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In Reply to: RE: Why does Magnepan get no respect from Wilson and Magico people? posted by Potrzebie on January 10, 2015 at 15:54:46
Well, some people care more about the price than the sound. In fact, Harman did a study that found that people judge expensive-looking speakers to have better sonics when they can see them.
That being said, people have different sonic priorities, depending on the kind of music they prefer, how loud they listen, etc. Maggies and other planars excel in reproducing acoustical instruments with great naturalism. But most people listen to studio pop and if you want gut-thumping bass and a sense of in-your-room presence, dynamics can be a better choice. Or, as Green Lantern says, if you want party speakers that let you walk around the room -- not to mention wife acceptance factor.
I think us planar guys are born rather than made -- the first time we hear them, we know they're magical. And for me, anyway, experience with the sound of live instruments has a lot to do with that, though in my experience everyone is impressed by the planar ability to transport you into another space and disappear.
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I have always wanted the thick full kicking bass and mids I got from my old JBL centuries with the NS1000 Be tweeters, and from my Vandy 2C (both in a smaller space). But can't resist the natural full sized presentation of planars. Hence the constant obsession to get the Tympani to sound more dynamic and extended.
What I love about the Tympanis is that they're a good compromise -- more dynamic and with more bass extension than most planars, more transparent than cones, more musical than horns. They're a great compromise for someone like me who favors acoustical music but also uses the system for rock and films.
But of course they are a compromise, stats being more transparent and cones having more slam and high eff/high SPL studio monitors having a dynamic ease that's missing in the home systems I've heard or owned.
I just don't know of any ideal solution! You can get a quasi ribbon driver to play as loud as you want in the mids and highs, but true ribbons and stats are another matter. Since the limitation with ribbons is metal fatigue, I wonder whether you couldn't do it with a laminated ribbon like those in the later Apogees. The advantage here would be in resonance reduction, otherwise it's essentially a 2" or 3" wide quasi-ribbon. It wouldn't have the purity of a minimal mass all-aluminum ribbon but it would sound better than a quasi-ribbon. Another possibility would be a low-resonance line source stat with a Quad-style time delay to give you a hemispherical wavefront. For bass, an H-frame tower with true pistonic servo woofers. Or the German plane wave setup -- I think the total elimination of room modes would have an advantage over *any* woofer technology. Or -- this has intrigued me ever since I read the proposal -- a *near field* sub with equalization which is possible since when it's near you the response aberrations are minimum phase.
I am pretty sure I want a cylindrical wave over any other form. I don't get real height cues with spherical wavelaunch like the KEF UniQ speakers.
There is something lacking in the density of dipole's output. That thing that keeps instrumental images feeling ethereal and not quite solid. It is what Swami got out of his double maggie setup that was so fulfilling. That makes me think it is the more uniform reflections from omnipolar cylindrical radiation through the mids that is lacking with dipoles. It might be some of what is so much more satisfying in a Limage setup where more of what you hear is from the shorter front of room reflections.
I am intending on trying a Limage bass+ attached Rooze mid/tweet setup. I got some pipe insulator tubing to widen the speaker edge to avoid any direct radiation escaping the dipole null.
I am not sure the lack of room resonances is so significant so long as none of them are overwhelmingly prominent. I think your particular sonar like hearing is not shared by many. Mos of us don't get to hear our front wall's geometry in the speaker's presentation and be able to pick it out. That said, the Hframe dipole bass like the GR Research and Linkwitz designs do seem to accomplish most of that.
Back when I was experimenting with my MMG's, the two setups that worked the best were what one might call conventional -- Blumlein triangle, angle in on axis, at the sweet point for planars which in a small room like mine is as far from the front wall as practical -- and something along the lines of the HK setup, which I'd say was second best.
Agree with you on the cylindrical wavelaunch. Someone once said (Harry
F. Olson?) that there were only two correct dispersion patterns for a speaker, point source and line source. And only full-height line sources reproduce height cues. The reason for this I think is twofold; They dnn't mask the floor bounce (learned that from you, way back when) because they don't have a point source floor bounce of their own, their floor bounce merely makes them seem like a longer line source; and they "average out" the vertical transfer function of the pinna, head, and torso, which deprives the ear of the other cue it normally uses to localize sources vertically.
However, it just occurred to me this morning that this could have something to do with the ethereal quality that affects dipoles. Part of that is wonderful, like a window opening up on the original soundfield. But part of it ma be that the vertical pinna cues are gone *missing*. It's sort of like the phantom image in stereo, isn't it? In that unless the sound is panned left or right it lacks the solidity of a physical driver for much the same reason -- wrong pinna cues. Center channel speakers reduce this effect in stereo and tri-center reduces it even more, in fact two-channel stereo listening *doesn't work* after you've been listening to tri-center for a while.
I've also heard a lot of that ethernial quality with the image that spreads beyond the ears with crosstalk cancellation.
Of course there are other possible explanations and the dipole null could be one. It isn't natural after all to have no sound coming from the first reflection point at the sides. All I know about this is that it has the same effect as any early room reflection, that is, it acts like artificial reverb, and that people tend to prefer it in listening tests to front wall reflections, and that it tends to extend the image laterally. It also, like any reflection, tends to smear the image, and effect I heard clearly when I used mirrors to put the dipole null right at the first reflection point.
Not quite sure what's going on with the double Maggies, I didn't have time to read those threads closely. The field of a quadrapole has nulls so it would depend on the orientation of the speakers wrt the room and listener.
I think decoupling the woofers from the mid/tweets could be effective, as long as you can maintain the phasing.
Room modes have a huge effect on bass performance so no golden ears required! Not only do they cause major peaks and nulls in low frequency amplitude response but they cause ringing which smears the sound. Of course dipole woofers don't excite as many room modes as omnis which I think is one of the main advantages of planar bass. So they're much less of a problem with Tympanis than with dynamics. I can't claim that the problems of my wall's geometry were detected by my special golden ears either, since when I was trying to get the MMG's to work in front of the mantle I invited my very non-technical stepmother to listen to the best result. As usual, no prompting. She immediately said "It sounds like everything is coming from the mantle!" Which left me with a frown on my face since I'd half convinced myself that I'd solved the problem.
I've also heard smaller room features like windows but the effect is much subtler, except where one side opens up onto a hall -- then the sound on the left wraps on the left wall as dipoles normally do because of the oblique reflection at the corner, while the sound on the right has much more depth.
I think the lack of pinae cues from the speaker's floor bounce is not an issue in the ethereal sound because vertical sealed dynamic driver arrays don't seem to produce that quality. Unfortunately, they also endow fine detail with a certain thickness and solidity...Also the Jenzen box ESLs seem to lack that degree of ethereal signature - which is even more pronounced with dipole ESLs . Also my very brief encounter with the Beveridge ESL didn't seem that the images were ethereal, just that dynamics were limited and volume too low to be satisfying.
I got some wainscoating panels too to make the Limage bass + Rooze top setup more precise and I have a couple of msecs of XO delay capacity on the bass panels. The all Rooze setup with the tympani was too difficult for me to time and phase align, Measurements were all over the place so were no help. But there was less of an ethereal quality to it midrange and up.
I have no real experience of a room where bass resonances are largely eliminated so I can't tell what their absence sounds like. I can tell that Tympani bass is far more articulate than anything in a box but things like heroically braced Focal Nova Utopias Wilson puppies and the like. and even then it is not quite there unless the room is bass trapped nearly to the point of covering the walls.
Ok, so you are not an old bat. ...But you do have a very well trained ear.
"I think the lack of pinae cues from the speaker's floor bounce is not an issue in the ethereal sound because vertical sealed dynamic driver arrays don't seem to produce that quality."
That would seem to rule that theory out, wouldn't it. I've long wondered whether it wasn't caused by the comb filtering from the reflected backwave.
Another possible factor is the comb filtering that occurs as a consequence of diffraction around the baffle.
Not sure about the effective absence of sidewall reflections. Research says that they contribute to a sense of width and lateral image spread, just as the front wall reflections contribute to a sense of depth. (In both cases, assuming the path length is long enough -- the subjective effect will depend on that, and also relative levels.) When I try orienting the dipole null to eliminate the first sidewall reflections, what I hear is an increase in clarity -- a clinical sound, like in an acoustically dead control room.
Satie,
Please explain the acoustic purpose of the wainscoting? I am currently planning the renovation of my living/listening (livestening?) room, and have been debating making a 3'-4' wainscot around the entire room, but for aesthetic purposes.
I can't claim my wainscoting is aesthetic,my walls are covered with pink insulation pressed to the wall between wainscoting.
I got a couple of extra panels so that I can place them in front of non-uniform areas so that I can bounce the midtweet output off it in the Rooze setup/with Limage bass panels. I can then adjust for asymmetry in the room to have precise angles and paths of bounce and thus also a way to calculate delays to achieve time alignment. I am hoping I don't need to glue damping compound on to the wainscoting but first rap test was not promising.
If you're doing Rooze, I don't think you want damping material at the first reflection points, since you're primarily listening ot the reflection. Though when I tried it down here it was surprisingly insensitive to the nature of the surfaces.
I am talking about damping the back of the wainscoting panels if they ring. I chose them because they did not seem to do badly on tone when pinged, and had a hard surface. If I have to damp them I will bungee cord styrofoam to it and possibly trap viscoelastic foam in betwenn the styrofoam and wainscoting.
I used styrofoam reflectors before and they were a bit midrangey in their response,
Ah, OK, sorry I misunderstood. Still not fully caught up.
Know what you mean about styrofoam. It doesn't have enough mass to reflect the lows and it also ends to resonate at midrange frequencies.
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