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I can't seem to wrap my head around these. They look like altecs from the 70's. I assume they use high quality components, but with all the R & D going into cabinets I'm surprised they wouldn't try to keep up, if for nothing else but style. I'm sure there is some value to tried and true designs, and if anyone knows what's in their cabinets please enlighten me.
If it's as simple as slapping good components into a rectangular box why do so many other manufacturers go to the lengths they do for fancy cabinets?
Edits: 05/13/15Follow Ups:
Interesting points guys.
I think many of the fancy cabinets are not for style only. If you input design criteria to a computer program that designs cabinets, and it pumps out something wild and whacky I guess that's the cabinet you want to build.
Reminds me of an F1 car. They are not a simple box design, they have convoluted shapes for a reason.
To me, it just looks like the boxy speakers are intentionally missing a whole area of R&D.
Do the merits of lossy cabinets out weigh the benefits?
I think of the Audio note demo, where the speakers are intentionally up against the wall. It's obvious they know the speakers are bass-light, and need the wall for reinforcement. Could come in handy in a crowded living room I suppose.
They don't need the corner for bass - they still have a tuned port of 29hz which is still considerable. Indeed, the AN J here in Hong Kong's AN dealership was playing the speakers away from corners and playing Noisia's "Split the Atom" to feel it in the chest bass levels and nowhere near as loud as they can go.
Back in 2001 the J's were pitted in a blind level matched session at Hi-Fi Choice. The speaker destroyed all the other standmounts (yup even the sexy looking it comes from a computer loudspeakers) - so bad was the drubbing that they pulled the J out and put it into their tests against floorstanders - and it STILL beat them in bass. Their testing room has no corners! The corner actually assists more with reducing the wide baffle effect to reduce colouration (but most North American walls are plaster which doesn't exactly fix the problem). This is why I feel they are better suited to concrete or brick walls than wood. But even at 70% they sound better than most at 100%
PS: Loudspeakers aren't asked to move at 160mph into corners or worry about wind hurting the gas mileage.
PS2: Corner reinforcement is a well established way to design loudspeakers.
PS3: Dragon Age Inquisition is a pretty good game.
Harbeth has their signature look and design around "issues" to maintain their look and sound, like audio note.It works for them and those that like them and they are also pricey .
Edits: 05/14/15 05/14/15
..these babies !
OK, those are the other extreme. Not sure how they sound, but they look like they are different just to be different.
Take a gander at a few more of these modern classics !
I got lucky, my wife is an engineer and although she was a bit disappointed that "the ugly ones" sounded best she was the first to point out that they were the ones to purchase. Aren't engineers great? I spent a long weekend researching the Harbeth's via their website and there is a lot of information there about why these cabinet and speaker cone choices were made. Apparently a thin wall cabinet with screwed on back and front is neither easy or inexpensive to make. But they do it for the acoustic properties. The speaker cones, while looking simple enough, are extremely rigid. So it was pretty (sorry!) interesting. J.M. has a point too, Harbeth probably can't change the dimensions of the BBC reference speaker without causing some problems at the pro user end. Personally I do not mind the boxy look. Many audiophile speakers look pretentious or gimmicky to me. Boxy before bizarre. But that is just my preference. I am disappointed that Harbeth wants me to leave the grills on though. I think speaker cones look cool. So 70's Hi Fi.
Edits: 05/14/15
I agree that sound quality is a higher priority than looks however the last "plain box" speakers I owned were Polk Model 10's.From there I had Vortex Screens with the black sock (no removable grills), ML Aerius, Magnepan 1.6's, Gallo Ref 3's, Stradas and now KEF LS50's. I just think visible screws around the drivers/cabinet look tacky. If I owned a recording studio, I wouldn't mind but at home, cosmetics do make a difference for me. I know some people think the LS 50's look like a cats butt however I kinda like the look of the drivers.
Take a look at the Devore Orangutan, Audio Note E or J or K, Trenner and Freidl RA, ATC 100 and you will see similarities.
But as one competing maker noted that while he felt the AN's sounded MUCH better than what he was selling "That look won't sell" and sure these lines may sell to the niche audiophile market they won't sell to the masses in enough numbers required by a B&W.
Sell a look first and then shoehorn the best acoustics you can get out of the look as possible and come up with contorted white papers to convince people it sounds good. And if you don't listen and just read those contorted white papers sound pretty good indeed...right up until the point you push play or drop the needle. That's when the fatso speakers rather easily walk away with the crown.
Like my women slim and sexy but I like my speakers fat and ugly.
with black grille cloth. I don't see where there's a problem.
Mark in NC
"The thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains" -Paul Simon
That is what I thought when I took home my Spendor BC-1's from the thrift store. The binding posts had broken off so I had to take the backs off to replace them. I knew the speaker had a very good reputation. Joe Rosen called them the best dynamic speakers in the world, but I could not believe the thin walls and rear mounted drivers. Then I listened, and I have been listening for almost a decade now, with no desire to listen to anything else. Lossey cabinets work.
Dave
Take a look at the Classic Spendor,Stirling Broadcast,ATC ,etc..As you can see that is the style of most British speakers. As the saying goes," Beauty is in the eye of the beholder !" I happen to like that classic look,and so do the many others that buy them !
"It is self evident that if the 'raw' untreated panel is thin, that damping that applied damping will have a proportionately greater beneficial effect than if the panel is thick, where no amount of conventional surface damping can adequately suppress latent peaky resonances. The superiority (although at very high cost) of the 'thin wall' panel philosophy was invented and used by the BBC from the 1960's, backed up by measurements and Research, and is, to our mind, the best overall solution for an acoustically quiet mid band, where the ear is extremely sensitive to buried resonances."
As far as the visual esthetic, it's "Classic Brit," and a matter of taste.
The first is that Harbeth is a prime supplier to the British Broadcasting Corporation's studios worldwide. What that means is that Harbeth's pro speakers (most of which have consumder versions) have to be "drop-in replacements" for the installed base. Many times the installations are in soffits that have custom cut-outs so that the front panels are flush. Obviously, Wilson Benesch's ACT loudspeaker is not a drop-in replacement for anything.
The other answer is that Harbeth believes in enclosures with tuned resonances--that at the end of the day, you can make a more musical loudspeaker that is more affordable by channeling and working with the unavoidable cabinet resonances than by trying to eliminate them totally by brute-force methods.
So Harbeth uses thin-walled "lossy" cabinets. You are free to reject this approach.
I think that within its limitations the P3ESR is one of the nicest little loudspeakers out there, and I think that in the right choice of veneer, it looks great.
FWIW & YMMV.
John
"The first is that Harbeth was a prime supplier to the British Broadcasting Corporation's studios worldwide."Fixed it for you.
The BBC hasn't used them for a long time. Broadcast House uses Dynaudio almost exclusively, Maida Vale uses PMC.
Last year they sold off all the equipment from their UK-based World Service studios and there was not a single 'BBC type' monitor left as they sold those off about 20 years ago. Ebay uk was flooded with them at around that time.
There might still be the odd studio left with Harbeth or others of their ilk but a 'prime supplier' they are not. It is just that Harbeth and Spendor are the only ones who survived without the BBC contracts.
Edits: 05/15/15
I listened to the P3ESR along with the Models 7 and 30.1 and found that the small speaker sounded different and not as good as the other two. Perhaps being a small speaker with small cabinet panels the lossy effect is less which tends to give it a non Harbeth like sound. Well, maybe a wild guess to justify my not liking a famous speaker.
Cheers
Bill
@Marks.
How are they getting around baffle refraction with all those edges ....
They have baffle diffraction, of course when the sound wave hits the edges. But so do almost all speakers. Even if the baffle is flat without raised edges there is diffraction when the sound wave hits the sharp edges of a baffle unless the baffle is properly designed and slowly curves around to the sides. This is expensive so it's usually only done on the super costly speakers that often cost like a car or worse.
Err not so quick, raised edges is about as bad as it gets for refraction and no , good baffle design is not super expense, but it does seems baffle edge refraction is, well expensive ..
What you see is a gap between the front baffle and the side walls. In all the Harbeth models I've seen in person, the side wall edges are flush with the front baffle, not raised. I'm not sure why the gap is there, other than to serve as a mount for the grille.
Anyway, the shape of the baffle edge only makes a difference at frequencies where the size of the geometrical features are a significant fraction of the wavelength. My guesstimate would be ~1/4 wavelength. The gap on Harbeth speakers looks to be around 1/4" or 0.6cm, so the presence of the gap shouldn't really have much effect below 10KHz. And even then, the presence of the gap is just going to change the pattern of ripples not their magnitude. Also, the tweeter's radiation pattern is somewhat directional at those frequencies, so the level of diffracted sound is already well below the direct output. I suspect it's sonically invisible.
In order to achieve a meaningful reduction in diffraction effects by rounding the edges, the edge radius has to be pretty large. Large enough to make wood and MDF enclosures impractical, and certainly impossible if you're following the BBC design philosophy of lossy cabinet walls decoupled from the baffle. A compromise for MDF construction is flat beveled edges like Joseph Audio uses. Note the bevel depth is quite significant; it needs to be in order to make a difference. IMHO all the DIY speaker builders who are using a router bit to put a 1/2" radius on the baffle are just wasting their time. If these guys really wanted or needed to suppress edge diffraction in their designs they would use felt.
Another thing to consider is that it might be better to factor diffraction effects into your design than try to suppress them entirely. A rectangular baffle with square edges is easy to model and there are spreadsheet calculators available. You can adjust the baffle dimensions and tweeter placement until the response is optimized, or maybe even use diffraction to help compensate for the tweeter's response. Designing for a complex curved or beveled shape requires CAD software and something like finite difference time domain or finite element frequency domain simulations. Without that you're just taking shots in the dark.
Hello Dave,Well , Yes ,
The pics i have seen of some of their models have shown raised edges, if i'm wrong then my apologies to Harbeth. As to baffle diffraction, i do agree you need large radius, we used to use at least an 3 inch radius and yes the issue is above 10K where the high frequency smearing takes place. A little baffle smearing is not bad, as it helps coherency between drive units and while felt does clean up the diffraction and high frequency detail , too much kills coherency and make the tweeter "I'm here" sound that some may hate.
As to designing with complex shape or curves , remember prototyping , yep, before and even after software, we actually had to do it...PS: I did take another look and yes it's a gap and then flushed, appreciate the correction, this particular model is 5 db down at 10K thou, so the refraction issues I'm assuming is not shown due to the lack of high frequency energy. I'm sure the tilt down is to give the speaker some balance .
Regards...
Edits: 05/15/15 05/15/15
Perhaps you were thinking of those. But they also had felt surrounding the tweeter.
And I agree that adding felt isn't always a good thing. But I've only tried it as an addition to speakers that weren't originally designed with it.
The Harbeth "look" was the deciding factor of more than one local retailer to drop the line. They had too many complaints that they were just too ugly(bad WAF)though they sounded ok. Of course, there are some who could care less about a speaker's looks as long as they sound good and some might even find the retro look of Harbeths attractive.
.
"A lie is half-way around the world before the truth can get its boots on."
-Mark Twain
to mbnx01
Is that supposed to mean I'm a troll?to chocolate lover: Yes, I realize looks isn't everything, for me really nothing, as i prefer function over form. I'm sure we all know much of the speakers' sound characteristics comes from the cabinet design.
Edits: 05/13/15
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