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RE: Agree to disagree.

I don't find them unconvincing in the low end. I love planar bass because it doesn't sound mushy and bloated like dynamic bass so often does. There's real detail in the notes. It sounds like real instruments.

Of course, bass is very room sensitive and whether there's enough of it -- or too much -- depends on the room. Manufacturers can only design to an average room. It also depends on the specific model. The smaller ones are bass shy and pretty much want a sub. But I heard some wonderful bass from the 3.7's a couple of weeks ago. Not subterranean, they're good to maybe 40 Hz. But clean as a whistle and beautifully controlled. And the Tympanis still have the best midbass I've ever heard. Full-height line source planars are even better than you'd expect from that web page (you don't need the math for that, BTW, just look at the pictures at the bottom) because if you arrange them and your seating correctly, they act as a single bass array and *completely eliminate* room modes below a certain frequency. You can do the same thing with dynamic drivers, but it requires multiple drivers and electronic trickery. I hit on this trick years ago when I used Tympani 1-D's but had only a partial understanding of the theory behind it. Now I understand that below the spatial Nyquist frequency of the speakers and their reflected images, you get a plane wave, and with proper seating the reflected rear wave cancels even the depth axial mode for bass that's smooth as a baby's bottom.

Here's an interesting thread on the double bass array. Most people don't realize that line source planars can do the same thing without any electronics or rear speakers, if you get the setup right.



Edits: 04/28/12 04/28/12

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  • RE: Agree to disagree. - josh358 12:30:12 04/28/12 (0)

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