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Planar Speaker Asylum Welcome! Need support, you got it. Or share your ideas and experiences. |
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In Reply to: Thanks, but... posted by slapshot on March 19, 2012 at 18:49:32:
Yes. It's economics.There are tons of standard drivers you can buy in a catalog, manufactured on an assembly line, and with a moderate amount of effort and some software you can make something decent. These days the products from major manufacturers are pretty impressive & high tech.
Average people think that $200 is a reasonable amount of money to spend on a *pair* of speakers, and they want some bass at that price.
There are, just now, some small planar drivers that you can buy in a catalog, planar midranges and ribbon tweeters---all for a much higher price than moderate level standard cones 'n' domes, though they often have superb performance.
But none for a full-range planar driver, they are all bespoke for a couple of reasons.
a) they're much more expensive
b) they're much harder to do well. If you were naive and tried to make a planar magnetic full-range speaker, odds are that it would be woeful, whereas a newbie, with some instruction can make a decent speaker from a box and two standard drivers. For planars there is a large amount of custom manufacturing knowledge and lore and special tricks (like how on Magnepan panels the tension stretching the mylar in the frame is not uniform, but is higher on top vs the bottom in just the special way to alter the resonances in combination with the tuning dots).
c) along with 'b', there is no clear cookbook theory and software combining measurements with directions on how to design systems with them, especially the bass. Even Stereophile has problems they admit measuring their properties in a usefully informative way. This property makes raw drivers difficult to sell in a catalog as a commercial product, whereas standard drivers can be characterized with a small number of numerical parameters which have physically meaningful values in a lumped-circuit approximation/analogy for the acoustic properties. Big planars, it's a huge nasty electro-elastic partial differential equation combining fluid mechanics, solid mechanics and the electronics. Without a NASA or DOD budget for R&D you won't get a good first principles physical model.Electrostatics are damn expensive for all sorts of obvious reasons (high voltage, having to coat the various large surfaces etc etc, planar magnetics expensive for other obvious reasons ($$$ on magnets & frame) and unobvious reasons (has to be integrated with physical frame, which is always the most expensive part).
Magnepan is the low price leader as a fully vertically integrated manufacturer. The very few planar-magnetic competitors, e.g. Eminent Technology, Analysis Audio, Wisdom, BG, or the dearly lamented Apogee either are not full range planar (Eminent tech) or are much more expensive.
Edits: 03/19/12 03/19/12
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Follow Ups
- RE: Thanks, but... - DrChaos 23:04:02 03/19/12 (1)
- RE: Thanks, but... - pistonengine 23:22:37 03/19/12 (0)
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