You are making a lot of assumptions about home hi-fi, and you never really disputed what I said with any evidence, you just said "no"... 95 dB average / 110 dB peak is more than enough to recreate a full orchestra or opera, even when sitting near the front. It is more than enough to replicate a jazz ensemble, or any non-amplified musical instrument at normal audience distances. No it is not going to recreate a trumpet at 18" from the bell, but that is not how we listen to trumpets... and No, it will not recreate a rock concert. I always wear earplugs at rock concerts.
Many of the speaker systems used in Mastering studios look a lot like high end audiophile speakers, though they are often custom built, but sometimes not.
ATC, Quested, Barefoot, Kii, Neumann, Genelec - these are all pro-audio loudspeakers that do not use compression drivers, and share a lot of design features with high end home hifi...
https://vintageking.com/neumann-kh-...MIzuamgdr29QIVkAwGAB30Rg5QEAQYBSABEgI3l_D_BwE
https://vintageking.com/barefoot-sound-minimain12-pair
https://quested.com/v3110/
Just some brief comments. I don't believe in the aubibiliity of a reasonable amount of phase shift. Have you calculated how much the phase would shift in a 5 way with 8th order filters? It is a bit much.
The distortion mechanisme you describe for horns produces 2nd order mainly increasing with frequency, which is not offensive generally.
Increasing the frequency coverage of 1 horn is hot at the moment. New Klipsch for example. It can be done well.
The distortion mechanisme you describe for horns produces 2nd order mainly increasing with frequency, which is not offensive generally.
Increasing the frequency coverage of 1 horn is hot at the moment. New Klipsch for example. It can be done well.
well i started my other thread by posting some music examples that i listen to but i will spell it out for you here - i do NOT listen to opera, jazz or any acoustical music. in fact nobody does. we used to have a typing teacher in high school who tortured us by playing classical music in class but other than that i never personally met anybody who listens to these types of music. people who listen to these types of music exist only on the internet, just like people who "love to help others" and other unicorns.
you are very wise to wear earplugs at concerts and clubs - so do i. in fact i plan to wear earplugs while listening to my own system as well. i already wear Westone earplugs under Bose NC700 noise canceling headphones in the gym. I also wear a different but similar set of musicians earplugs while listening to music in the car. my living room isn't quite as loud as the gym or car but after 2 decades of wearing earplugs i hear things like whine from dimmers and LED bulbs ... from 20 feet away ... i have contemplated taking measures like building acoustical isolation chamber around the refrigerator and such but you know what i would rather just crank the system to 120 decibels and put in earplugs.
i haven't mentioned this before because i was myself unsure if i would be wearing earplugs or not ... i always wear them in the gym and car while listening to music ( let alone in clubs and concerts - that's obvious ) and i have SOMETIMES used them at home with JBL EON 1500 speakers but at other times i would listen to the EON without earplugs ... but the EON are only really painfully loud around 3 khz whereas my system would be painfully loud at ALL frequencies ... also i was only using EON to watch movies where loud noises come in short bursts and i must be able to hear quiet dialogue in between ... music is a more constant level so now that i think of it i will ABSOLUTELY wear earplugs while listening to music ... sound systems have about 60 decibels of dynamic range and ambient noise in this house is maybe 50 decibels so to drown it out would take about 110 db which means hearing damage within a minute without earplugs ... but with earplugs i could listen at the same level for half an hour before damage and still have that same 60 decibels of dynamic range and still have that bass in the chest feeling ...
in fact all the reasons to wear earplugs at a rock concert or club still apply at home ... if you really think about it ... the only ones objecting would be your precious fabric dome tweeters
as for studio monitors in fact you make a good point - many of them do have regular dome tweeters - but also remember those people have to listen for 8 hours a day. 8 hour safe level is 85 decibel. 1 minute safe level is 110 decibels. that's a BIG difference. i don't need to listen 8 hours a day !
also their studio is acoustically treated to absorb all noise and i will have two full size refrigerators in my listening space.
i swear i had no idea what i was trying to achieve but the more i argue about it the more it makes sense. the more you try to discredit my design the more obvious its advantages become to me. i am honestly and unironically grateful. i hope you don't stop.
in that AES paper on hearing damage in concerts the author refers to the level of earplug use in concerts as "alarmingly low" ... i find the choice of words odd. how the !@#% do they expect people to wear earplugs in concerts when literally nobody tells them to ? people are cattle - all they know how to do is copy each other and take orders - they are not physically capable of doing anything intelligently or different from others. they will wear earplugs if they are ordered to like they are ordered to wear m@sks in the current "situation" ... otherwise they will not. that simple.
since nobody can order you to wear earplugs at home you will not be doing it. but i will be.
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I am not trying to discredit your design... not at all. I want you to succeed, just as I want everyone who does DIY audio to succeed. You and I will clearly choose to build very different types of speakers, based on our differing priorities. My choice of "A" does not invalidate your choice of "B".
You said that home hifi equipment is little better than toys. I disagree. There are some valid criticisms to be made at the audiophile market, such as magic cables, but it is not all BS and marketing. I have heard some astoundingly good systems in peoples homes based on commercially available hifi equipment and speakers. In contrast, I have never heard a cinema sound system that impressed me. Most are acceptable, but just acceptable. I have never heard sound reinforcement at a live music event where I was not immediately aware that I was listening to amplified sound from a speaker. I have NEVER heard a live performance performance involving amplified male or female voice that actually sounded like the person singing... it always sounds like a person singing into a microphone and played through PA equipment.
There are some kinds of music which only really exist by way of PA equipment. No rock, pop, hip-hop artist sings a capella with acoustic instruments. So for these kinds of music, the performance only exists after it has been amplified and played through speakers... probably large horn speakers. So of course PA equipment is ideally suited to recreate the sound of PA equipment. When I listen to Chili Peppers or Zepelin or Pearl Jam, my speakers do the best they can, but they are not going to replicate a stack of guitar cabinets with 1000's of watts behind it. Nor do I care... I can enjoy rock and pop music just as much in my car as on a great system.
Now you are being silly.
You said that home hifi equipment is little better than toys. I disagree. There are some valid criticisms to be made at the audiophile market, such as magic cables, but it is not all BS and marketing. I have heard some astoundingly good systems in peoples homes based on commercially available hifi equipment and speakers. In contrast, I have never heard a cinema sound system that impressed me. Most are acceptable, but just acceptable. I have never heard sound reinforcement at a live music event where I was not immediately aware that I was listening to amplified sound from a speaker. I have NEVER heard a live performance performance involving amplified male or female voice that actually sounded like the person singing... it always sounds like a person singing into a microphone and played through PA equipment.
There are some kinds of music which only really exist by way of PA equipment. No rock, pop, hip-hop artist sings a capella with acoustic instruments. So for these kinds of music, the performance only exists after it has been amplified and played through speakers... probably large horn speakers. So of course PA equipment is ideally suited to recreate the sound of PA equipment. When I listen to Chili Peppers or Zepelin or Pearl Jam, my speakers do the best they can, but they are not going to replicate a stack of guitar cabinets with 1000's of watts behind it. Nor do I care... I can enjoy rock and pop music just as much in my car as on a great system.
Now you are being silly.
you raise some valid points ...
i was recently listening to "VNV Nation - Kingdom ( Restoration Version )" and realized that they played a subwoofer into distortion and then recorded the distortion of the subwoofer and put it on a track to create a more "live" sound to the track. We all heard tracks that have reverb added to them to create a more live sound.
i thought that was fascinating - distortion as a feature, not a bug. in fact based on what i started this thread with - subwoofer distortion is barely audible and if anything just makes the bass appear louder, which is of course the goal when creating bass.
about 15 years ago Romy the Cat asked me to leave his forum because he squarely put me in the same basket as you people ( he hates you all with a vengeance ) ... he accuses us of "oscilloscope like listening" ... in fact i am roughly in between you and him. he doesn't believe in measurements. you believe in ONLY measurements. i believe that the end goal is ENJOYMENT and it neither has to measure accurate nor even sound accurate to the ear.
the reason people like you listen to acoustical music is because your concepts of accuracy only are applicable to acoustical music. you throw your human nature out with the bath water and and turn yourself into a giant oscilloscope with your purpose in life being to analyze speakers for their accuracy. on other hand your concepts of accuracy don't even apply to my music which is entirely electronic and never existed in physical reality. i don't listen to a synthesizer and be like "no that is not what synthesizer sounds like in real life" ... LOL ...
instead i just ask - does it sound awesome or not ? awesomeness is mainly just a function of loudness and bass - everybody understands that EXCEPT audiophiles, who are too busy listening to orchestra music which has neither.
the human voice is an exception ... it's the only acoustical instrument that i cannot dismiss. and in fact i have to again thank you for making me consider this fact - just how unique human voice is. i literally DO NOT CARE what everything else sounds like as long as it is loud and has a lot of bass. but human voice must sound human.
on the prosoundweb i asked why compression drivers often seem over-sized compared to woofers in PA systems on SPL basis ... and they replied that it's because subwoofer distortion doesn't bother anybody but compression driver distortion is something nobody tolerates. this is why i started this thread - i wanted to better understand this particular aspect of speaker design - and it seems like all roads lead to rome. everything leads to human voice ( and speech ).
you guys are wasting your life chasing the accuracy of orchestra instruments that nobody cares about. focus on the human voice. you're spreading yourself too thin.
when i was younger hi-hat sound was everywhere, now it is gone. it simply fell out of favor with people who make music. imagine all the fools who dedicated their life to getting the hi-hat to sound right. human voice will never fall out of fashion.
to summarize, a good sound system is:
1 - loud
2 - bass hits you in the chest
3 - vocals sound natural
that's it !
the reason audiophiles reject this is because they want to believe they are special and not like everybody else.
i once revealed on an online forum that i use bass boost on Sennheiser IE8 earbuds ( which at the time were something like HD800 of earbuds ) which i used when working out on a road bike because they fit under a helmet ... to this the audiophiles responded with " Holy bad taste Batman ! " ... basically i had " bad taste " because i liked bass ... the IE8 were known to have a lot of bass so applying bass boost to them was a grave sin. they imagined i would fall on my knees and apologize to them and swear never to listen to bass again ... instead i told them all to go !@#% themselves 🙂
they choose to reject their human nature to be accepted by some clique. i choose to reject their clique in order to accept my human nature.
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^I think that you really should calm down now, axiperiodic. Insulting and classifying others like that, and declaring your truth as the only will not help you to get sympathy or good advice.
Regards,
"One of Nobody who listens to classical or jazz"
Regards,
"One of Nobody who listens to classical or jazz"
well BMS makes a Tri-Axial driver for people like you. 15" with integrated compression midrange and supertweeter all co-axial with each other.
there is absolutely no doubt that aligning the sources in space is beneficial. and yet 99% of speakers do not do it. are they all designed by idiots ? is everybody who works at JBL an idiot because they do not do this ? i doubt it.
more like there are cons and pros and sometimes the pros outweigh and sometimes the cons.
i knew about the Unity Horns for decades but the concept seems too restrictive for me. it asks to sacrifice a lot all in the name of an objective which somehow 99% of speakers on earth ignore. does it have real benefits ? i am certain that it does. are they worth the sacrifices ? that is a rather subjective question.
you inadvertently admitted that you are against 5-ways because you can't fit them into your Unity horn. so you started out with sound quality as a goal, then you convinced yourself that Unity horn is the way to sound quality, and now anything that doesn't fit into the Unity horn is dismissed as counter-productive to sound quality. In artificial intelligence this would be called getting stuck in a local minimum / maximum or in human speak it's called losing the forest for the trees or throwing the baby with the bath water.
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split even and odd frequency bands on horizontal and vertical sides of the unity horn - that would be pretty insane
i mean i personally have no interest in unity horns but you like 5-ways and unity horns so ...
exactly. 100% of the most high end systems are arrays. maybe 1% of all systems are coaxial outside of car audio where they simply have no space for anything else.
1 - my crossovers would have FIR functionality but i would not know how to use them ... however i assume in the future better crossovers will emerge. i will not design a system around current DSP limitations. in the future it will be possible to upgrade crossovers to linear phase brick wall ones.
2 - i am attaching a screen capture from this paper by JBL:
https://jblpro.com/en/site_elements/tech-note-characteristics-of-high-frequency-compression-drivers
i can't really summarize it any better than they did.
3 - not sure what you mean. i generally despise Klipsch but it may be simply due to the bright color of their cones.
Attachments
I have since some weeks a 3 way + sub system with 2 2 X 4 HD full active mini DSP crossovers. It is with horns for mid high and a horn super tweeter
in most of the forums there is a lot of criticism about the use of a super tweeter nowadays, but i like the look of the old fashioned Visaton TL16H super tweeter with the look of the legendary old Fostex T705 super tweeters i had long long time ago.
In my understanding the need of more than three way could be if you want a full horn system with horn sub, horn kick bass horn mid and horn high like this one, very expensive by the way:
Avantgarde Acoustic EN Web Site
For such a big system there is the need for a very good system to automate the measurement in a normal room like Dirac or even more expensive super intelligent DSP based room correction system. Even a long year experienced sound engineer will not be able to tune a 5 or 6 way system right, it is simply too complex for free hand tuning.
In the 70s of the 20th century there was a car engine injection system from Bosch that needed to be tuned with 4 or 5 screws where the change of one setting affects the other 3 or 4 settings of the screws. The number of iterations to find the right set of this thing was so high - only a few car experts were able to accomplish the mission. Very very expensive for the owner of the car. I was one of them with my Citroen DS23 Pallas...
in most of the forums there is a lot of criticism about the use of a super tweeter nowadays, but i like the look of the old fashioned Visaton TL16H super tweeter with the look of the legendary old Fostex T705 super tweeters i had long long time ago.
In my understanding the need of more than three way could be if you want a full horn system with horn sub, horn kick bass horn mid and horn high like this one, very expensive by the way:
Avantgarde Acoustic EN Web Site
For such a big system there is the need for a very good system to automate the measurement in a normal room like Dirac or even more expensive super intelligent DSP based room correction system. Even a long year experienced sound engineer will not be able to tune a 5 or 6 way system right, it is simply too complex for free hand tuning.
In the 70s of the 20th century there was a car engine injection system from Bosch that needed to be tuned with 4 or 5 screws where the change of one setting affects the other 3 or 4 settings of the screws. The number of iterations to find the right set of this thing was so high - only a few car experts were able to accomplish the mission. Very very expensive for the owner of the car. I was one of them with my Citroen DS23 Pallas...
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I was going to say the same, but since it wasn't really the point of his post, I let it go. 🙂
That is almost all that I listen to. But that is because I have taste, and exist only on the Internet.
Time to put down the shovel, stop digging that hole and use that effort instead to try to understand what's being offered. Getting advive on the Internet isn't easy or straight forward, but it asks only your time and effort.
Please share what tweeters can be crossed this low. Some OK on the frequency chart, but distortion skyrockets. I have yet to find a 1 inch dome that is actually useable below 2500. The SB a little lower, but not much.
No. I wouldn't go to that much effort and then leave it to some automated system to fix. Admittedly a system like that isn't consistent enough to be easy to tune and even if it was, it would take considerable time.
What reduces that time is the ability to make adjustments to the speakers themselves, physical adjustments that is, not electrical ones.. and a DIYer who is in the process of making electrical adjustments is in a position to know when there is a more serious problem in need of repair.
Many years ago I used to run Scan-Speaks to 1k5.. sometimes even first order. I started with this to cover the woofer at the top, and there are a number of advantages. Disadvantages too, but I usually didn't find harmonic distortion to be an issue within the usable range, which of course gets smaller with a low cross.
Its possible now if one can afford the computational costs (fast, powerful FPGAs and or fast, powerful PC). That said, probably not much point in ideal filters when the dacs used are audibly wanting. Topping D90 (the original version with AK4499) was pretty good, but several hundred dollars for two channels.
Totally agree. To each their own ...and may they find what they are wanting to hear.
For a static in-home setup, i believe line-arrays may make the best overall solution with their enhanced vertical pattern control. I'd like to try them again someday, with a line of tiny drivers or ribbons, along with lines of larger drivers.
I'm sold on point source/MEH's for two simple reasons.....easiest way to maintain 1/4 spacing of acoustic centers i've found....and i can move them from indoors to out pretty easily.
One example is ScanSpeak D2905/9900. Distortion is low all the way down to 1000 Hz, which is amazing.
I use an SB26CDC down to 1.8k, and a Satori TW29TXN-B down to 1.6k, in both cases I use 4th order filters. The waveguide version of the satori beryllium dome TW29BNWG could almost certainly go below 1.5k.
I use an SB26CDC down to 1.8k, and a Satori TW29TXN-B down to 1.6k, in both cases I use 4th order filters. The waveguide version of the satori beryllium dome TW29BNWG could almost certainly go below 1.5k.