I'm not a believer of a direct 15" radiation with a horn above loaded by a compression driver ! There is a mismatch and btw you will see the relativ low efficienty of the M2... (resistive network for the compression coaxial is not only to paddle the efficienty imho!)
But I believe for the high efficienty system in the good and fundamental good behavior of the Mid-bass register (let say around 80/100 to 500/800/1000 to make short) ! I believe life is here and the rest is salt and Pepper (but no good plate with bad amount of salt & Pepper !)
If no FAST design as we saw usualy here we can ask for an other philodophy and let's try to have this important fundamental range without crossover.... that's my two cents idea for a n+1 speaker... I like the sound of VOTT and strangely they are 60/80 to 700/1000 Hz with one driver ! aH !
Many made 80/150 to....1000/very more standalone driver, horned : I believe they are right, but complexity here is to have a suffiant aera and even a dedicated lidtening room.... trade offs ! Here the M2 has many advantages as you say : 2 ways, simplicity, living room waf POSSIBLE !
But I believe for the high efficienty system in the good and fundamental good behavior of the Mid-bass register (let say around 80/100 to 500/800/1000 to make short) ! I believe life is here and the rest is salt and Pepper (but no good plate with bad amount of salt & Pepper !)
If no FAST design as we saw usualy here we can ask for an other philodophy and let's try to have this important fundamental range without crossover.... that's my two cents idea for a n+1 speaker... I like the sound of VOTT and strangely they are 60/80 to 700/1000 Hz with one driver ! aH !
Many made 80/150 to....1000/very more standalone driver, horned : I believe they are right, but complexity here is to have a suffiant aera and even a dedicated lidtening room.... trade offs ! Here the M2 has many advantages as you say : 2 ways, simplicity, living room waf POSSIBLE !
Hahaha, WAF depends on the 'woman' in this case. If she is willing to accept 2 fridge sized cabs, then: WAF = solved!
You'll have to look for other concepts if a direct radiator + wg/horn is not up to your taste.
In small listening areas these would not be my first choice either, but once you have the space to let them 'breath' (and driver integration will be much less of an issue as distance increases), very few 'simple' loudspeaker concepts are able to match a big 2-way. A synergy may be better, but that's not what I would refer to as being 'simple'.
I listen to a lot of electronic music, but I am not a fan of seperate subs in a listening room (Dr. Geddes will sincerely disagree). As long as the 2-way cabs are big enough (>140 L) you won't necessarily miss them either with most musical material, unless you like to 'feel' 16 ft organ pipes. Mine are tuned to 27Hz, this is low enough to 'shake the walls'.
Nobody needs 140dB inside a living room, but hear for yourself what this ability means for low SPL dynamics and... there we go again: transients...
JBL abandoned development of high sensitivity drivers in the 90's. As high power amplifiers became much cheaper (to produce) they have shifted their focus more and more towards other things like power response, linearity etc. That's probably why the older JBL drivers are so much sought after.
The 'sound' of a big 2-way is imo largely dependent on :
- Type of wg/horn used (a waveguide will sound less like a trumpet in the midrange compared to a deeper circular type of horn)
- Dome material of the comp. driver (Poly domes will sound smoother, due to a far less nasty sounding breakup)
- Integration between woofer and wg. I prefer more efficient low mms and somewhat higher Fs 15" woofers to heavy coned, high X-max, low Fs woofers. If your cab is big enough you'll have the best of both worlds; sufficient low-end extension and abillity to play better (cleaner) into the midrange which leads to the last point:
- XO. Driver integration will be much less of an issue if you have paid attention to the previous aspects. A proper 15" will easily have useful response to 2000Hz. 2nd order XO (Yessss: keeping it simple!) between 800-1200Hz will be a 'peace of cake'(sort of ;-).
It seems JBL has, at least partly, chosen this route in developing the M2.
You'll have to look for other concepts if a direct radiator + wg/horn is not up to your taste.
In small listening areas these would not be my first choice either, but once you have the space to let them 'breath' (and driver integration will be much less of an issue as distance increases), very few 'simple' loudspeaker concepts are able to match a big 2-way. A synergy may be better, but that's not what I would refer to as being 'simple'.
I listen to a lot of electronic music, but I am not a fan of seperate subs in a listening room (Dr. Geddes will sincerely disagree). As long as the 2-way cabs are big enough (>140 L) you won't necessarily miss them either with most musical material, unless you like to 'feel' 16 ft organ pipes. Mine are tuned to 27Hz, this is low enough to 'shake the walls'.
Nobody needs 140dB inside a living room, but hear for yourself what this ability means for low SPL dynamics and... there we go again: transients...
JBL abandoned development of high sensitivity drivers in the 90's. As high power amplifiers became much cheaper (to produce) they have shifted their focus more and more towards other things like power response, linearity etc. That's probably why the older JBL drivers are so much sought after.
The 'sound' of a big 2-way is imo largely dependent on :
- Type of wg/horn used (a waveguide will sound less like a trumpet in the midrange compared to a deeper circular type of horn)
- Dome material of the comp. driver (Poly domes will sound smoother, due to a far less nasty sounding breakup)
- Integration between woofer and wg. I prefer more efficient low mms and somewhat higher Fs 15" woofers to heavy coned, high X-max, low Fs woofers. If your cab is big enough you'll have the best of both worlds; sufficient low-end extension and abillity to play better (cleaner) into the midrange which leads to the last point:
- XO. Driver integration will be much less of an issue if you have paid attention to the previous aspects. A proper 15" will easily have useful response to 2000Hz. 2nd order XO (Yessss: keeping it simple!) between 800-1200Hz will be a 'peace of cake'(sort of ;-).
It seems JBL has, at least partly, chosen this route in developing the M2.
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As for my second point above:
The type of compression driver and therefore the wg guide which will be used, is evidently largely budget dependent. Single diaphragm vs. Coaxial, beryllium vs. ordinary 'materials' etc.
You may go wild here, but superior sounding designs have been built with reasonably priced -though high quality- drivers.
(Earl Geddes' Summa is a well known example).
The type of compression driver and therefore the wg guide which will be used, is evidently largely budget dependent. Single diaphragm vs. Coaxial, beryllium vs. ordinary 'materials' etc.
You may go wild here, but superior sounding designs have been built with reasonably priced -though high quality- drivers.
(Earl Geddes' Summa is a well known example).
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Well known, and best seldom heard...
Probably, Summa, M2 and VOT are currently the best IOT speakers ever.
Listening to the real thing might be another story, but few of us will ever experience. So why bother about things that almost do not exist...
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As for low-mid to midrange reproduction, there's at least 1 driver I would like to hear connected to a large Yuichi, Iwata, Kugellen or similar horn:
This Faital compression driver is fitted with a PAPER diaphragm and may be used from 500Hz-9000Hz.
You'll need a supertweeter, but hey; these big boys have two of those (super tweeters) above the Vitavox horn and have been declared 'best of show' by many visitors of the 2016 Münich High-End Messe:
This Faital compression driver is fitted with a PAPER diaphragm and may be used from 500Hz-9000Hz.
You'll need a supertweeter, but hey; these big boys have two of those (super tweeters) above the Vitavox horn and have been declared 'best of show' by many visitors of the 2016 Münich High-End Messe:
An externally hosted image should be here but it was not working when we last tested it.
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As for measurements with regards to 'ultra high-end' products like the Living Voice Palladium (@ $356.000 the 'cheaper' brother of the >$450.000 Vox Olympian, yes that's excluding the Vox Elysian Subwoofers, these will set you back another $171.000):
Polar plots, resp. curves etc. from these are likely to look pretty miserable. These speakers are mainly 'voiced' by ear.
Polar plots, resp. curves etc. from these are likely to look pretty miserable. These speakers are mainly 'voiced' by ear.
Do we know the choosed compresion driver in the Yuichi horn of this Living Voice !
Wow, two XO above the Yuichi's horn, they really choose the hard way !
I would like to see the polar patern of it !
Yes, they use TAD beryllium compression drivers.
Those were my thoughts when I stumbled upon this driver. I wonder how you would apply this in a synergy. Multiple drivers instead of the 'regular' 4 or 5" paper cones? That would become quite expensive I'm afraid.
Ah, I guess you meant this driver might be a nice alternative to a (try-)synergy? But used in a conventional way (a big horn/waveguide). The 'sound of paper' is a very attractive feature indeed!
A paper diaphragm supertweeter would really 'top it off'.
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About the drivers of the Living Voice Vox Palladium, Vox Olympian and Vox Elysian:
The big 300Hz exponential mid horn built from laminated beech is evolved from the original 1940's Vitavox Horn (which was a licensed Altec design). It's loaded by a Vitavox S2 compression driver with a proprietary alloy diaphragm, a specially modified compression chamber and bronze parts.
That reaches up to 5kHz, where it mates with a modified TAD 2002 tweeter, fitted with a beryllium diaphragm and alnico motor. The prominent trumpet (cast in LG2 bronze) is a spherical derivative with its length exactingly tuned to optimize its acoustic attenuation. Another beryllium-diaphragm compression driver, this time a TAD ET703 with proprietary tuning and slot-dispersion loading, takes over at 15kHz and extends the bandwidth out to a -3dB point of 45kHz.
Below the S2, the midbass is handled by a Vitavox 151, a 15" paper-cone, pleated-paper-surround unit with an Alnico magnet system. It is loaded by a folded-horn enclosure, with nonparallel sides and again built from laminated beech, that extends its range down to a -3dB point at around 70Hz -- giving the complex and visually imposing Vox Olympians about the same low-frequency bandwidth as an LS3/5A -- hence the existence of the Vox Elysian. The subs are huge exponential-horn enclosures. As big as they appear from the front, nothing quite prepares you for their enormous depth. The laminated beech cabinets house a pair of incredibly long-throw 13" drivers feeding a common mouth, actively driven by a dedicated, class-B solid-state amplifier/crossover, which provides control over roll-off, phase, and upper and lower bass output levels. Living Voice strongly recommend that this is run from the speaker terminals of the main system amplification, although both balanced and single-ended high-level inputs are provided.
So far for these 'cost no object' monsters.
(Text partly quoted from theaudiobeat page).
The big 300Hz exponential mid horn built from laminated beech is evolved from the original 1940's Vitavox Horn (which was a licensed Altec design). It's loaded by a Vitavox S2 compression driver with a proprietary alloy diaphragm, a specially modified compression chamber and bronze parts.
That reaches up to 5kHz, where it mates with a modified TAD 2002 tweeter, fitted with a beryllium diaphragm and alnico motor. The prominent trumpet (cast in LG2 bronze) is a spherical derivative with its length exactingly tuned to optimize its acoustic attenuation. Another beryllium-diaphragm compression driver, this time a TAD ET703 with proprietary tuning and slot-dispersion loading, takes over at 15kHz and extends the bandwidth out to a -3dB point of 45kHz.
Below the S2, the midbass is handled by a Vitavox 151, a 15" paper-cone, pleated-paper-surround unit with an Alnico magnet system. It is loaded by a folded-horn enclosure, with nonparallel sides and again built from laminated beech, that extends its range down to a -3dB point at around 70Hz -- giving the complex and visually imposing Vox Olympians about the same low-frequency bandwidth as an LS3/5A -- hence the existence of the Vox Elysian. The subs are huge exponential-horn enclosures. As big as they appear from the front, nothing quite prepares you for their enormous depth. The laminated beech cabinets house a pair of incredibly long-throw 13" drivers feeding a common mouth, actively driven by a dedicated, class-B solid-state amplifier/crossover, which provides control over roll-off, phase, and upper and lower bass output levels. Living Voice strongly recommend that this is run from the speaker terminals of the main system amplification, although both balanced and single-ended high-level inputs are provided.
So far for these 'cost no object' monsters.
(Text partly quoted from theaudiobeat page).
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I'm beginning to build one...in lego !
impressive description : Alnico at all the floors, etc ! I heard the two TAD already and they indeed sounds vey natural with a good crossover and integration in relation to the room, the systeme I heard was directive at close usual listening distances but awesome at 6 meters and more !
For the price we could have expected some electro magnet instead ALnico but this can maybe talked if you buy one !
The Vitavox wood Altec licencied horn looks like a lot the TAD h-4001 !
The good thing is when you can afford such speakers is you have no pain to buy two JBL M2 of shelves for the rear surrounds ! But I'm asking myself what the owner will have in the car ?
It is not time aligned but with the money you spent, your brain corrects the phase with an automatic behavior faster than a DLCP ! I like also the relation written with the LS3/5A... it was 11 or 16 ohms speakers (the genuine ones) but 82 to 82 dB/2.83v/w sensivity if my memory is still accurate in this first day of the week ?!
They are smarter at Avantgarde : they sell cheap (but good) Community compression drivers in their flagship ! And it's ROH (no beyrillium !)
impressive description : Alnico at all the floors, etc ! I heard the two TAD already and they indeed sounds vey natural with a good crossover and integration in relation to the room, the systeme I heard was directive at close usual listening distances but awesome at 6 meters and more !
For the price we could have expected some electro magnet instead ALnico but this can maybe talked if you buy one !
The Vitavox wood Altec licencied horn looks like a lot the TAD h-4001 !
The good thing is when you can afford such speakers is you have no pain to buy two JBL M2 of shelves for the rear surrounds ! But I'm asking myself what the owner will have in the car ?
It is not time aligned but with the money you spent, your brain corrects the phase with an automatic behavior faster than a DLCP ! I like also the relation written with the LS3/5A... it was 11 or 16 ohms speakers (the genuine ones) but 82 to 82 dB/2.83v/w sensivity if my memory is still accurate in this first day of the week ?!
They are smarter at Avantgarde : they sell cheap (but good) Community compression drivers in their flagship ! And it's ROH (no beyrillium !)
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From the man, who heard the man (who heard the man...) who heard that non obtainum stuff, as Troels in Munchen...
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