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With age it seems like most of us have a habit of repeating ourselves.
We end up almost like parrot constantly repeating our beliefs as a mantra we have formed through our life only now and the modifying our views.
I am probably doing this to the same extent as most others. So here will I have another go at a topic which I have discussed earlier, timbre quality (or lack of it) of reproduced sound; but this time I will attack it from a different angle than before; a historical angel.
I will tell the story of how the Celestion SL 6/600 was born in glory and how its offspring’s died of because Celestions engineers seemingly didn’t understand why it had a magical sound, and therefore took it down the wrong development route.
In the late 1970’s early 1980’s Laser Interferometry was introduced to the loudspeaker engineers, well at least to those who were so lucky that he/she worked for a loudspeaker company willing to invest in this new fancy technology. One of the very first companies to do so was Celestion, they could soon proved what everyone had actually known before that virtually all loudspeakers of the time were run in breakup mode from around 600 Hz and upwards.
It is obviously difficult to know the subjective listening consequences of this but the folks at Celestion feelt that they now had the engineering tool needed to design a tweeter which behaved like a perfect piston up to 19.000 Hz. This had to be a good thing at least it could do no harm!! So on they went, and designed what became the Celestion Sl 6 and its luxury derivative the SL 600. This/these loudspeakers did behave much better than the previous generation of the speakers, and the tweeter truly did behave as a perfect piston from its crossover point at 2200 Hz to its first breakup point at 19.000 Hz.
The reviews at the time was outstanding, everyone loved the little Celestion and all agreed that here was the empirical evidence that breakup modes in drivers destroys the sound, because this was surely the most sweet and natural speaker sounding speaker ever heard; what a glorious sound!!!
The engineers at Celestion must surely have felt the same, but they were not quiet satisfied yet; because, good as they felt the SL 6/600 to be; they knew that it wasn’t quiet perfect. So soon they started to reengineer it into the supposed much improved SL7/7000.
What did bother the engineers at Celestion was the fact that the tweeter of the SL 6 was made of copper which they had originally decided to use because it is seemingly cheaper to produce than aluminium membranes. The use of copper had 2 side effects they wanted to rectify in the new SL 7/700, first it first breakup mode was just inside some peoples hearing range secondly copper is much heavier than aluminium which meant that the tweeter in the SL6 was absurdly inefficient. Instead of making the SL 6/600 absurdly inefficient, they had originally decided to let the treble play at a level around 2 dB below the level of the bas/midrange driver. So the SL 6 basically had a fairly flat frequency response up to the crossover point at 2200 Hz and then it suddenly dropped by 2 dB for the remaining 3 octaves. The engineers at Celstion must surely have felt that this was unacceptable in the long run so; the main change for the SL 7/700 was the use of an aluminium membrane in the treble (and a new surround for the bas/mid driver), and presto Celestion had what had always wanted, a mechanically well behave loudspeaker to beyond our listening capability with a flat on axis frequency response. There must have been a party that evening at Celestions development department, what they didn’t know was that it was more of a funeral gathering.
Within a few years Celestion would be out of the High End segment, they had just killed the glorious timbre of the SL 6/600, from this moment onwards it was downhill all the way.
What had gone wrong?
Basically they had developed a speaker, as engineers have a tendency to do, as mechanical devises, and they had paid almost no respect to what it in the end is all about psycho acoustics. When they had developed the SL 6 they had by chance/accident ended up with a frequency response which integrated wonderfully with most small listening rooms. There has been made loads of research of which in room frequency response listeners fin neutral sounding, these can be found in papers of Floyd o Toole, on Lyngdorf Audios homepage and several other pages.
http://www.lyngdorf.com/downloads/catalogue/Lyngdorf%20Catalogue%202007.pdf
The findings do not always agree completely but they are actually fairly close; we perceive an in room frequency response as neutral, when the in room frequency response falls slowly with frequency.
With this knowledge let us then take a look at how the Celestion SL 600 did compare to the Celestion SL 700 in John Atkinsons listening room.
http://stereophile.com/standloudspeakers/488/index6.html
Yes the Celestion SL 700 is the superior to the SL 600 in the mechanically sense, but it is seriously lacking in timbral quality.
I will suggest that Celestion still would be producing high end speakers today, if their engineers had realised this at the time of introducing the SL 7/700.
KlausDK
Best wishes from Denmark.
Yes it is a sad story; let’s hope it will serve as a lesson for all those loudspeaker producers out there who produce ever and ever shriller, harder and more pinched sounding speakers. You have already lost the young generation of listeners who are more interested in computers; beware not to loose us, the music loving community who wants natural timbre, warmth, beauty and envelopment, in our speakers.
Best wishes from Denmark.
KlausDK
Follow Ups:
I still own both SL600s and SL700s and use them as my main speakers :)
Celestion is now a very BIG player in musical instrument speakers.
Could it be that since the audio speaker field is so cut-throat, the accountants decided there was more money to be made, by going in another direction?
BTW: I have a pair of 1989/90 Celestion 3 speakers....good stuff!!
Steve
A few comments:
I don't believe this change in treble balance had anything to do with Celestion's current lack of presence in the high end market. I believe changes in ownership with new business directions are responsible for their departure from the hi-fi marketplace.If Celestion wanted to keep the same tonal balance with the aluminum dome tweeter as they had with the copper dome, they could have easily adjusted it in the crossover.
Donald North
Hi David North
To me it seems like someone inside Celestion believed the Celestion Sl 600 to be a better speaker than the supposedly technically superior SL 700.
Why would they otherwise have produced these two speakers side by side, year by year?
To the best of my knowledge the 700 newer replaced the 600, strange?! Isn’t it?
Another point is that the state of the art dipole subwoofer system developed for the SL line was designed for the 600 but not for the 700. A strange decision if the good people at Celestion truly believed the SL 700 to be superior.
When Celestion at a later stage decided to marked a digital correction module (the DLP) to flatten small wrinkles in the frequency response and to make it phase coherent, then it was the SL 600 and not the SL 700 which got this deluxe option. Again a strange choice, if they really in their hearts, believed the SL 700 to be the better design.
You write that they just could have adjusted the treble level in the crossover. This obviously is perfectly true. I however believe that they were blinded by their own measurements; they started out to make a frequency linear version of the SL 6/600 and probably mentally got stuck when this turned out to be to bright sounding. No one seems to have suggested that the entire idea of giving the speaker a flat frequency response was at fault. Their ears might have told them to lower the treble level, but as good engineers they felt obliged to follow their instruments, and therefore declined to do so!?
What they did however was to push the crossover frequency up from 2200 Hz to 3000 Hz this will obviously reduce the dispersion in this range and put less lower treble into the listening room. This however was probably jut another nail in the Celestion coffin, because it did increase the incoherence in dispersion between mid drive and treble at the crossover frequency.
I truly believe the Celstion SL 700 could have been a winner if it had had its treble level adjusted to the same level as the 600, and had had a it crossover frequency point lowered (maybe to something like 1700 Hz) rather than lifted.
The lessons to be learned are to take something for granted and learn to think outside the box.
Charles Hansen deliberately did so when he gave the Avalon Eclipse a crossover frequency at a stunningly low 1080 Hz. I salute him for that, GREAT!!
Celestion did the same with the frequency response of the original SL line, but it wasn’t a deliberate design decision and for this reason they were unable to capitalise in their following design development. SAD!!
Best wishes from Denmark.
KlausDK
> To me it seems like someone inside Celestion believed the
> Celestion Sl 600 to be a better speaker than the supposedly
> technically superior SL 700. Why would they otherwise have
> produced these two speakers side by side, year by year?
> To the best of my knowledge the 700 newer replaced the 600,
> strange?! Isn’t it?
Hi Klaus
I chanced upon your original article and the various followups today and thought you might appreciate some facts to set against your speculations. I suppose I need to introduce myself first; I'm Ed Form and I was one of the two Technical Directors of Celestion duing the period when the events you spoke of were happening.
The first, and most important comment is that the 600 and 700 products did not run in parallel at any time after the stock of 600 tweeter domes was exhausted - perhaps 6 weeks or so from launch.
As for the comment that someone inside Celestion thought the 600 a superior product: I can assure you that no such person existed! The development team was completely at one in this matter, and, remarkably, the marketing boys all agreed with us: the 700 was in every way a superior loudspeaker. The extra wall stiffness of the cabinet, due to the internal bracing shelf, notably cleaned up the upper midrange and the much lower moving mass of the aluminium tweeter allowed the system to be rebalanced to a higher overal efficiency. The elevation of the first break-up mode of the tweeter to about 24KHz from about 18KHz allowed the removal of the hand tuned equalisation network in the crossover and distinctly opened up the treble. Finally the much lower mechanical Q of the bass unit, due to the use of different materials for the inner and outer diameters of the surround, gave a new rhythm and freedom to the bass that the 600 could not even approach.
> Another point is that the state of the art dipole subwoofer
> system developed for the SL line was designed for the 600
> but not for the 700. A strange decision if the good people
> at Celestion truly believed the SL 700 to be superior.
What on earth made you make such a suggestion? The 6000 subwoofer system was developed before the 700 ever existed and was, therefore, recommended for use with the only existing loudspeakers, the SL6, SL6S, and SL600. I am aware of members of the development team who felt that the 6000 subwoofer was not suited to the SL700 system but their reason was that the crossover between the subwoofer and the top-box had a detrimental effect on the upper bass performance of the 700: in other words, the 700 was markedly superior to the electronics associated with the 6000 subwoofer and they did not feel the two items should be used together. I, on the other hand, have since used a very high performance digital crossover and equalisation system to meld 6000 and 700 units together with stunning results.
> When Celestion at a later stage decided to marked
> a digital correction module (the DLP) to flatten
> small wrinkles in the frequency response and to
> make it phase coherent, then it was the SL 600
> and not the SL 700 which got this deluxe option.
> Again a strange choice, if they really in their
> hearts, believed the SL 700 to be the better design.
The model you're referring to here wasn't the original 600! It had the stiffer, braced cabinet, the twin-material surround on the bass unit and a tweeter with a pressed copper dome, not the electroformed copper dome of the original. To put it in a nutshell it was an SL700 with a copper dome, and the reason the copper dome was reintroduced was that the marketplace, and most reviewers, in those days were convinced that metal dome tweeters sound metallic but that, somehow, the copper dome in the original SL6 and SL600 didn't. Let me explain why some tweeters sound metallic and others do not so that you can get to grips with the situation the Celestion people faced in those days...
The output of a dome tweeter consists of the sum of the outputs of its dome and its surround. The surrounds of *ALL* such tweeters, up to the point where the SL6 was introduced, exhibited a series of resonances at regular intervals where the surround was a number of half-wavelengths in width. In isolation therefore, the output from the surround itself appears to have been passed through a comb-filter, and, as any electric guitarists will tell you, a comb-filter gives the signal a metallic sound. What is worse, in 25mm dome tweeters, the normal kind in those days, the surround is larger in area than the dome itself, so the output from the tweeter is the sum of a resonance free metal dome and a dominant, metallic sounding, surround. In the case of the SL6 tweeter, the surround was absolutely tiny - less than 1mm across, so any comb-filter artifacts were pushed out of the top of the audio band and were much lower in level than the output from the dome which was increased in diameter to 32mm to further benefit the ratio between area of dome and area of surround.
In the case of soft dome units the wobbling bag of jelly called the dome fills in the comb filtering effect of the surround with a multitude of uncontrolled resonances, and sounds so naff anyway, that the overall effect is a smooth response curve and lousy dynamics with the comb-filter effects submerged in the mush.
The ultimate example of a metal dome tweeter that really sounds metallic is the 25mm beryllium-dome unit in the Yamaha NS1000 where the dome is completely devoid of resonances below 50KHz, and had no sonic chararacter whatsoever, but the surround is 3 times bigger in area than the dome and has *VERY* marked comb-filter artifacts in its output because it is so wide. It sounds, to be blunt, dreadful, but a modified version I made, with a 0.7mm wide surround, sounds quite wonderful - the boys at Focal and at Usher have demonstrated rather nice examples in recent years, although they haven't fully grasped the surround resonance problem yet.
Sorry about the long diversion, but it was necessary to explain the truth behind the very real consumer opinion that metal domes sound metallic. When the copper SL6 tweeter appeared the entire universe jumped on the copper as the reason, and were certainly never told that it was the tiny surround that gave the good sound - I'm not even sure that my colleague Boaz EliEli, the actual designer of the unit, fully appreciated it! When the aluminium dome appeared in the SL6s, and then the SL700, the misconception continued and no amount of persuasion would change it - even though John Atkinson, the editor of Stereophile, adopted the 700 as his primary reference, and personal choice for listening to, and continued with it for a lot of years afterwards.
By this point I had left the company to go to Tannoy, and was shocked by the change in marketing direction that the company took: they simply gave in and went back to calling the products 6 and 600, and reintroduced copper for the domes because they thought the 'fickle' public would buy it. What actually happened was that the sales of the whole range dried up because they sounded really wimpy, and the company started on a series of truly awful excursions into marketing-lead nonsense - who remembers the dreadful 5000 series with their useless ribbon tweeter? What the company should have done was to actively promote the truth about dome tweeters. As part of my tenure as Technical Director I had the backroom boys develop a new laser system that would have allowed the separate frequency resonses of domes and surrounds to be listened to. Why the tech boys didn't use this to kill the daft idea that the copper dome was somehow magic once and for all, I cannot imagine.
> You write that they just could have adjusted the
> treble level in the crossover. This obviously is
> perfectly true. I however believe that they were
> blinded by their own measurements; they started
> out to make a frequency linear version of the SL
> 6/600 and probably mentally got stuck when this
> turned out to be to bright sounding. No one seems
> to have suggested that the entire idea of giving
> the speaker a flat frequency response was at fault.
> Their ears might have told them to lower the
> treble level, but as good engineers they felt
> obliged to follow their instruments, and
> therefore declined to do so!?
Nonsense Klaus. The 700 was in every way superior to the 600, and, in my carefully observed opinion, also superior to the 600si. Optimising all three with digital electronic crossovers and signal conditioning, the superiority of the aluminium tweeter, and the flat response approach, is glaringly obvious. If you live anywhere near East Anglia you're welcome to come and hear - although I'd need some notice because I've given away my SL600 and SL600si boxes and would need to borrow them from friends who acquired them. You should also note that the SL series of products were meant to be sited well away from walls and the floor and listened to in the quasi-nearfield so the balance of the room was not significant in their perceived sound. You should also bear in mind that the great man whose work on room sound you quoted in the original article appears to have cloth ears and never produced a good sounding domestic loudspeaker in his life.
> What they did however was to push the crossover
> frequency up from 2200 Hz to 3000 Hz, this will
> obviously reduce the dispersion in this range
> and put less lower treble into the listening
> room. This however was probably jut another nail
> in the Celestion coffin, because it did increase
> the incoherence in dispersion between mid drive
> and treble at the crossover frequency.
You know the dispersion of the one-piece cone of the SL600 bass unit at 3KHz? You know the dispersion of the 32mm dome at 3KHz? What the revised tweeter crossover frequency, and the higher tweeter crossover slope did was to cut the excursion expected from the tweeter at the lower extreme of its passband. The crossover was the work of my greatly esteemed colleague, Bob Smith, and he came as near to a set of golden ears [it's a BBC term of fairly obvious meaning] as I have ever known. The stability of the polar pattern of the loudspeaker through the crossover region was distinctly better than for the original 600 because the two units were very well matched throughout that region.
> I truly believe the Celstion SL 700 could have been
> a winner if it had had its treble level adjusted to
> the same level as the 600, and had had a it
> crossover frequency point lowered (maybe to something
> like 1700 Hz) rather than lifted.
But that would have meant increasing the width of the tweeter surround to allow sufficient excursion and would have completely ruined the sound quality by reintroducing the dreaded comb-filter problem.
> The lessons to be learned are to take something
> for granted and learn to think outside the box.
> Charles Hansen deliberately did so when he gave
> the Avalon Eclipse a crossover frequency at a
> stunningly low 1080 Hz. I salute him for that,
> GREAT!! Celestion did the same with the
> frequency response of the original SL line, but
> it wasn’t a deliberate design decision and for
> this reason they were unable to capitalise in
> their following design development. SAD!!
The choice of 2K3 for the original SL6, 600 series models was a deliberate decision based on the performance of the tweeter and bass units, as was the slightly higher frequency, but steeper slope, of the 700. The difference between 2K3 and 3K has no significance, since both lie very firmly at the maximum sensitivity of the ear and the polar pattern of the bass unit will change only marginally. Moving the crossover down to 1K, as you claim for the Avalon model, is not a major advantage because the ear is only 3 to 4 dB less sensitive there than it is at 3K. To truly make a difference that the ear can hear, the crossover would need to be set at 300Hz or so, where aural acuity has fallen 6 to 8dB and, much more importantly, sensitivity to rapid changes of polar pattern has also diminished substantially - because the wavelength is *much* more than the distance between the ears. The big problem for any design like the Avalon Ecclipse, if it's 1 inch tweeter does actually go down to 1K - I can't find that figure quoted anywhere - is that no 1 inch tweeter capable of 1K crossover has ever been made and the MB tweeter they used was certainly not capable of it.
Ed Form
HI Ed,
Thank you for an outstanding insight into the engineering decisions concerning these speakers. It is always an eye opener hearing from an insider.
I owned SL600's for years and read all of John Atkinsons's adventures with his 600's and 700's. Personally, I never heard the 700's but I do respect JA's ears. I have no dog in this discussion.
In their day I thought the 600's were excellent albeit with a deemphsized treble range and a somewhat odd emphasis at the upper end of the woofers response around the crossover frequency. Soundstaging and imaging were excellent which overcame all other issues for me. I used these speakers on Celestion stands as a secondary system in my bedroom but with good amplification in the near field. Finally, one tweeter failed and I could not find a replacement. I replaced them with the excellent B&W 805S in a bedroom home theater/stereo configuration. Technology does move on.
I am disgusted with the direction Celeston took in later years. I hate to loose a great company who innovated and changed the industry. I hope the same fate does not befall Audio Research.
Thanks very much for setting the record straight. And thanks for your work at Celestion.
Sparky
KlausDK wrote:
< < The lessons to be learned are to take something for granted and learn to think outside the box. Charles Hansen deliberately did so when he gave the Avalon Eclipse a crossover frequency at a stunningly low 1080 Hz. I salute him for that, GREAT!! > >
Thank you for the kind words. When that speaker was designed (roughly 20 years ago), it was almost certainly the first two-way speaker to provide pure pistonic action throughout the full frequency range. (The actual crossover point was 1000 Hz, both because I like nice round number and because the characteristics of the tweeter allowed the crossover to be simpler at that frequency.)
We kept the idea secret as it was so obvious (at least in hindsight) that we were afraid it would be copied. Yet 20 years later there are still only a handful of speakers that offer truly pistonic operation, freeing the music from the strong colorations of resonating diaphragms.
Donald North wrote:
< < Every time you lower the crossover point of a tweeter by 1 octave (3000 to 1500 Hz for example), you increase the tweeter's excursion by 4x to maintain a constant SPL. 4x the excursion significantly increases the distortion from the tweeter due to nonlinearity in the tweeters suspension and magnet structure > >
Absolutely true.
All speaker designs consist of a long series of compromises and tradeoffs. In this case, the tradeoffs were well worth it. The advantages of pure pistonic action plus the ability to have a smooth polar pattern (dispersion) throughout the crossover region were (and are) significant. Regarding the distortion, this is a trivial matter. Every day speaker designers figure out the maximum output level versus distortion for woofers.
But for some reason almost nobody seems to do the same thing for tweeters. I guess it's that old "box" conundrum. Back then I didn't have the resources to make custom drivers, so the midrange distortion levels were merely average in that design. But look at what Jim Thiel has done. He has a 1" metal dome tweeter with an underhung voice coil and an Xmax of 3 mm. Go ahead and figure out the maximum SPL from that at 1 kHz. I think you'll find it is more than adequate for normal home playback levels. And I'm sure that the distortion is exceedingly low on that design now that tools like magnetic FEA are widely available.
What I don't understand are all the people that keep putting the same old recipe in a new package. The last thing the world needs is another 6-1/2" two-way with a crossover at 3 kHz. There must be thousands of designs using that recipe. The definition of insanity is repeating the same actions and expecting different results. I guess most speaker designers fall into that category. Personally, I'd rather do something new and exciting and different that expands the envelope of what is possible. If I can't do that, then I don't bother to bring a design to production. YMMV.
"When that speaker was designed (roughly 20 years ago), it was almost certainly the first two-way speaker to provide pure pistonic action throughout the full frequency range. (The actual crossover point was 1000 Hz, both because I like nice round number and because the characteristics of the tweeter allowed the crossover to be simpler at that frequency.)
We kept the idea secret as it was so obvious (at least in hindsight) that we were afraid it would be copied. Yet 20 years later there are still only a handful of speakers that offer truly pistonic operation, freeing the music from the strong colorations of resonating diaphragms."
Dear Mr. Hansen:
Thanks for mentioning this. There are now a number of good tweeters available (ScanSpeak, SEAS, Morel, and others) which have Fs around 500Hz, flat unfiltered response down to 1kHz, long excursion, and high power handling. Some of these should work well with a low crosspoint, IF the slope is sufficiently steep. While a 4th (or higher) order passive filter would involve a high parts count and introduce a perhaps undesirable amount of phase rotation, it should be possible with bi-amplification and an active digital crossover to apply 48 (or even 96)dB/octave slopes which would effectively prevent out-of-band frequencies from reaching and distorting the tweeter, AND manipulate phase to allow transient-perfect summation between drivers on the design axis. What think you?
Hi Klaus,
One thing to remember: Every time you lower the crossover point of a tweeter by 1 octave (3000 to 1500 Hz for example), you increase the tweeter's excursion by 4x to maintain a constant SPL. 4x the excursion significantly increases the distortion from the tweeter due to nonlinearity in the tweeters suspension and magnet structure (they're created to be tweeters, not midranges after all!).
I personally am less concerned about the differences in dispersion because high quality monitors like the SL600 and SL700 should be position well out into the room away from the side wall and rear wall. This is how I used my 700s. With this arrangement, the difference in arrival time is lengthened between the direct and reflected sounds, further attenuating the reflected sound and making it less significant to the sound heard. If a speaker were placed in a corner, then the difference in dispersion is more significant to the sound heard in the room.
The SL600s were developed and sold on the marketplace for several years prior to the introduction of the SL700. Because the SL600 was out first, it's natural that they would develop the System 6000 dipole subwoofers for the 600s. I believe they introduced the 6000 subwoofers slightly before the 700s, but I could be wrong.
Why they developed the digital EQ for the 600 and not the 700 is unknown to me. Maybe they felt the 700 was closer to perfect whereas the 600 needed more fixing! ;) If you look at what the digital EQ did to the treble balance in JA's room, it brought the level up to more like the treble balance for the 700s. See link at bottom.
Donald North
Celestion's disappearance from the high-end (and lower) audio arena is an astonishing example of changing fortunes, and in such a precipitously short time. Wow.
Yes, I am sorry to see them leave the hi-fi marketplace - their speaker offerings of recent years have been embarrassing. I remember in the 80's the first hi-fi speakers which I heard at a store that I liked and could afford were their DL-8s.
Donald North
Sold DL6, DL8, and DL10 at my first job. Loved the DL6 so much bought a pair. Eventually gave them to my uncle and they were stolen a few years later. Should have never let them go. They sounded marvelous with the Series 20 (Pioneer) 30wch class A amp.
thanks for bringing back the memories.
I used to love the old B&W speakers. Friend had a pair of DM7(?). Glorious. Now they all sound forward and bright to me. Mechanical sounding.
thanks
barondla
nt
What is also sad is that I used to own a pair of SL600 in the 1980s. I paid nearly $2000 for it. During those times, this was an exorbitant amount to pay for a pair of speakers.
They were as close to hi-fi magic as I have ever experienced in my hi-fi life. Even my current Magico's, which cost 15 times more, do not elicit that sense of amazement (I was much younger and more impressionable then.)
I can remember how delighted and amazed I was at how the aerolam cabinets did not sound like they were present at all. The music just hung there in all its glory as the speakers vanished. Sitting on the requisite FOundation stands, they provided many many hours of musical pleasure, even though it was just early CD digital from my Meridian Pro MCD.
What was not fun were the Telarc bass drum whacks, which would pop the woofers.
One speaker toppled over once and the copper tweeter got dented. I managed to replace it by buying a spare tweeter.
They also had their own subwoofers, although I never got those.
I remember when the SL700 was released, I felt dismayed that my speakers were superseded. I envied those who had the SL700 with the aluminium tweeter and the biwiring capability. To make up for it, I removed all the absorbent material in the SL600, like Jimmy Hughes of What Hifi recommended. Indeed, the Sl600s now sounded more dynamic, like he said it would. However, they now sounded more coloured and did not seem to disappear as well.
How I wish I had known that the SL600's sounded better than the SL700's.
Eventually, after twenty years, the fuzzy finish which Celestion thought would add a touch of class, and perhaps damp the cabinet resonances, began melting into a sticky ooze. I sold them to an enterprising 2nd hand dealer who, I'm certain, found a way to re-finish them. I wonder where they are now. They are the only pair of speakers I've bought and sold and am still in love with.
****They were as close to hi-fi magic as I have ever experienced in my hi-fi life. Even my current Magico's, which cost 15 times more, do not elicit that sense of amazement (I was much younger and more impressionable then.)****
Your experience with the SL 700 was remarkably similar to a speaker I owned during that same era called the Ohm F. For sure it was far less than perfect but its omni directional single Walsh driver enabled it to do some things that can be only matched, not exceeded, even today in my experience.
See link below. I even make reference to my Telarc experience that was remarkably similar to what you have described!
Robert C. Lang
NT
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