence-between-notes presence and insight into musical textures. No such amplifier was on the market, at any price.
So I jumped in the deep end of the pool and learned about amplifier design; fortunately, I had my Tektronix friends look over my shoulder and test the results with their lab gear. This is where the first amplifier, the Amity, came from, followed by the unsuccessful Aurora project, and then the Karna, which I use now. The Karna is due for a Mark II revision, and I'll be working with Gary Pimm on the project.
DACs are far beyond anything I can do. For the present, I have the Monarchy N24, which uses the Burr-Brown PCM1704 current-output chipset, passive-resistor I/V conversion, and a 6DJ8 amplifying stage in SRPP configuration. The signal path from the switched-resistor array in the PCM1704 ladder DAC to the loudspeaker terminals is all-vacuum-tube, with two caps between the PCM1704 and the tweeter terminals. For those who care, interconnects and speaker cables are industrial Litz wire with cotton sleeving.
It's a semi-custom system with only the source components from the high-end market. When I finally get a turntable working, that might end up being semi-custom as well, since Thom Mackris of Galibier Designs is a neighbor.
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Kindhornman, do you have a website, blog or something similar where you have write-up of your speaker design philosophy?
Like you, I'm also after an ideal speaker (for a small room, fortunately), tho with very very limited budget. Budget is limited, but I don't need budget for shaping the baffle (only time and energy), so the baffle design will be a "no-compromise".
Not really. Shaping the perfect baffle for HF while providing enough volume for the bass (and go with standmounted-style) is difficult. I will go more or less like your speaker in the avatar...
I want it to be "standmounted-like", so the front wave can wrap around to the back through under the speaker, to improve soundstage. But I need volume for the woofer. A trapezoid internal volume, to make use the upper back side of HF drivers, is difficult to realize. So I will use the dummy stand to extend the volume, as I can see from your speaker (don't know if it is an internal subwoofer tho).
Please refer me to a thread or something if you have described your speaker in detail somewhere.
I'm frankly undecided how to use the woofers. I have 4 GPA 416's and 2 GPA 515's (all 16-ohm), so I can try a variety of combinations.
What I'm considering (and will probably build and audition) are:
1) Upper 416 or 515 in a small OB with curved wings, combined with a lower 416 in a closed-box directly beneath.
2) Upper and lower 416 in a taller and larger OB with curved wings, and a separate self-powered and equalized subwoofer.
3) Upper and lower 416's in separate closed-boxes on top of each other.
4) Side-by-side 416 in a common closed-box with internal partition to isolate the drivers from each other. This is the heaviest cabinet and also the most likely to be problematic from the viewpoint of lateral lobing when listening off-axis.
For solutions 1 through 3, although the drivers are the same, the lower driver will not behave the same as the upper driver because of the proximity of the floor image. The floor image behaves as if there were another 416 beneath the floor with its own power amplifier.
In practical terms, this means the lower driver should not have the same equalization as the upper driver, or even be driven at the same level. This is where the slightly greater efficiency (about 1.5 dB) and lower Qts of the 515 might come in handy (for the upper driver). If necessary, I'll commission a custom autoformer for acoustically level-matching the upper and lower drivers.
(I do think it's quite important to level and phase-match both sets of drivers, regardless of their physical position relative to the floor. Temporarily reversing the phase of the lower driver, and looking for the depth and spectral width of the null on a spectrum analyzer, will reveal how good the driver-matching is.)
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Lynn, for me a very simplistic view of the matter is that the DAC source determines the tonality, the quality of 'musicality' that one perceives; and that the amplifier sets how effortless the sound is, how well crescendos and the like are handled - so depending where the replay is more problematic I would focus on those areas.
One thing that I find crucial to consider, is that even if everything but one tiny, seemingly insignificant detail has been attended to, then the sound can still be impossible to live with. Only after that last little hurdle has been surmounted will the sound snap into focus, and always be good to listen to - as I progress with tweaking I keep listening for this marker to appear - the payoff is finding the last weakness holding the sound back,
.
Jay,
First off the speakers you see in my avatar are as you can see horn loaded, the base of the enclosure was a direct radiator in a ported down firing enclosure. I showed those speakers at the CES show so long ago. I still have the tooling to make them and about a dozen pairs of molded enclosures. So what happened? It showed me that high end audio is a joke, it is a Cluster fck. of idiots leading the way. The look was more than the audio press could understand and the same went for the listening public. The questions asked and the comments made were ridiculous. There were a few people who would actually sit and listen and then they could see what I had done. Bruce Edgar was one of those people, So was Mr. Van Den Hul, so were a few other well known names who understood what I was doing. I designed the horns, enclosure and a friend who was one of the early engineers at Radian Audio did the networks. It wasn't easy. I designed the enclosure to not only look nice but to do what you say, get out of the way of any reflective surfaces and cause diffraction. Long before everyone noticed how to terminate a horn with a round-over of the edges. I was an early designer showing what was possible with horns and I was getting laughed at! Audio is just a bunch of putts who only know what someone else tells them.
My enclosure was out before B&W came out with the Nautilus, you figure out where they got the idea for that enclosure. I showed you didn't have to follow convention, that other shapes were possible. The horns in those enclosure most definitely influenced the original JBL EON design, they had my horns in house for over a year, I was doing other work for them at the time as a contract manufacturer on the XPL series of speakers. I tried a few other things but didn't have the funding to pay the money to advertise in the audio mags at the time, it would have been a million dollar advertisement and education campaign to get my points across. Dealers who liked the product wouldn't touch it, the comment was I wasn't trying to charge enough for the speakers and it would decimate their sales of other high end speakers, I couldn't win. I walked away from the audiophile market, it was a complete sham. I ended up doing development work in many other industries with my knowledge. It is only recently that I have come back to what I love and started life wanting to do. But now I have given up on even trying to work in the audiophile market, I am working on a design for consumers that will take much of what I learned and bringing a great sound to the masses. It won't be horn loaded, it won't be large and it will be self powered. I am just now working on putting together a website. I am going to do an Indiegogo campaign to finance the project. I can tell you the tooling to produce my speaker would cost about $75K here in the USA, that is a real conservative number, I quoted and produced tooling for molded plastic parts for over 20 years. I had my own plastics manufacturing company that was basically an R&D company for very large companies in many industries.
My new speakers are direct radiators, a cone driver and a dome tweeter. I've done all the mechanical design on the speakers. I designed the cone material as a challenge for another company many years ago now, it doesn't exist anywhere else, I am the only one on this planet that knows how it is done bar my brother. I never divulged the formulation to anyone or the method to produce the cone. I did the motor design for an extremely long gap design and have looked at many other aspects of the speaker such as the surrounds, spiders and adhesives. I do not go with the highest efficiency concept, I think that is a dead end as far as distortion goes, overhung and equal hung drivers have inherent design flaws, everyone in this thread is trying to overcome those problems as they are locked into vacuum tube amplification. You will never get to the ideal this way, that is why everyone is talking about all these dead end concepts here. I can chew up every design I am seeing with technical reasons they are so flawed, but they can sound good with one particular type of music. That is exactly what I hear Lynn saying. My design is not perfect either, I am making compromises so I can make something that is small and looks like something the consumer would purchase, I have to sell against Bose and all the other large companies selling what I call low-fi sound. I am trying to make the least amount of compromises and make great sound, it surely isn't easy. I look at what I am doing and I see the compromises but there is no way around that, the days of large speakers is long since over except for here in diy land. I have to meet a price point that I think the consumer will pay, and that is much more than most would consider reasonable already. I am doing a Be tweeter of my own design and I will tell you the best price for a 1" raw dome is as much as most consumer speakers are spending on the entire speaker in a box. packaged, I know I did work for JBL and understand there pricing.
I appreciate all the work and time that has gone into what Lynn is trying to do, I do understand where he is coming from, I just don't want to go down that road. I still have old Altec speakers in the house, I understand the desire for large format speakers but people have just stopped buying that type of equipment. I will make horn loaded speakers fro a few people who will pay the price for custom designed speakers but beyond that I see that as just not a viable business, there is just to small a world market, I leave that to companies like Wilson to sell to, it has so little to do with real quality design anymore, it is a fashion business for the 1% crowd, it is all marketing and I'm not willing to try and go down that road again, been there and done that.
First off the speakers you see in my avatar are as you can see horn loaded, the base of the enclosure was a direct radiator in a ported down firing enclosure. I showed those speakers at the CES show so long ago. I still have the tooling to make them and about a dozen pairs of molded enclosures. So what happened? It showed me that high end audio is a joke, it is a Cluster fck. of idiots leading the way. The look was more than the audio press could understand and the same went for the listening public. The questions asked and the comments made were ridiculous. There were a few people who would actually sit and listen and then they could see what I had done. Bruce Edgar was one of those people, So was Mr. Van Den Hul, so were a few other well known names who understood what I was doing. I designed the horns, enclosure and a friend who was one of the early engineers at Radian Audio did the networks. It wasn't easy. I designed the enclosure to not only look nice but to do what you say, get out of the way of any reflective surfaces and cause diffraction. Long before everyone noticed how to terminate a horn with a round-over of the edges. I was an early designer showing what was possible with horns and I was getting laughed at! Audio is just a bunch of putts who only know what someone else tells them.
My enclosure was out before B&W came out with the Nautilus, you figure out where they got the idea for that enclosure. I showed you didn't have to follow convention, that other shapes were possible. The horns in those enclosure most definitely influenced the original JBL EON design, they had my horns in house for over a year, I was doing other work for them at the time as a contract manufacturer on the XPL series of speakers. I tried a few other things but didn't have the funding to pay the money to advertise in the audio mags at the time, it would have been a million dollar advertisement and education campaign to get my points across. Dealers who liked the product wouldn't touch it, the comment was I wasn't trying to charge enough for the speakers and it would decimate their sales of other high end speakers, I couldn't win. I walked away from the audiophile market, it was a complete sham. I ended up doing development work in many other industries with my knowledge. It is only recently that I have come back to what I love and started life wanting to do. But now I have given up on even trying to work in the audiophile market, I am working on a design for consumers that will take much of what I learned and bringing a great sound to the masses. It won't be horn loaded, it won't be large and it will be self powered. I am just now working on putting together a website. I am going to do an Indiegogo campaign to finance the project. I can tell you the tooling to produce my speaker would cost about $75K here in the USA, that is a real conservative number, I quoted and produced tooling for molded plastic parts for over 20 years. I had my own plastics manufacturing company that was basically an R&D company for very large companies in many industries.
My new speakers are direct radiators, a cone driver and a dome tweeter. I've done all the mechanical design on the speakers. I designed the cone material as a challenge for another company many years ago now, it doesn't exist anywhere else, I am the only one on this planet that knows how it is done bar my brother. I never divulged the formulation to anyone or the method to produce the cone. I did the motor design for an extremely long gap design and have looked at many other aspects of the speaker such as the surrounds, spiders and adhesives. I do not go with the highest efficiency concept, I think that is a dead end as far as distortion goes, overhung and equal hung drivers have inherent design flaws, everyone in this thread is trying to overcome those problems as they are locked into vacuum tube amplification. You will never get to the ideal this way, that is why everyone is talking about all these dead end concepts here. I can chew up every design I am seeing with technical reasons they are so flawed, but they can sound good with one particular type of music. That is exactly what I hear Lynn saying. My design is not perfect either, I am making compromises so I can make something that is small and looks like something the consumer would purchase, I have to sell against Bose and all the other large companies selling what I call low-fi sound. I am trying to make the least amount of compromises and make great sound, it surely isn't easy. I look at what I am doing and I see the compromises but there is no way around that, the days of large speakers is long since over except for here in diy land. I have to meet a price point that I think the consumer will pay, and that is much more than most would consider reasonable already. I am doing a Be tweeter of my own design and I will tell you the best price for a 1" raw dome is as much as most consumer speakers are spending on the entire speaker in a box. packaged, I know I did work for JBL and understand there pricing.
I appreciate all the work and time that has gone into what Lynn is trying to do, I do understand where he is coming from, I just don't want to go down that road. I still have old Altec speakers in the house, I understand the desire for large format speakers but people have just stopped buying that type of equipment. I will make horn loaded speakers fro a few people who will pay the price for custom designed speakers but beyond that I see that as just not a viable business, there is just to small a world market, I leave that to companies like Wilson to sell to, it has so little to do with real quality design anymore, it is a fashion business for the 1% crowd, it is all marketing and I'm not willing to try and go down that road again, been there and done that.
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Limono,
I will have to change my picture of the larger horn loaded enclosure so I could post it here, the dpi is much to high for the site to accept it. I have to make it a lower quality jpeg to put it up here.
I am going to eat the cost of the Be, just pass it through to get the sound I want, I won't make an extra dime for using that material. My target is actually $1,500 direct to the consumer, that will be a real fine line that I am trying not to cross. I am going to give you a $10K audiophile speaker at a consumer price of $1,500 which is going to **** some off and and be very disruptive of the industry. The only way I can do that will be through direct sales, no dealers, that instantly would double the price and then again as I said earlier the dealers wouldn't touch it, it would destroy there sales of other high priced speakers. I understand the game and the internet has changed what can be done. I plan on making a very big wave when this speaker comes out, that is part of my plan. I don't think anyone will be able to do anything but make cheap knockoffs that won't really be a match for what I am trying to do. The only other thing I could do is sell this entire design to someone else who would sell this for much more than I plan to.
I will also say that though the enclosure will be molded it will not be made of cheap plastic. The enclosures are designed with a minimum wall thickness of 1/4" (7mm) with a lot of internal ribbing using a very expensive material. Part of the reason that I did the shape of the enclosure was to stiffen the walls, even the design line across the sides was used to change the stiffness of the enclosure, the shape was crucial to being able to doing what I am doing, it was not just a nice visual design project, it was a very well thought out structural member. There is no separate frame for the cone driver, that is also part of the structure and it does make assembly much more tricky but I came up with a way to do that. It also limits the reflective internal surface behind the cone driver. I have some other tricks I am not willing to talk about yet for things going on unseen inside that enclosure. The tweeter also has some trick things going on that though it is somewhat classic in design will make it work at the level of the Seas dome tweeter being talked about earlier. I will say it will have the highest grade of Neo magnet material inside and some unusual tuning methods for the back wave. Something I learned from compression driver testing, I'll leave it at that.
I will have to change my picture of the larger horn loaded enclosure so I could post it here, the dpi is much to high for the site to accept it. I have to make it a lower quality jpeg to put it up here.
I am going to eat the cost of the Be, just pass it through to get the sound I want, I won't make an extra dime for using that material. My target is actually $1,500 direct to the consumer, that will be a real fine line that I am trying not to cross. I am going to give you a $10K audiophile speaker at a consumer price of $1,500 which is going to **** some off and and be very disruptive of the industry. The only way I can do that will be through direct sales, no dealers, that instantly would double the price and then again as I said earlier the dealers wouldn't touch it, it would destroy there sales of other high priced speakers. I understand the game and the internet has changed what can be done. I plan on making a very big wave when this speaker comes out, that is part of my plan. I don't think anyone will be able to do anything but make cheap knockoffs that won't really be a match for what I am trying to do. The only other thing I could do is sell this entire design to someone else who would sell this for much more than I plan to.
I will also say that though the enclosure will be molded it will not be made of cheap plastic. The enclosures are designed with a minimum wall thickness of 1/4" (7mm) with a lot of internal ribbing using a very expensive material. Part of the reason that I did the shape of the enclosure was to stiffen the walls, even the design line across the sides was used to change the stiffness of the enclosure, the shape was crucial to being able to doing what I am doing, it was not just a nice visual design project, it was a very well thought out structural member. There is no separate frame for the cone driver, that is also part of the structure and it does make assembly much more tricky but I came up with a way to do that. It also limits the reflective internal surface behind the cone driver. I have some other tricks I am not willing to talk about yet for things going on unseen inside that enclosure. The tweeter also has some trick things going on that though it is somewhat classic in design will make it work at the level of the Seas dome tweeter being talked about earlier. I will say it will have the highest grade of Neo magnet material inside and some unusual tuning methods for the back wave. Something I learned from compression driver testing, I'll leave it at that.
fortitudine, That is the present idea. I am leaning towards Indiegogo right now but that isn't set in gold. I was considering tying into some celebrity but I am not so hot on that idea right now. The Beats headphones kind of turned me off to that idea.
Kindhornman, I'm impressed at the sheer dedication and effort you're putting into breaking into the market. It's a tough market and it doesn't help that the opinion-leading US audio magazines are completely corrupt and have been that way for at least thirty years.
Worse, they've taken it upon themselves to act as gatekeepers to keep out the riff-raff who can't afford their ad rates. That's the brutal reason that the high-end is full of overpriced and badly designed equipment ... it's not that different than the music industry, where talent is intentionally shut out and the slick AutoTune acts get the big marketing push. It's just the way that global capitalism is structured right now ... corruption wins, almost every time.
On a more pleasant note, bwaslo (shout-out to Puddletown!), Dave Slagle has a set of speaker-level autoformers with 1 dB taps. I think that's what Gary Dahl is using for MF/HF attenuation. Thank goodness that the DIY market is too small to get the attention of the big guys.
Worse, they've taken it upon themselves to act as gatekeepers to keep out the riff-raff who can't afford their ad rates. That's the brutal reason that the high-end is full of overpriced and badly designed equipment ... it's not that different than the music industry, where talent is intentionally shut out and the slick AutoTune acts get the big marketing push. It's just the way that global capitalism is structured right now ... corruption wins, almost every time.
On a more pleasant note, bwaslo (shout-out to Puddletown!), Dave Slagle has a set of speaker-level autoformers with 1 dB taps. I think that's what Gary Dahl is using for MF/HF attenuation. Thank goodness that the DIY market is too small to get the attention of the big guys.
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Lynn,
You are so right on about the audio magazines. I had some of the Stereophile writers in my CES room multiple times, they kept coming back and listening. The bottom line was besides a very short comment about the speakers they wouldn't do any more. A review was out of the question without a minimum number of dealers already in place and a minimum number of pages of ads to get them to review a product. It was a buy your review type of situation. The other problem was that I priced the speakers at what I thought was reasonable and that was a mistake, I needed to multiply this by 10x to get the dealers interested. Believe me I did get them in a couple of showrooms but they were small and relatively unknown, not the large dealers advertising in the magazines. They told me the same thing, my speakers were much to good for the price, they would steal sales from their money making brands, I learned a very valuable lesson about the market at the time. That is why I say the internet has changed things, as long as you can drive people to a website and you have a great product you have a chance. I ask anyone interested in spreading the word of what I am trying to do. I am looking for Blogs and other places where what I am doing can help to spread the word. This is new to me so I am asking others who know more about that than me for help. My kids are way ahead of my about the social aspects of the internet and I am ready to get this thing going.
ps. One audio magazine in Asia did take my brochure and took the picture on it and without asking used that for the front page of their magazine. I had celebrities come into my room and want to purchase my speakers but of course they had their audio gurus with them who said no, you can't buy those they aren't a known brand!
You are so right on about the audio magazines. I had some of the Stereophile writers in my CES room multiple times, they kept coming back and listening. The bottom line was besides a very short comment about the speakers they wouldn't do any more. A review was out of the question without a minimum number of dealers already in place and a minimum number of pages of ads to get them to review a product. It was a buy your review type of situation. The other problem was that I priced the speakers at what I thought was reasonable and that was a mistake, I needed to multiply this by 10x to get the dealers interested. Believe me I did get them in a couple of showrooms but they were small and relatively unknown, not the large dealers advertising in the magazines. They told me the same thing, my speakers were much to good for the price, they would steal sales from their money making brands, I learned a very valuable lesson about the market at the time. That is why I say the internet has changed things, as long as you can drive people to a website and you have a great product you have a chance. I ask anyone interested in spreading the word of what I am trying to do. I am looking for Blogs and other places where what I am doing can help to spread the word. This is new to me so I am asking others who know more about that than me for help. My kids are way ahead of my about the social aspects of the internet and I am ready to get this thing going.
ps. One audio magazine in Asia did take my brochure and took the picture on it and without asking used that for the front page of their magazine. I had celebrities come into my room and want to purchase my speakers but of course they had their audio gurus with them who said no, you can't buy those they aren't a known brand!
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