As shown by Soongsc years ago, the outer perimeter of a cone has the most effect upon high frequency dispersion and phase, vis a vis the actual minimum phase portion of the signal a driver is capable of providing as sound. The portions he addressed were still on the cone. Once these patterns have been applied to a cone a tap test may or may not find an additional need out on the driver frame. The result is a subtle opening of dispersion of coherent information. Meaning the very fine detail that is supported by high frequencies will be more correctly provided in time.
This also holds true for locations found on the box surfaces in the same fashion. Doing this without also treating the driver emitter surface does provide some change, just as treating the edges of a panel that supports the driver does. Depending upon many things like ratio of length of panel to driver diameter these changes can range from just barely noticeable to very noticeable. Finding a way to measure this change in coherence has eluded everyone so far, but the change in phase has been measured.
Bud
hi,
could i please get help with EnABL-ing this driver?
could i also get linked to the best step-by step description of how to EbABL please so i can be 100% sure i know what i'm doing.
planet10 brought up the tap test. as far as i understand, i tap the speaker with a pen or something similar to make a noise. i listen to the resulting percussive notes and listen for any irregularities in the note depending on where i tap?
i was under the impression that the inner and outer rings were stock placement, whereas addition middle rings were dependent on sound discrepancies found after initial treatment?
thanks for your help 🙂
could i please get help with EnABL-ing this driver?
could i also get linked to the best step-by step description of how to EbABL please so i can be 100% sure i know what i'm doing.
planet10 brought up the tap test. as far as i understand, i tap the speaker with a pen or something similar to make a noise. i listen to the resulting percussive notes and listen for any irregularities in the note depending on where i tap?
i was under the impression that the inner and outer rings were stock placement, whereas addition middle rings were dependent on sound discrepancies found after initial treatment?
thanks for your help 🙂
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
More or less, sorta kinda, maybe....
The original EnABL had two ring sets, one at the voice coil cone juncture and one set at the surround juncture. This works well for a generic fix. Your situation does not fit that generic pattern arrangement. This means we will have to derange you, to fit what you need to know.
I have attached a text file that has all of the pertinent EnABL threads. This thread we are on has a set of the original application teachings, that deal with application tools and techniques, back a few pages or a few hundred, I forget. This will give you a leg up on the skills needed to actually perform competently, which is all you need, as perfection is not necessary.
The tap test will need your close attention, as you will need to pick apart the three components of the resulting signal as it is emitted from the driver surface.
1.) The initial strike or "tick", which tells you if the area you have entered, on your radial trip up the cone, is subducting the energy.
2.) The actual tone and it's change format. Most tonal change is unimportant, until you get to the surround join.
3.) The most important portion is the decay of the tap. The most important portion of the decay is the direction it travels in, from the point of impact.
You can only hear this if you are sitting with the driver in front of you, on a table, with the opposing portion of the cone face at a more or less right angle to your face as you look at it. So, right in front of you but not with your face hanging over the voice coil.
As you tap in a radial direction, up the cone face, in small incremental steps of no more than 1/16" you will find that the decay begins to show directionality at the onset of the flat portion in the cross section of a curvilinear cone and just a few taps away from the voice coil in a flat cross section cone.
As you move up the cone face this direction of decay will suddenly shift from towards the voice coil to towards the surround. A short distance further you will find that it has flopped back towards the voice coil and than shifts once again. Only the zone where it makes a sudden shift in direction is important, the middle ground between two zones will also have a direction change but it is very diffuse and the new direction, or the loss of the original direction, only becomes noticeable near the important zones.
These will be available to you on your driver main cone, with difficulty added due to the corrugations and they will be available on the whizzer. On your main cone the interval zones will be quite difficult to find and placing a ring set at every corrugation is not practical. However, a ring set at the start of the corrugations, one at a tap test determined mid corrugations location, and a set at the surround juncture will be possible to do and should be all that are needed. The mid corrugation ring set will likely show itself in a change in tone, might show itself in a change in decay direction and likely will not show up in the initial "tick" of the tip striking on the cone surface.
So, as I said, we are going to bend your head around to fit, just because this is a very difficult cone to analyze from a computer screen shot. I can and will provide you with patterns for the inner and outer ring set and once you have found the mid corrugation set. I need another picture with a ruler laid across the cone, with the measurement edge aligned with an opposing mounting holes center line. I need the lens to driver angle to match your upper picture. This will allow me to calibrate that upper picture in my software and thus provide a usable set of guides. The same can be done for the whizzer.
Bud
thanks for the reply bud.
tbh, i think its only the whizzer that really 'needs' the treatment as the tap test you described (perfectly) is more or less what i was doing and i didn't find any horrible areas of the aural abnormalities you described on the main cone, the whizzer most definitely did. i shall redo the test and mark on a corresponding picture the area of where i perceive the abnormality to take place along with an accurate visual reading of its radial distance from the centre.
can adding one ring change where these abnormalities take place, or will it be static positioning that can be tackled all at once, with a single session of 'dotting'?
thanks again 🙂
tbh, i think its only the whizzer that really 'needs' the treatment as the tap test you described (perfectly) is more or less what i was doing and i didn't find any horrible areas of the aural abnormalities you described on the main cone, the whizzer most definitely did. i shall redo the test and mark on a corresponding picture the area of where i perceive the abnormality to take place along with an accurate visual reading of its radial distance from the centre.
can adding one ring change where these abnormalities take place, or will it be static positioning that can be tackled all at once, with a single session of 'dotting'?
thanks again 🙂
You will uncover other underlying problems. They may or may not be worth addressing. They may or may not be addressable with dots. This is where the Gloss coating material and 2way Zig acrylic, ever sticky, glue come into play and these activities occur on both sides of the offending diaphragm. The whizzer will almost certainly fall into this group.
The original patterns will not need to be altered, as their causal problem is endemic to the cone's construction and would just reappear if you removed them.
I am quite sure you will need a pattern just under the outer edge of the whizzer, on the main cone, which is just before the corrugations begin, and one out at the surround joint. Otherwise, the whizzer is going to overpower the main cone just because the feed back mechanisms that are causing the sonic problems will still be predominate. More than those two is unlikely, but I do think you will end up with a couple of coats of glue on the backside, about 3/8" wide, at the outer end of the cone. This just to kill the Raleigh waves created by the glue joint at that point.
Keep in mind that the outer pattern rings are the ones that disperse the high frequency suppression feed back modes natural to the driver.
here's the measurement of the cone. i can't really get a useful picture of a ruler across the top, so i can give you the position of the tap test result relative to their position along those given dimensions if that is ok? not to any scale whatsoever btw.
there's definitely an acoustically dead section where the dustcap used to be glued on, this still needs more work sanding down.
just double checking your previous post, which direction is the one i'm noting the position of, towards the voice coil, or towards the surround?
thanks again for your help 🙂
there's definitely an acoustically dead section where the dustcap used to be glued on, this still needs more work sanding down.
just double checking your previous post, which direction is the one i'm noting the position of, towards the voice coil, or towards the surround?
thanks again for your help 🙂
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
this to the best of my ability are the points i make out some kind of change in the sound.
the ring of glue is very dead acoustically upon the percussive strikes. more of it still needs to be removed.
how does one EnABL the phase plug?
edit: i also think there's one in the middle of the ribs on the main cain, can't be 100% sure however as its hard to get a clean strike there.
the ring of glue is very dead acoustically upon the percussive strikes. more of it still needs to be removed.
how does one EnABL the phase plug?
edit: i also think there's one in the middle of the ribs on the main cain, can't be 100% sure however as its hard to get a clean strike there.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
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its not attached with anything just yet, so it can be removed whenever. it was just in the shot as i thought most people EnABL the phase plug so i left it in place.
Do not attach it until you have finished with the patterns for the whizzer. You may not want it in at that point, very hard to predict.
The dimensions of distance from respective ends of the whizzer, at 1.8 and 2.8 mm are going to place the patterns right at those two termini. Is this what you intended? If so, I will have patterns for you tomorrow. Just for convenience, can you please lay a ruler across the basket / driver center line, with the edge on that center line? This will allow mw to make much better approximations for patterns, which are going to lay in the whizzer and be a strip and a doughnut for the main cone. Also, if you can provide me with some indication or where the mid cone anomaly is situated I can provide that doughnut also. Measured lengths down the cone face do not really help much, as it forces me to make a geometric model of a cross section and then measure the diameter, to allow me to make a pattern smaller than what needs to be applied by just the right amount. If this is confusing to you please go here https://picasaweb.google.com/hpurvine/AudioNirvanaSuper8# and peruse the various pics involved.
The dimensions of distance from respective ends of the whizzer, at 1.8 and 2.8 mm are going to place the patterns right at those two termini. Is this what you intended? If so, I will have patterns for you tomorrow. Just for convenience, can you please lay a ruler across the basket / driver center line, with the edge on that center line? This will allow mw to make much better approximations for patterns, which are going to lay in the whizzer and be a strip and a doughnut for the main cone. Also, if you can provide me with some indication or where the mid cone anomaly is situated I can provide that doughnut also. Measured lengths down the cone face do not really help much, as it forces me to make a geometric model of a cross section and then measure the diameter, to allow me to make a pattern smaller than what needs to be applied by just the right amount. If this is confusing to you please go here https://picasaweb.google.com/hpurvine/AudioNirvanaSuper8# and peruse the various pics involved.
here's the cone with the ruler as you asked, resolution is quite high because i didn't have a normal ruler handy.
still working on the main cone middle point, need to give my ears a rest as i'm not hearing it clearly. will have a go again with fresh ears in a few hours, i hope this doesn't inconvenience you.
many thanks for your help.
http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/1152/20120410134935.jpg
still working on the main cone middle point, need to give my ears a rest as i'm not hearing it clearly. will have a go again with fresh ears in a few hours, i hope this doesn't inconvenience you.
many thanks for your help.
http://img803.imageshack.us/img803/1152/20120410134935.jpg
This may be a bit OT at this point in time, but I hope not. Several pages back Tuxedocivic lambasted Bud because he could not hear a substantive difference in the quality of the sound between enable treated speakers and non-enabled. When I read that my first impression was that he he had tin ears. Mind you, i've only just finished reading this thread and have not heard enabled speakers as yet. I want to. But I have come to a conclusion regardless of this lack of personal experience. I think there is something to it and my intuition tells me Bud and the others who agree with him are telling the truth about what they have heard in enabled speakers.
My personal experience with audio over the last thirty years has told me that all the up stream audio components before the speakers have a vital influence on the "potential" for hearing changes to the system. To me it is laughable that tuxedocivic has a Sherwood receiver and a Sony cd player and expects to hear the differences in treated and non-treated speakers. When I started in this game I had cheap name brand components like almost everybody starts out with. Pretty much everything sounded similar as long as my cheap Yamaha receiver was there. I could have changed everything but the receiver and there would have been little change in the quality of the final sound. Sure, new speakers might have improved the tonal balance but the information getting through to them were being bottlenecked by the receiver. It wasn't until I finally got a Dcs dac and a nice tube amp that the information actually had the potential to be actualized at the speakers. After that it was easy for me to differentiate speaker cables, interconnects, and different tweaks of all kinds. And I plan to enabl my speakers in the future and at this point I'm pretty confident I will hear a good difference.
What is really annoying to me is that intelligent and sensitive people continue to be belittled as being subject to the placebo effect by people like Tuxedo who don't even have a system with the potential to let the information get through to the speaker drivers. And this doesn't even mention people who have a good system but have it wasted because their hearing discerning ability is so poor.
It is the old saw of people that are incompetent in a particular area but who have an overabundance of confidence in their abilities. It happens all the time. Sorry that this was so after the fact but as I read this thread I was really annoyed with Tuxedo.
My personal experience with audio over the last thirty years has told me that all the up stream audio components before the speakers have a vital influence on the "potential" for hearing changes to the system. To me it is laughable that tuxedocivic has a Sherwood receiver and a Sony cd player and expects to hear the differences in treated and non-treated speakers. When I started in this game I had cheap name brand components like almost everybody starts out with. Pretty much everything sounded similar as long as my cheap Yamaha receiver was there. I could have changed everything but the receiver and there would have been little change in the quality of the final sound. Sure, new speakers might have improved the tonal balance but the information getting through to them were being bottlenecked by the receiver. It wasn't until I finally got a Dcs dac and a nice tube amp that the information actually had the potential to be actualized at the speakers. After that it was easy for me to differentiate speaker cables, interconnects, and different tweaks of all kinds. And I plan to enabl my speakers in the future and at this point I'm pretty confident I will hear a good difference.
What is really annoying to me is that intelligent and sensitive people continue to be belittled as being subject to the placebo effect by people like Tuxedo who don't even have a system with the potential to let the information get through to the speaker drivers. And this doesn't even mention people who have a good system but have it wasted because their hearing discerning ability is so poor.
It is the old saw of people that are incompetent in a particular area but who have an overabundance of confidence in their abilities. It happens all the time. Sorry that this was so after the fact but as I read this thread I was really annoyed with Tuxedo.
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Personal listening impressions: Yes EnABL does make a difference. Better or worse? I can't say but it sounds different.
About the technique: I have no idea how or why it sounds different or if it's just added mass and stiffening of the cone or if the dot patterns work or not. I'm fine as long as it doesn't look worse than original (EnABL looks way cooler than original though) and it sounds different 🙂
About the technique: I have no idea how or why it sounds different or if it's just added mass and stiffening of the cone or if the dot patterns work or not. I'm fine as long as it doesn't look worse than original (EnABL looks way cooler than original though) and it sounds different 🙂
I think you raise a fair point "exeric", the whole system seems to be important. I did question someone's system earlier in this thread just to work out if it was realistic to hear something subtle from a low end front end and amp but I seem to recall the response suggested a lot of confidence in said system. I wouldn't go too far to judge a system I've not heard because I know from experience that room setup, mains quality and familiarity with a system and the music selection is so important.
Ya, what a piece of junk this is: http://www.hometheater.com/content/sherwood-newcastle-r-865-receiver
I guess my ears and crappy system can't resolve 20db room mode bass swings that apparently enable fixes That's not placebo. That's obvious.
You obviously don't know me. I know my limitations and I'm not afraid to make them known. I think you need to get in touch with your limitations.
And btw, I didn't lambast Bud. I stated exactly what I got out of my review for others to judge. I was fair and honest. I even said I heard a difference. But there is no way that some of the things Bud claims is true.
I WANTED ENABLE TO WORK. Think about it. I personally know Dave. Why would I want to slam this guys work?
It is a fact that everyone has a right to their opinion, including you. But I've also had 60 years on the planet to hone my sensory perceptions and I have no reason to doubt my senses. What your senses are telling you, or not telling you, is your own issue and not mine. And yes, if after I finally get my drivers enabled and it does not make a good difference I will have the courage to say so.
This also goes for Tuxedocivic's response. You "did" accuse Bud of lying, like he said. That he appears to have let you off the hook doesn't mean others don't remember it. There is a permanent record here. Maybe you could apologize to him for that. From everything I've read from him he seems to be a kind person. You might avail yourself of his gentle nature and finally do the right thing instead of making excuses for yourself.
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That was me. And you were fair and sincere about your points. I think we were amiable. However, the claims Bud makes are not subtle. They are serious and should be very easily heard. Some of them should heard on a boom box. And also easily measurable. My measurements were posted in the technical thread.
Regards.
I must agree. Last summer I visited Audioconcept in Stockholm and I saw they had lots of super-expensive cables. I asked if I could try listening to a setup with cheap cable and then switch to more expensive ones.
The speakers was Focal Utopia La Scala I remember. I don't remember the rest of the setup but I'm pretty sure it was good enough to not bottleneck the Focal speakers.
Did I hear a difference between cables? Yes, I did. A very little difference and I couldn't tell what was better or worse. What was the difference in price between cheap cables and expensive cables? I don't know for sure but I guess maybe atleast $4000 or more. I'd rather spend that on acoustic treatment for my room 🙂
Actually, imo without being able to switch back and forth, you won't have the ability to justifiably say there is a difference. At least Rullknuffs has 2 pairs, one enabled and the other not.