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In Reply to: RE: Arabesque Speakers: aesthetics vs sound posted by Sordidman on November 03, 2009 at 08:57:37
. . . I see some real pluses. SWEET drivers -- top line ScanSpeak woofers and a Raal true ribbon tweeter. Clever internal cross-section, with no parallel surfaces, and sort of a short tapered line leading to the slot vent on the back. Narrow enough front baffle, with chamfered adjacent sides, which should result in a fairly benign diffraction profile. (Since they don't call these a 2.5 way, I assume that the three woofers are in parallel to gain efficiency, and that the lowpass filter includes appropriate shelving for baffle step compensation). Never having worked with glass as a cabinet material, I'm not familiar with its resonant properties -- maybe, in a design like this, it is in fact superior to plywood or MDF.
But I would still be concerned about undamped organ-pipe resonances in the vertical dimension. Having built several tall narrow cabinets myself,I don't see how these resonances could NOT color the sound. It usually takes a fair amount of wadding crammed into the lower part of the cabinet to damp them out.
And I REALLY wonder why they put so much distance between the tweeter and the upper woofer. Closer is always better, and less than one wavelength at crossover frequency is nearly universal practice these days. Whatever the crossover design (they say 2nd order electrical/3rd order acoustic at 2kHz), that much separation will lead to serious lobing issues on the vertical axis -- ESPECIALLY with a rectangular ribbon tweeter, which has wide horizontal dispersion but almost no vertical dispersion more than a few degrees off axis.
I'd like to see a comprehensive review of these, with a full suite of measurements. Hello, JA?
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