Drivers for Ariel speakers

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My condolences; that must have difficult for you, and hifi always has to take a back seat to the events of the real world. I wish you the best, and hope your family is doing OK.



They have the same ownership and the same feature sets, as well as user interface, but are "tuned" a little differently. My guess is this is done with different op-amps and different electrolytic caps, which can noticeably alter the sound of solid-state equipment. Traditionally, there is a Denon house sound and a Marantz one, going back to the Seventies when they were quite separate companies, and Denon always had a sharper, more "technical" sound while Marantz always harked back to its made-in-the-USA 50's and 60's sound ... lush, very musical and involving, and worth every penny of its premium price. I always thought that vintage vacuum-tube Marantz was way, way better than McIntosh. There's still a pale shadow of the classic Marantz sound in contemporary receivers, but a direct comparison with vintage equipment shows how much has been lost in the transition to transistors and the mass market. (Transistor receivers are pretty much mass-market by definition.)

Vintage, made-in-the-USA Marantz equipment were never receivers, but preamps, power amps, and the famous Marantz 10B tuner, the product that bankrupted the company and forced the sale to the Japanese. (It was rumored that Marantz lost more than $100 on every tuner they sold ... and that was $750 back in the late Sixties, equal to $5250 now.)

That aside, my previous home-theater receiver was a Denon, which was well-made, but I never cared for its sound that much. The Marantz AV8003/MM8003 separates, which I bought as refurbished units, were actually half-decent at playing music, and some of that character is there in the receiver line. I'm pretty sure the engineers "voice" these things so they have the Marantz house sound, since we're talking about made-in-China receivers undoubtedly made on the same production line as Denon (and probably many other brands).

It would be nice if the HT manufacturers offered a simple feature to turn off the inputs of the built-in amplifiers so they could used as a pre/pro without sonic compromise, but nope, nobody offers that. So the pre/pros, without any power amplifiers at all, cost as much as a premium receiver, despite having a lot less in the box.

That said, the simplest way to sonically upgrade a receiver with RCA pre/pro outputs that have at least 2V rms out (many don't) is to get a secondhand hifi grade amplifier for the L and R speakers. As mentioned earlier, Class AB transistor amp technology has essentially been static since the late Seventies, so there are lots and lots of secondhand high-end transistor amps out these selling for modest prices. The market is glutted with pretty good transistor amps, yet buying a receiver compels the buyer to get 7 or more channels of pretty mediocre-quality amps. (Hint: if the amp can't drive a 4-ohm speaker at low distortion from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, it's not a good amplifier.)

One drawback of higher-efficiency speakers is they shine a spotlight on mid-to-lower quality amplifiers, revealing grainy, two-dimensional sound, and harsh, edgy tonality for singers and orchestras. So it's actually not easy to recommend speakers for modern HT receivers ... and unfortunately, I find the sound of modern HT receivers to be not as good as the mid-fi receivers of the Seventies, and those were far from the best at the time. It would be easier to recommend HT receivers if we could skip the mediocre power amps that are built-in, and shop around for a stack of older power amps that sound better and are very reasonably priced. But as always, convenience wins over sound quality ... and not surprisingly, all-in-one sound bars now outsell home theater systems.


Thanks Lynn.


I found this : "Music fans are catered for, too. Put the AV8003 in Pure Direct mode and feed it a good-quality stereo analogue source and it does a frankly stunning impression of an audiophile stereo amplifier, with an equally lush, refined and detailed signature"
Will this help in getting better stereo music out of the preamp?
If I use the Marantz preamp and use a multichannel amplifier like say from Emotiva, will this result in a better overall sound? I heard they were good price/quality wise.
Please don't kill me for asking this: Could it be, because youre from an older :eek: generation, that you are used to an older sound? I wonder if younger people like the transistor sound better.

I have no clue of what different amplifiers should sound like. So I have to get a general consensus of what a good receiver/amplifier is.
 
Thanks Lynn.

I found this : "Music fans are catered for, too. Put the AV8003 in Pure Direct mode and feed it a good-quality stereo analogue source and it does a frankly stunning impression of an audiophile stereo amplifier, with an equally lush, refined and detailed signature"

(a) Will this help in getting better stereo music out of the preamp?

(b) If I use the Marantz preamp and use a multichannel amplifier like say from Emotiva, will this result in a better overall sound? I heard they were good price/quality wise.

(c) Please don't kill me for asking this: Could it be, because you're from an older :eek: generation, that you are used to an older sound? I wonder if younger people like the transistor sound better.

(d) I have no clue of what different amplifiers should sound like. So I have to get a general consensus of what a good receiver/amplifier is.

In order: (a) The flowery phrasing just means that Pure Direct (or Direct mode, as well), bypasses the A/D, DSP, and D/A stages for analog inputs. The signal still goes through the volume control chip and a variety of op-amps and source-selecting chips. (Neither the volume control nor the source selectors are pots or mechanical switches.)

This isn't what you'd find in a traditional preamp, where there is no digital stuff of any kind, and volume control is done with a pot (with the annoying addition of L/R tracking errors) and switching is done with mechanical switches. The actual circuits doing the work of signal gain and buffering are then vacuum-tube, solid-state with discrete transistors, op-amps, or a mixture of the above (hybrid circuits). This approach gives the lowest possible distortion, or put another way, a more consonant distortion profile (whichever is your thing) than a device that digitizes all sources and then uses DSP for signal processing.

But still, in the A/V world, Pure Direct is a nod to quality, which is appreciated. Note that Bass Management is not functional when Pure Direct or Direct is selected, nor distance compensation or room equalization (these are all digital-domain functions).

(b) You don't need to rush out and buy a Marantz pre/pro, but I have admit they sound better (to me) than the custom-installation home theater equipment in the $5,000 to $15,000 bracket. Not as good as a "real" hifi component like 2-channel NAD or similar, but plenty listenable.

A useful compromise is a recent-vintage Marantz all-in-one receiver and using the pre-out jacks to feed a decent-quality stereo amplifier (NAD etc.) for the front L and R channels. This takes a big load off the internal amplifiers, and the Center and Surround channels are less musically important. The next step is an external amp for the Center channel, which can either be mono or a stereo amp with one channel left unused (bridging doesn't always sound better). By using external good-quality amps for L, C, and R, the internal amps are only being used for the Surround channels, which carry very little musical content. By the way, I do enjoy DTS Neo:6 Music Mode on my pre/pro, finding it superior to Dolby Pro-Logic II (music mode). Technically, the internal amps in the receiver are still running with no speakers connected to them, but they have no speaker loads drawing current, which is kinder to the main power supply (which the pre/pro op-amps appreciate).

(c) This a perfectly good question, no embarrassment at all. I grew up with vacuum-tube sound in CinemaScope and Todd-AO 70mm movie theaters, from home Ampex and Sony tape recorders, and home mono, followed by stereo, phonograph players and AM-FM radios. I didn't hear transistor sound until I went to college, and liked it at first ... faster, snappier, more powerful, but the transistor stuff back then was notoriously unreliable, which led to the demise of the old-line manufacturers of Fisher, Scott, Marantz, and others. The names were sold to Japanese companies with little connection to the US originals. I was in the high-end industry in the early Seventies (listening to all-transistor electronics from Radford and Audionics), and stayed in for some decades after that. I didn't return to vacuum tubes until the revival in the early Nineties, when I caught the triode bug, which is still with me today.

Since I design my own (triode) amplifiers, I'm pretty aware of the difference that various circuits and parts selection makes to the sound ... I can usually hear the difference in a matter of seconds or a minute or two at most. Or, not hear a difference at all, or a difference so small it doesn't matter. This is just part of the design cycle; designers hear things consumers, and reviewers, never get to hear, since we're working at the device and circuit level. That's true of speakers, or any other part of audio. Some designers put 100% trust in the measurements, others only use measurement for quality control, but I kind of sit in the middle; I use measurements to verify things are working the way I expect it to, and to try and correlate what I'm hearing with what I'm measuring. Sometimes there's a correlation, other times there isn't, and sometimes it seems to go in reverse. When worse measurements actually sound better, that's a problem that needs to resolved .. either measuring the wrong thing (easy to do), or sonically overlooking a problem area (also easy to do).

I have complete contempt for the Eighties-era idea of "accuracy". That's a concept that is borrowed from photography and lens design, and has nothing to do with appreciating music from electro-mechanical sources. For me, High Fidelity is closeness to what acoustical music, played in real acoustical spaces, actually sounds like. This is very different than the high-end sound that magazine reviewers like, which to me is tipped-up and edgy-sounding, with boomy, false, unreal bass, and a very strange spatial impression, usually very closed-in sounding. I don't like this sound at all, and don't find anything "accurate" about it. If it sounds like musicians in the next room, that's really rare ... I almost never hear it at a hifi show, and only occasionally when visiting other hifi enthusiasts.

But I also like German techno and London dance electronica, and that takes a sense of power, but the finesse of a system that's also good with acoustical music is really welcome as well. Doing both at once is the trick; the dynamism and big thrills of electronica, and the delicacy of solo voice presented with in-the-room realism and sense of physical tactility (you almost feel the performers right in front of you).

I can say that reasonably flat high-efficiency speakers and good triode amplifiers can reliably deliver this illusion (which can be very powerful and nearly hallucinatory), but it's more of a struggle with lesser-quality equipment. It's also something very few audiophiles have ever heard, and I think most reviewers have never experienced it, either. However ... not everyone can "get" this illusion. I've met many audiophiles, and some reviewers, who are incapable of perceiving it. There's no way of telling in advance, since it's a perceptual and emotional-response thing that's very individual. The kind of audiophiles who follow 20-item checklists (I've met them and sat right next to them at a demo) don't seem to "get" what I'm talking about. They're deeply wired into the Stereophile and Absolute Sound sonic paradigms, and just don't hear the way I do. I'm not going to force my perceptions on them, and what they listen for is alien and incomprehensible to me.

The emotional-response aspect is a big part of it. When I was reviewing the Ongaku and Reichert Silver 300B DHT-triode amplifiers in the early Nineties, I invited over three of my Tektronix/audiophile friends. I played a piece of music that brought tears to my eyes and Karna (every time), and the three of them sat on the living-room couch, all three of them with their arms folded across their chests, trying their hardest not to feel the emotions, and just stay inside their heads in "audiophile" mode. What they asked to listen to was "Planet Drum", and all they cared about was boom-boom bass. That was eye-opening. I didn't realize until then, looking at the arm-folded trio, that some audiophiles didn't want to feel when they listened .. it was all about the checklist and the social side of audiophilia.

People who read my stuff come from all over audiophilia. I have no idea what they like, or what they expect to hear, or their background in sound and music. That's why I'm so vague about recommending things. I know what my friends like, and adjust accordingly. But someone on the other side of Internet, no idea.

(d) Receivers, to be honest, are on the bottom tier of "real" audio, although there's lots of stuff far below that .... laptop speakers, mobile phones, earbuds, etc. The sound quality in theaters is pretty damn bad, too, miles away from anything like high fidelity. I think people buy B*se because they want a mellow sound for background music, which is frankly a pretty good reason to buy B*se, in an era when shrill sound from cheap titanium tweeters dominates.

Where you can hear the real thing? If you have a hifi club anywhere near where you live, go visit, and listen to some "real" amplifiers and speakers, and certainly listen to some tube gear, and see if that's your thing with your kind of music. You might like it, you might not. No way of telling.

Hifi shows often have terrible sound in 90% of the rooms, and it's slog trying to find the good rooms, especially if your ears are fatigued (which takes about an hour or two) and you're just getting confused, not enlightened. When I go to a show, I know exactly what I want to hear, and most of the rooms are not it, so I only go to a small fraction of the show.

This is a very lengthy reply, but I hope it clears up some things. A good starting point is finding out your own tastes, and what kind of gear does it for you. Do not trust any reviews, no matter how flowery the writing is. I can write too, and writing has nothing to do with listening.
 
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Lynn,

I always enjoy your contributions. Your ear -- and your writing -- are great.

One thing I would suggest is to go out and listen to live music. For me, that is large- and small-scale "classical" music (in quotes because I tend more to the Romantic period). Listen in a variety of spaces if you can.

It is one of life's great experiences, and what high fidelity seeks to reproduce.
 
Lynn Olson, I'm in two minds. Previously, you have shown direct favour to brands at the initial build, which were then superseded by an alternate recommendation by yourself. Lundahl, Onetics, Tribute. And one might say this is evolution. Maybe it is. Yet, I wonder what kick-backs you might get, or how genuine your interest is, and how this might sit with reality.

As you are in the 'industry', I wonder if stepping back and stripping clear of all this 'cult worship author' is not the most pragmatic approach for a perspective buyer like myself.

Direct question: Do the Klipsch Cornwall IV sound that good?. I've followed for long enough to have built your amplifiers and I need a new speaker (from Ariel).

Trusting that you have thick skin, I look forward to your reply.

Kind regards,
HK
 
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We don't seem to be making much progress on this:

787863d1571101407t-drivers-ariel-speakers-img_2612-jpg


The Lynn Olson Ariel MTM design, as built by zigzag.

Since the Vifa P13WH-00-08 went end-of-line, we seem to be struggling for a replacement.

597764d1486517557-vifa-p13wh00-08s-scan-speak-d2905-950000-a-vifa-p13wh-00-08-png


Personally, I plain like Rick Craig of Selah Audio's ideas along the same line with his MTM design:

532765d1456057805-classic-monitor-designs-mtm-scanspeak-raal-ribbon-selah-audio-jpg


In fact this is better than Lynn's original excellent idea, IMO. The ribbon tweeter matches the twin basses on cylindrical dispersion. Distortion is lower because twin basses operate at 1/4 power for the same SPL at the listening position.

At an affordable level, I like the plastic, aka polycone, Peerless 830860 as a replacement for the Vifa P13WH-00-08. Peerless HDS PPB 830860

No nasty breakups!

So, since everybody has given up on a replacement for the Vifa P13WH-00-08, let me offer further hope. Alan Shaw of Harbeth has been doing good things for years. His Radial 5" driver, with the phase plug, is just setting the bar very high! :cool:

I just enjoy this sort of freely given hommage to great speakers:
YouTube
 
Lynn Olson, I'm in two minds. Previously, you have shown direct favour to brands at the initial build, which were then superseded by an alternate recommendation by yourself. Lundahl, Onetics, Tribute. And one might say this is evolution. Maybe it is. Yet, I wonder what kick-backs you might get, or how genuine your interest is, and how this might sit with reality.

As you are in the 'industry', I wonder if stepping back and stripping clear of all this 'cult worship author' is not the most pragmatic approach for a perspective buyer like myself.

Direct question: Do the Klipsch Cornwall IV sound that good?. I've followed for long enough to have built your amplifiers and I need a new speaker (from Ariel).

Trusting that you have thick skin, I look forward to your reply.

Kind regards,
HK

Not offended at all. I've written on and off for Positive Feedback magazine since the early Nineties, although I rarely review products. I have an ExaSound e38 Mk II DAC sitting right next to me now, and I still haven't figured how to start writing the review. It's an excellent unit, and one-of-a-kind for people who want to listen to high-quality music in surround format (several steps above a home theater receiver, but the signal sources are USB instead of HDMI).

It's pretty funny that anyone might think I'm a cult author. If I am, it's the world's smallest cult, smaller than a gathering of model-train enthusiasts in small town, with about the same impact on the rest of the industry ... zero. Nobody in home theater cares what I think, and I've never gotten an offer from Stereophile or Absolute Sound to write even one article for them. My editor, David Robinson, pays me enough for an article to take my sweetie out to dinner a couple of times ... that's about it. Not exactly big money.

I only write about things that get my attention that I think other folks in the audio world might be interested in, and that's a very small niche, since I have no interest at all in mainstream high-end audio nor in mainstream home theater. I departed from the mainstream some time ago in the mid-Eighties, and haven't gone back. No interest in Krell, Wilson, Focal, etc. etc.

In show reports, I highlight interesting new speakers and amps, but I can't in good conscience write a full review of them, because these are products that fall in my area of experience. I would be needlessly harsh on aspects I see as faults or oversights, and would get the itch to improve them to my own tastes. That's grossly unfair to the manufacturer, who have their own ideas what they should sound like, and I don't think it's the reviewer's job to "improve" the product. You review the product as-is, not an imaginary hypothetical product that doesn't exist yet.

I'm OK with reviewing DACs, phono preamps, or record players, because I frankly don't ever want to design one. Too damn complex, too much to learn, no thanks. But I can enjoy them as much as anyone, and I know what I like and what I don't like.

Kickbacks ... boy, I wish. Over the years, I've heard rumors about high-profile reviewers, but I've never gotten a hint of any such thing for myself. Besides, David, my editor, would have a fit and throw me off the magazine (not joking here, PFO editorial policies are very strict). The editorial policy at PFO is to write about products you find personally interesting, and you think the readers might appreciate. If you don't like it, it goes back to David, and he might find another reviewer that likes it better (there is no "house sound" at PFO ... the reviewers have quite different tastes). If nobody likes it, or it breaks down, it goes back to the manufacturer with a brief note on our findings.

We do have an editorial policy of no "hachet-in-the-head" or "damn with faint praise" reviews. We hate the idea of audio magazines becoming self-appointed gatekeepers keeping out the riffraff, and want to see newcomers succeed in what we know is a very difficult industry financially. If the product is no good or outright defective, back it goes with a polite note. If it's noteworthy, it gets written about. If it's really sensational, several reviewers might cover it, or David might chime in with his own take on the product.

As for the brands I've written about, Lundahl, O-Netics, or Tribute, hey, they're good transformers, and my designs use transformers to do various circuit functions. They're useful for problem-solving ... ground isolation, single-ended to balanced conversion, etc. For what it's worth, the current version of the Karna uses Tribute input and first interstage transformers, and O-Netics for the second interstage and output transformer.

Finally, the Klipsch Cornwall IV. I've been a quiet fan of the Cornwall and Chorus speakers for the last ten years, since they respond to simple mods so well, and are way less hassle than going down the rabbit hole with Altec Duplex 604's or ambitious projects like the "Beyond the Ariel" (as built by Gary Dahl). Those are big multiyear projects, and something most people should stay away from (like building the Karna amplifier). The old models are decent in stock form, but the Klipsch-forum mods to the crossover puts them in a category that competes with a lot of pretty expensive high-efficiency speakers at the shows. I feel these particular models are actually the flattest and most neutral Klipsch speakers, way better than the Heresy, and not as uneven in the bass as the folded-horn models like the LaScala and the Klipschorn.

In terms of value, buying a pair of mint-condition old-school Cornwalls are the way to go. A local friend in Denver picked up a mint-condition pair for $1700, and they look like they just came out of a time machine from 1979. A few crossover tweaks, an improved supertweeter, and these things play in the $10,000 or higher category, right alongside the Volti's, for example. I'd say that was pretty good value, with none of the heartache of Altec or Lowther.

But not everyone wants to track down vintage speakers ... and when it comes to new-production high efficiency speakers, there's really not much to choose from at reasonable price points. Not a fan of JBL. Not a fan of Avante-Garde. The big Volti is good but out there at $25,000/pair, too rich for me. That's why I thought the new Cornwall IV's sounded pretty good in a sonically hostile environment. Most of the rooms at the show were boomy, and I didn't care for the music server Klipsch was using ... despite that, I liked what I was hearing, and the room was drawing a crowd, and with good reason. If owned them myself ... I'd be tempted to replace the supertweeter, but that would mess up the factory 4th-order LR crossover, so probably not.

P.S. Thanks, system7, for bringing things back on track. The Selah Audio speaker with the MTM/ribbon looks like a solid design. My only worry would be adequate headroom for the tweeter ... ribbons run out of steam pretty easily, and using them with moderate-slope crossovers can be tricky. If they're overloaded, the speaker goes from sweet to sour, with prominent upper-mid harshness that's program dependent. That's what I've heard from a lot of ribbon-tweeter speakers at the shows, at any rate. I hope Selah has gotten around the challenge of integrating the ribbon with the midbass drivers.
 
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We don't seem to be making much progress on this:

Since the Vifa P13WH-00-08 went end-of-line, we seem to be struggling for a replacement.

Personally, I plain like Rick Craig of Selah Audio's ideas along the same line with his MTM design:

532765d1456057805-classic-monitor-designs-mtm-scanspeak-raal-ribbon-selah-audio-jpg


In fact this is better than Lynn's original excellent idea, IMO. The ribbon tweeter matches the twin basses on cylindrical dispersion. Distortion is lower because twin basses operate at 1/4 power for the same SPL at the listening position.

At an affordable level, I like the plastic, aka polycone, as a replacement for the Vifa P13WH-00-08. Peerless HDS PPB

No nasty breakups!

The Ribbon gives a larger c-t-c distance.

In a modern version of the Ariel, I would personallu want a tweeter with a trimmed or smaller faceplate.

In fact I'm wondering if something like af MLTL with 2 bass drivers like 830860 or other suitable specimens and a tweeter might be and idea, it's less complex to build the cabinet and it will be better for nearfield listening.
 
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Well, that's how an electrical LR4 works, assuming a flat impedance. ;) As far as the acoustical slopes are concerned, the Ariel is also 4th order, albeit a form of asymmetric Gaussian.

Trouble with ribbons is that with very few exceptions they have rotten distortion on the low end, so you need to cross relatively high up, and with a relatively high order (since their LF response is often quite extended, albeit unusably so), and with MTMs, that means you can have a merry time getting them to behave well due to the centre-to-centre spacing & the potential phase-related issues that can result. Not impossible but not easy: the Ariels are a good example of it done well with a dome, and the potential difficulties involved. OK, we have the advantage of computer modelling not available when they were designed in the early 1990s, but even then, you still need a lot of measurements off both the horizontal & vertical axis, and the experience to know how to work with those to achieve your desired result.
 
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In fact I'm wondering if something like af MLTL with 2 bass drivers like 830860 or other suitable specimens and a tweeter might be and idea, it's less complex to build the cabinet and it will be better for nearfield listening.

It is easy enuff to swap out the midTweeter we use down to 250 Hz in these with a different or smaller midTweeter or with a regular dome, ribbon, or ATM type tweeter as the midBasses are good to 10k on axis (and some use them as FR). I’d look for something that allows for the midBasses to be moved closer together. I always aim for less than 1/4 wavelength C-C, so with that unattainable with a tweeter pushin gthe Ms as close as possible is desirable). Bass is good to about 25 Hz in-room. Edit: worth noting that the MLTL is specified by Scott (just above)).

A12pw-MTM-comp.jpg


You are on your own XO wize. We have a passive for these, but they were designed with PLLXO in mind, I am eagerly awaiting Nelson’s diyAudio store version of the B4.

dave
 
Trouble with ribbons is that with very few exceptions they have rotten distortion on the low end, so you need to cross relatively high up, and with a relatively high order (since their LF response is often quite extended, albeit unusably so), and with MTMs, that means you can have a merry time getting them to behave well due to the centre-to-centre spacing & the potential phase-related issues that can result.

Not impossible but not easy: the Ariels are a good example of it done well with a dome, and the potential difficulties involved. OK, we have the advantage of computer modeling not available when they were designed in the early 1990s, but even then, you still need a lot of measurements off both the horizontal & vertical axis, and the experience to know how to work with those to achieve your desired result.

Scottmoose has hit on one the key design features of the Ariel and one that I didn't go into much detail in the original articles. I wanted to keep the IM distortion of the 1" soft-dome as low as possible, but didn't want to use an extreme-slope crossover out of concern of what might happen to vertical dispersion in the crossover region. That model Scan-Speak had the longest linear excursion of any tweeter of the time, and then I went further and crossed it above the critical voice region, around 3.8 kHz. Although this might have violated some "rules" about CTC spacing, I care more about IM distortion, especially in the critical 1~5 KHz region, where distortion is most audible and annoying.

There are many, many speakers on the high-end market with inadequate highpass filtering for the tweeter. Although it doesn't show up in the FR curves or even in the overall IM distortion measurement of the speaker, the tweeter, like all other direct-radiators, increases its excursion at 12 dB/octave as frequency is lowered. This means excursion will actually increase in speakers with electrical 6 dB/octave highpass filters, even though acoustical output from the tweeter is decreasing ... and this happens in the critical band between the highpass filter and the Fs of the tweeter. For many speakers, that's between 700 Hz and 2.5 to 3.5 kHz, the worst possible place in the spectrum for increased IM distortion.

If you wonder if this is audible, play choral music at normal listening levels, then disconnect the midbass drivers. That's when you'll hear the IM distortion in the tweeter ... and it isn't pretty. Worse, it comes and goes with different program material, depending on spectral excitation in the critical band.

As Scottmoose mentions, ribbon tweeters will measure nice and flat in the 1~5 kHz band, but have unacceptable levels of IM distortion in the lowest part of the working band. Worse, this is sudden-onset distortion as the ribbon leaves the very small gap region and tries to actually move around a bit.

There aren't many drivers that have real power in the 1~5 KHz region. The old Peerless 2.25" cone tweeter was better than most domes (particularly in pairs), and the Heil AMT was outstanding, provided you could find matching pairs with reasonably flat response (the classic models had major problems with sample variation). This is probably where mid horns really shine; provided there's a decent highpass filter in the 700 Hz to 1.5 kHz region, they really punch it out without falling into major IM distortion. The gotcha with mid horns, of course, is excessive time storage (diffraction at the horn mouth and ringing), but that's where modern horn profiles excel.

P.S. That was one of the hidden tricks that PW Klipsch used with his moderate-slope highpass filters for the mid horn. He used compression drivers with old-school phenolic diaphragms, which are far more forgiving when driven out-of-band than aluminum (or titanium). I found it interesting the modern Cornwall uses a plastic diaphragm for the mid horn, which shares the same gentle-overload characteristics as the traditional phenolic. One of the more difficult aspects of working with Altec drivers are the aluminum diaphragms in the compression drivers; they must be kept out of the over-excursion regions, or they sound very very bad.

Speaking to the Klipsch designer at the RMAF, I found his description of the Cornwall IV crossover surprisingly modern and refined: acoustical 4th-order LR for both mid and VHF horns, and sloping or shelf filters to offset the characteristics of the constant-directivity horns. I didn't hear any obvious peaks, and the titanium-diaphragm VHF tweeter did not aggravate me (and they usually do). I suspect the restriction of titanium so it only operates above 7KHz, combined with a LR4 highpass filter, limits the nasties the diaphragm can do.
 
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Thanks for the response, Lynn. I felt as though I was a bit obtuse (somewhat character flaw of my own and not a reflection in any way to what you provide to the readers).

Cornwall IV in Oz are 17k AUD, which is 12k USD. I'm a bit (lot) over vintage. I had a bite a second hand pair of the bigger volti's at USD 16k but they went for a bit more than that.. (although not much more). All to say surely cheaper if I fly somewhere and place an order + shipping.. I'll go and listen, seems they are worth investigating.

Kind regards,
HK
 
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I have no clue of what different amplifiers should sound like. So I have to get a general consensus of what a good receiver/amplifier is.
It is more a question of what you want from your home audio equipment.

If you want a high technical performance then an amplifier should be neutral and simply amplify the input signal without adding anything audible to it. All amplifiers will distort to some extent but it is not too difficult these days for competent solid state amplifiers to generate a level of distortion that is below what we can hear in use. AVR receivers however push really hard to get the price down particularly at the budget end of the range with the result that they tend not to be audibly neutral.

An alternative is for an amplifier to add small audible artifacts to the sound perhaps to sound pleasant or simply to distinguish it from competitors. Several people in this thread are advocating this approach. It is perfectly valid but it can be confusing for the inexperienced because it is rarely expressed in this way.

The same two alternative approaches hold for speakers but because, as discussed earlier, there is no single correct output for a speaker the addition of artifacts tends to be more widespread and the recognition of what is reasonably neutral less straightforward. One or two suggestions in this thread have been a long way from reasonably neutral if this might be your objective.
 
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The Ariel. Lot to like there, IMO. AFAIK, Lynn tuned this one by ear using pink noise, which sounds a bit like rain on a tin roof.

I also admire Joe Rasmussen's Elsinore:

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Not a huge difference, IMO.

What I am seeing is, Joe has relieved the midbasses of bass excursion by adding two genuine woofers to an MTM, which is good. And given a waveguide to the tweeter which relieves the tweeter of low-end excursion. Both make for lower distortion IMO.

Possibly, not many people know this, but Vifa made a more midrange oriented version of the illustrious midbass P13WH-00-08 here:

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It was the Vifa P13MH-00-08:

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Purely for interest, here's the waterfall plot:

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Seems like when a cone breaks up, here around 7kHz, which is typical for a 5" unit, it breaks up in a big way. I learned this from Lynn. Maybe a LCR notch is called for. That is what Joe does in the Elsinore. :cool:
 
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