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Some of things that Mr. Linkwitz advocate's that stuck out to me are diffusion at the front of the room, and absorption at the rear. Speaker wise sealed not ported designs or better yet open baffle. Much more attention needs to be placed on speaker radiation patterns, speaker positioning, and room acoustics.
I heard his Orion speaker at AXPONA 2013, while I liked it's open baffle sound. The bass seemed slow, and the image size small in vertical dispersion. Being a Magnepan owner I prefer it's 6' ft wave launch and the True Ribbon Tweeter has 180' degree dispersion, lobes and all. Maybe it was the room acoustics that were off, however I would take the Zen Acoustics, YG Camel, Sony SS AR1 , Martin Logan Montis, and Focal Utopia Scalla over the Orion.
FYI my current room acoustics are tri corner bass traps floor to ceiling, all corners. QRD diffusors on the front wall and corner and side wall of the corner. With more diffusion soon to try on my ceiling, and perhaps side wall and rear wall. I believe he advocates more common room furnishing type items for acoustic treatment purposes. He also promotes thinking of the listening room as a wave guide not a box.
"Here are 10 examples of highly rated loudspeakers, which are representative of the "high-end" today. All are very pricey except for the small KEF LS50 two-way speaker in the center.
There are some real engineering marvels amongst these speakers, like the MBL Radial Strahler. It is the only speaker amongst these that has constant directivity at all frequencies. Horizontally it is omni-directional – as in this graph - and thus would meet my criteria for a high sound quality speaker, but unfortunately it has vented ports for unnatural bass enhancement. Besides, some directionality, like in a dipole or cardioid, is advantageous because it increases the direct to reverberant ratio at the listening position.
With the exception of the horn speakers and the Magneplanar open-baffle radiator, all speakers here have ports. Also all use passive crossovers and external power amplifiers.
The Magneplanar uses large radiating panels and a long high frequency ribbon is not an acoustically small radiator and therefore has radiation lobes. It makes its interaction with the room difficult to predict. It also suffers in bass volume capability. Never-the-less it comes close to my ideal loudspeaker concept.
The horn loudspeakers next to it are highly directional, but their directionality varies considerably with frequency of radiation. They are multi-beamers. Thus the reverberant field in the room is relatively weak for most frequencies. To me they sound like big headphones at a distance, creating a phantom scene that is uncomfortably close and colored.
The TAD 3-way and KEF Blade use a coaxial design of midrange and tweeter, which gives a smooth transition in the polar pattern between the two transducers and a smooth roll-off in the off-axis response as the speaker becomes increasingly forward directional with higher frequency. Again, they are omnis at low frequencies.
Both speakers and most others hereuse strategically placed internal bracing to minimize spurious radiation from the enclosure surfaces. All the box speakers here must deal with the acoustic cavity behind the cone and how to dissipate the airborne energy that should not be re-radiated into the room.
The B&W 801 speaker goes for wide horizontal and vertical dispersion and low diffraction with its spherical midrange and tweeter baffles. But it does not go far enough to produce a neutral sounding reverberant field in the room.
The Dynaudio loudspeaker with its symmetrical vertical driver arrangement achieves a narrow vertical radiation pattern, but possibly with lobing.
The Spendor box speaker continues in the BBC tradition of monitor design and has in my opinion a host of cabinet and diffraction issues. Again it really exemplifies what is wrong with the box loudspeaker paradigm and its generic loudspeaker sound.
The best recognized of this type of box speakers is probably the Wilson line of speakers, to the point of having become status symbols."
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Topic - Linkwitz, SOA with Speakers, Maggies - TitaniumTroy 15:22:21 04/20/14 (2)
- RE: Linkwitz, SOA with Speakers, Maggies - johnvb 06:06:07 04/21/14 (1)
- RE: Linkwitz, SOA with Speakers, Maggies - Davey 06:38:29 04/21/14 (0)
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