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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Dunlavy types vs new technology posted by jeremy on September 27, 2001 at 12:42:31:
I don't think cone and dome speakers in a box are new technology. IIRC, Acoustic Research perfected the dome tweeter and dome midrange in the mid-1960s.I think it would be better to say that in the last 30 years or so, we have seen to optimization of old technology. Computing power is able to replace a lot of trial-and-error. Materials technology is much better -- which shows up in better cabinets and better drivers. And measurements are much better, not only of output, but of cabinet vibrations, spurious resonances from drivers, etc.
Most of the new technology I can think of has had mixed success. Electrostatics are still problematical. The Heil tweeter which truly was new technology is not being used. Perhaps non-electrostatic planar speakers (Magnepans) are the only successful "new" technology -- and I first heard them in 1972.
What I haven't had the nerve to listen to (because they're so far out of my price range) is the Avantgarde horn speakers. Although I recognize their advantages, I was never a fan of Klipschorns; and they never impressed me except with their ability to play ear-splittingly loud. I would love to hear of the Avantgarde folks have successfully optimized the classic horn speaker, as they claim to have.
Of course, even Avantgarde has abandoned the effort to reproduce bass with a horn in a consumer speaker, which was one of the things I liked best about the Klipschorn. The absence of stored energy in the bass system gave the Klipschorn the most realistic (although not the lowest) bass reproduction I have ever heard because its reproduction of bass transients was so good.
The Klipschorn uses a bass horn and it is flat down to the mid-30 hz range. By contrast, the Avantgarde horn cuts off at either 150 or 200 Hz, depending upon the model. It uses 200 watts per channel of solid state power to reproduce bass with conventional drivers in a box; so Avantgarde's efficiency claims are somewhat less impressive. Even a conventional speaker could show pretty high efficiency if it were not called upon to reproduce frequencies below 150 Hz.
Not much that's really new, even though a lot of it is better.
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Follow Ups
- Re: "new technology" - Bruce from DC 16:17:23 09/28/01 (3)
- Re: "new technology" - Tom Brennan 03:58:58 09/29/01 (2)
- Re: horniness - Bruce from DC 08:39:48 09/29/01 (1)
- Re: horniness - oitzman 17:54:32 10/02/01 (0)
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