Home Planar Speaker Asylum

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RE: Should we send a "representative" to Magnepan?

There's apparently a paper on chaotic behavior in planar diaphragms -- seems it leads to the generation of subharmonics. Unfortunately, I haven't read it, just seen it mentioned somewhere or other, so I don't now the magnitude of the effect. But what with reflections from the edges of the diaphragm, I do know that you're going to have traveling waves, and these are going to affect the distance of the conductors to the magnets. Also, the diaphragm dishes. Some of this can presumably be incorporated into the transfer function, but even if you could accurately model the speaker you can only use a one-dimensional parameter, voltage, to control a two-dimensional surface. That's why I suspect that, in the absence of cone breakup, a dynamic driver is a better match for DSP -- you have only to control the motion of the voice coil to achieve ideal pistonic motion.

Just speculation, of course. But I've seen some amazing measurements off self-powered speakers, Satie sent me a waterfall plot way back when that was beyond belief.

I've found that redbook can really be surprisingly good. Years ago, I had a good converter at home and tried A/Bing some LP's with and without conversion on my 1-D's. I wasn't able to hear a difference. Of course, live recordings are more demanding than LP's and redbook can apparently be succesfully ABX'd when downconverted from 192/24, but I think the difference is subtle at best. I think it got a bad rap owing to the poor quality of early implementations and bad mixes. So curiously, the reason to get new 192/24 releases typically has more to do with the fact that more of them were mastered with audiophiles in mind than with the bit rate itself. (The effect of the bit depth is easy to calculate. 24 bits is needed for music of the widest dynamic range played at original levels. That immediately rules out most everything we do at home. But 16 probably isn't quite enough, home systems can generally do about 115 dB on peaks so you need about 125 dB of dynamic range.) In any case, I think you're right that advanced converters can help even with redbook, perhaps even more than with high def recordings, because the reconstruction filters have to be better. And spot on about the difficulty of interpreting measurements. There are some good ways to test, e.g., multiple passes through a A/D-D/A cycle. Some converters handle this with aplomb, you can do it 100 times and still can't hear any degradation. Others fail on the first attempt. The question is, which ones?


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  Michael Percy Audio  


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