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You missed out Music Reference

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13th Duke of Wymbourne

In Reply to: RE: Newport Planar & Dipole News 1 posted by josh358 on June 06, 2016 at 15:35:09

Roger Modjeski was showing his 'new' ESL speakers. I put new in inverted commas because he said the demo pair was ten years old but he is only now producing them for sale. He gave a 30 min lecture on ESL design on Saturday evening and his approach to bass reproduction - he uses small sealed sub-woofers sharply crossed-over at 100Hz-ish (can't remember for sure). The subs have 8" drivers working below resonance in acoustic suspension mode. He prefers several small subs distributed in the room as the best match for panels. The ESL panels are $10k a pair and are line sources designed not to beam.

I was wandering the halls at close of show on Sunday and made it in to the last Magneplanar demo. I didn't get to sit in the hot seat because that was reserved for Jonathon Valin & Julie Mullins of TAS. The sound was very nice but I didn't hear any particular imaging magic. Wendell said that the set-up only works for one hot-seat, which Julie confirmed on the way out. Wendell also said that the three speaker approach is not a commercial venture, it's just a gimmic he's put together for dealers to stimulate interest in maggies, not to sell them in three's. He wouldn't say how the processing was done but James Bongiorno was a proponent of three channels using a Blumlien shuffler approach to create sum and difference channels (see link)

Regards
13DoW
http://www.sst.audio/trinaural/ (Open in New Window)

Follow Ups:

RE: You missed out Music Reference - josh358 14:55:49 06/07/16 (10)
Damn, I'm sorry I missed that. I also missed Roger Sanders' room, to my dismay.

By the way, we were literally feet from one another without knowing it since I was in the room next door when he showed the system to Jon Valln and Julie Mullins. I did have a chance on Friday to listen from the sweet spot and can confirm that the magic collapses when you leave the central position. I didn't find head position critical, in that it didn't require head in a vice listening -- I had to consciously lean over to lose the holographic effect. So it's one person listening for full effect, but Wendell told me that he doesn't expect it to be a problem in practice because will be showing the system to individual customers.

AFAIK, all two-three channel systems work basically the same way, but the magic is in the details -- the matrix, the logic, etc.
- Roger Sanders and other dipole stuff. - 13th Duke of Wymbourne 15:55:36 06/07/16 (9)
  I forgot to mention Sanders but I did visit. The demo was the same as it has always been at the Newport Show, same three chairs arranged in line-astern fashion and the same music played from a Tascam digital recorder. When I mentioned that the room was always the same but always sounded good I was told there was a difference this year that the digital cross-over now incorporates room correction.
  
  As an ESL-57 owner I've been contemplating the best way to augment bass so I was interested at the different approaches on show. The Sanders Sound transmission line bass sounded very good but I wasn't so impressed with that from the small sealed Music Reference subs. Voxativ had dipole bass units to reinforce their speakers (looked like the Linkwitz Phoenix woofer design) that sounded OK. In general I did like the bass from the moving coil dipole speakers (eg. Kyron & Emerald Physics). There was a new company with moving coil dipoles from Germany (I think, and I can't remember their name and could not even find them for a second visit). The former are equalized with DSP the latter is passive but does not have woofer equalization. The designer was adamant that he was able to get around the dipole bass cancellation problem by careful drive unit selection so that the rear wave launches straight back and does not leak around to cancel the front wave. The bass wasn't super strong but did sound good.
  
  Talking of DSP correction, I was disappointed with the DEQX demonstration.
  I was hoping to hear the improvement on real speakers but they showed a custom set-up. The idea was to show that you could 'simply' put three good drivers in a box and let the DSP create optimal cross-overs (in a tri-amped system). But, you could not do a correction-on vs. correction-off comparison. For that they had a pair of public address horns from a bus station and demo'ed correction-on vs correction-off for that - very impressive but I'd rather hear how much a top system can be improved.
  
  Regards
  13doW
  - RE: Roger Sanders and other dipole stuff. - airheadair 16:58:45 06/08/16 (1)
    Any comments on how the Music Reference ESL"s sounded?
    - Sorry... - 13th Duke of Wymbourne 14:24:18 06/09/16 (0)
      ..when I walked in Roger was waxing lyrical about Quad bass problems and how his approach was better that my techie side took over thinking about it and I didn't give them a good listen. But, what I hear was not bad but not memorable.
      
      13DoW
  - RE: Roger Sanders and other dipole stuff. - BDP24 21:41:06 06/07/16 (1)
    Duke, were the dipoles by Gradient? They are the people who offered the dipole sub for the Quad 63 in the 80's and 90's. Gradient is actually located in Finland, and I believe still offer dipole subs.
    
    Speaking of dipole subs and Quads, the sub you should become aware of is a joint offering by GR Research and Rythmik Audio, developed by those company's Danny Richie and Brian Ding. It consists of a pair (or trio) of 12" Servo-Feedback controlled paper coned woofers installed in opposing directions in a W- or H-frame, powered and controlled by the Rythmik Servo-Feedback 370w plate amp. To counter-act the dipole cancellation, Brian installs a 6dB/octave shelving circuit in the amp, which enables response to below 20Hz at robust SPL.
    
    The sub is offered only as a kit (priced at around $1500/pr shipped for the 2-woofer version), comprised of two amps and either four (standard) or six (at extra cost) woofers, the frame being the responsibility of the user. Several GR Research AudioCircle Forum contributors offer H-frame flat packs (very easy to assemble), one CNC cut from 1.5" thick MDF! There is a lot of information about the sub available on that forum.
    - RE: Roger Sanders and other dipole stuff. - 13th Duke of Wymbourne 15:26:31 06/09/16 (0)
      Thanks for the info about the Rythmik kit. I've contemplated building the Linkwitz Phoenix dipole woofer, which is probably very similar.
      
      The Voxativ sub unit is made by them (see link). It looks like the Linkwitz dipole except I could see that the two drive units are facing each other in the H-frame. Ideally, they should be facing the same direction so that when the cones move towards each other one cone is going forwards and the other backwards. That way any asymmetry in the cone movement cancels out.
      
      The UK magazine Hi-Fi World ran some articles on dipole bass 20 years ago. The editor (Noel Keywood) used ESL-63s as his reference and mated them with Celestion SL6000 dipole woofer. He published his own cross-over and the magazine published a simple DIY dipole subwoofer design.
      
      At this stage I don't know which way to go, a dipole system is appealing but in a recent thread about adding a sub-woofer to Quads, Kentaja stated his preference to let Quads run full range and just use a closed-box subwoofer to fill-in the final couple of octaves. Then there is the approach of AudioKinesis (the real Asylum Duke) of using distributed box (10" cones, vented) subs to smooth room nodes that was discussed in a recent thread in the Speaker forum (and Music Reference is taking a similar approach though with 8" cones in small sealed boxes).
      
      Anyway, sub-woofing is not at the top of my audio priority spending list but I will check out Rythmik.
      
      Cheers
      13DoW
      The Sanders Sound transmission line woofers work well
      http://www.voxativ.com/en/loudspeakers/the-987-system/ (Open in New Window)
  - RE: Roger Sanders and other dipole stuff. - josh358 16:04:04 06/07/16 (4)
    Yes, I had the same problem with the DEQX room. Worse, actually, since they were having trouble firing up the system so I basically only heard the horn demo. But Alan Langford did give me some very useful information about how to set up the DEQX with Maggies, including custom builds. It turns out they have curves for many models. Otherwise, he recommends measuring them out of doors (or in a large space like a gymnasium) at 3 meters.
    - Anybody check out Analysis Audio? - TitaniumTroy 19:41:51 06/07/16 (3)
      Anybody have the time to check out Analysis Audio, if so how did they sound?
      - RE: Anybody check out Analysis Audio? - DrChaos 14:22:41 06/08/16 (1)
        
        In Reply to: RE: Anybody check out Analysis Audio? posted by TitaniumTroy on June 07, 2016 at 19:41:51
        
        I did.
        It sounded good, but not $22K good. As always show conditions are poor, and music selection is often poor so a true test isn't always possible. I think it had better low bass than my MG 3.6, but I felt the maggies might have better midrange.
        I thought the Sanders 10D---biamp with electronic crossover---was the best sound I heard over all rooms.
        Partly because they had diversified large orchestral music which is, in my opinion, a more stringent test, but it was just overall great.
        Other than the narrowish sweet spot---it was wonderful, clear and true in tone.
        I didn't hear many rooms of course, but my top three independent of price were MBL 101, the Sanders, and a big surprise to me, the PTE Phoenix SG internally self-powered/biamped speakers.
        
        Edits: 06/08/16 06/08/16 06/08/16
        
        RE: Anybody check out Analysis Audio? - BDP24 15:04:06 06/08/16 (0)
        
        In Reply to: RE: Anybody check out Analysis Audio? posted by DrChaos on June 08, 2016 at 14:22:41
        
        I wasn't able to attend this year, but I did in 2015, and really liked the Sanders ESL's---best sound I heard at the show. The Vandersteen/ARC room (by Santa Monica retailer Optimal Enchantment) was "eh", as was Magnepan's. Okay, but not great. The other good system I heard was the EAR/Townshend/Marten---really, really good. It should have been---the Marten speakers (Coltrane model) retail for a hundred grand!
      - RE: Anybody check out Analysis Audio? - josh358 05:43:38 06/08/16 (0)
        
        In Reply to: RE: Anybody check out Analysis Audio? posted by TitaniumTroy on June 07, 2016 at 19:41:51
        
        I did -- I'll post my impressions and what I learned later today.

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