New planar drivers at Parts Express

Thanks for providing a link. I skimmed all the pages for measurements, but somehow missed those:)
They look good, especially considering that you're using a very expanded vertical scale. Everything seems to go south below 600hz though:(
If I get a lot of variation in my pair of slims, Ill probably be sending them back. Sadly, my pair of BG Neo 10's had variations that were just too hard to live with(I may have damaged one). My BG neo 3's are fine though. If need be, I can take these up to 800hz with an 8th. I could live with that if it means better consistency

I damaged a few of my first set with too many rounds of solder/desolder. Units developed quiet wide variations btw themselves after originally being almost identical. I'm an expert level solder jockey too, so I was surprised, but when I called BG and talked with Chris Brunhaver, he explained how easy it was to deform the diaphragm material with too much heat. On the second set, I only ever used crimp on terminals to attach the speaker wires and the units have remained very consistent freq response over about 5 years now.

Word to wise. Using any of the planar drivers, DO NOT SOLDER.

Chris is now with PS Audio and working on revisions of their forthcoming (any century now) speaker line. Current versions are using a modified version of the Neo10/Neo3 coaxial design like in the BG Z62 center channel.

Greg
 

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Have not listened, but tested two samples. big hd peak at 1.5khz, so using it as a mid was out of the question. As a tweeter crossed at or above 2k with a relatively steep slope would probably work well though, especially for the price. I was only interested in it's application as a mid, and who knows, it may still sound great in that configuration, but the 1.5khz hd made it a nonstarter for me
 
music soothes the savage beast
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Distortion plots. 2nd order is RED and 3rd order is ORG

The original BG NEO8-PDRs kill it as long as you stay above 600-700Hz. Both samples were almost identical. Midrange performance from a simple harmonic distortion perspective is fantastic.

Most disappointed in the Radian, but it's still totally acceptable if you consider most of it's range is still below -40dB down or under 1%. Even some of the other drivers that look like they have a bad spike in the upper midrange are still at least -40dB, so overall pretty usable.

The Slim 8 is the worse of the bunch, as expected, with the highest levels below 1KHz. But used as a line array of tweeters, they sure are a steal.

Greg

nice measurements studiotech
I was specially interested in slim8 from grs, since I used it
here are some data I got, post #99:
viral projects, sort of
originally I wanted to use slim8 from 900Hz to 10kHz, then foster planar on top
however, distortion of slim8 was higher than I expected, not that it would sound bad or anything.
so I started raising the crossover frequency, to 1kHz, then to 1.2kHz, and it got better
 
They look beautiful. First glimpse reminds me of the Devialet Bluetooth speaker... you think function couldn't keep up with the form. Aesthetically you're not sure what to expect from them, but can only assume they'll deliver some great sounds.

I liked the comment "with as little as 100watts" like everyone has power on tap or something. Then again, having more power has always been a good thing IME.
 
Latest and hopefully final version of PS Audio Fr-30 released. Still a 10" Neo-10 style driver for mids.

First Pictures of the new PS Audio FR30 Loudspeaker - Speakers, Soundbars and Subwoofers - StereoNET International

Hey, this is Chris. It's fun to see the chatter and comments here and appreciate where you guys are coming from.

Yes, the mid and tweeter are close cousins to the NEO3 and NEO10 made at a different facility. They are using different diaphragms, stronger magnets (went from N38 to N52), corrugation, damping and some phase plug/waveguide work.

We had originally looked at using Radian Audio, who is still retaining Igor Levitsky, my former colleague from BG (and who did the HiVi, SLS, Oppo and other planar drivers) but we're able to make that relationship work.

A little inside baseball - the BG diaphragms for the NEO drivers were interesting story. David Graebener tracked down many years ago. They were made by a company that made microwave inductive heaters/crisping sleeves (think hot pockets) and had a proprietary continuous line printing for simple etched aluminum circuits. They had some unique technology for super low cost. In fact, BG didn't even use their production equipment with orders of 100K diaphragms - they were made in the sample lab.

While there were some good things about that source (besides cost) - the photoresist used coats the aluminum and prevents corrosion and also had some good damping and mechanical properties. However, their printing resolution was rather low and the effective feature size/trace width couldn't be made very small and diaphragms had to be binned and rejected by resistance etc. The testing actually cost a good deal more than the diaphragms themselves. Also, the company didn't use Kapton (as it isn't food safe) and so high power tweeters weren't a possibility with them as the source (though Teonex has superior damping and midrange performance).

In our case, we're using a photo etched diaphragm with the same type of materials but we can print much finer traces and have the ultimate design flexibility to have the "keys to the castle" for future designs. It definitely took some time to get these units developed and dialed in but I have found the QC to be excellent and am excited to being them into a variety of products.
 
I have almost-full-range ESLs. And topped-off with ribbons at 3kHz, sounds pretty good to me.

But quite a stretch (literally) to get ribbons down into the heart of the music band. But easy for ESLs. Long ago, there used to be ESL add-on boxes that went lower than ribbons and produced the same clean-as-a-whistle sound. And are quite durable. Pity nobody offers them today, I think.

For DIYaudio, the DIY ESL builders compete for extending low end and that makes building them hard.

On the contrary, maybe - in the absence of mid-range ribbons - DIY builders need to focus on easy to build drivers that cover say, 500-4000 Hz. Simple to fabricate stators from plastic stuff sitting around and high-voltage bias power is simple. Cheap as could be.

B.
 
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Sorry for the necrobump....
While I have not yet build a real speaker with my 17x of GRS Slim 8" I have gotten around to measuring them for consistency:

Distortion measurement is at ~ 2.6V so ~ 1W. I added a 18 dB highpass filter @ 800 hz.

The goal of the measurements is not to see the actual performance but rather to detect if I have any bad drivers in the bunch.

REW .mdat of distortion sweeps of all drivers (30 MB):
Planar Distortion Numbered.mdat - Google Drive

REW .mdat of all driver impedances (22 MB):
Planar Impedance Numbered.mdat - Google Drive

The driver number on the distortion sweep corresponds with the impedance driver number. The color, however, does not because I am lazy =)

All impedance measurements are in free air (same setup as when measuring distortion) except that for driver 1 where "with wool" means in this setup: New planar drivers at Parts Express.

Conclusion:

No truly bad drivers in the bunch, which far better than I expected. Especially considering how cheap they are. The Sounderlink drivers I've tried, which are more expensive too have nowhere close to this good consistency! They are all pretty much the same except below 600 hz where they differ somewhat. I only need 14 for my speakers so I will keep the 3 drivers the furthest from the average as spares and use the others for my speakers.
Sorry for the necrobump.................. so are PE's measurements BS? They aren't showing this huge fall off above ~12K. I'm looking at these for an OB project but I really don't want to have the same high frequency issues as my current setup. Here are PE's measurements:

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