|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
207.200.116.6
In Reply to: Re: the wait is over check out these new and improved VMPS, posted by ekovalsky@cox.net on October 20, 2005 at 14:21:03:
No cavity resonances, slot is mostly absorptive.
No panel vibrations, wave guide never touches the front baffle and is quite heavy.
Nice cosmetics to come.
Spectacular sound--competitive with (or better than) a certain very large system you're familiar with!"Diffraction slot" is the closest technical term for that part of the wave guide.
Follow Ups:
but much more elegantly
Sorry, no. The "opening curtain" baffle on the Karlson enclosure was a load for the woofer backwave and had little to do with Constant Directivity.
http://home.planet.nl/~ulfman/
The Karlson site describes the enclosure as bass reflex with an open exponentially cut port. The driver is coaxial. Again, nothing to do with constant directivity or my invention.
There is many many references to the radiation control through the use of a slot. You just didn't read it.Many prosound manufactures also use slots for directional control in line arrays today. It is quite effective but nothing new.
There's a lot of stuff there, and you're right, I at any rate didn't read it all. Just the theory page.
- This signature is two channel only -
The implementation for planar speakers is new and sufficiently different from prior art to warrant issuance of a patent to me.
"The implementation for planar speakers is new and sufficiently different from prior art to warrant issuance of a patent to me."I'm patent examiner myself and deal with prior art search, judgement on novelty and inventive step every day.
As you might know, a patent is granted for inventions which are new AND involve an inventive step. Using a known device/solution in a similar application may not be considered as being inventive since the skilled person, in this case the speaker designer, would recognize the known technical advantages of the known device/solution and simply implement them. Your waveguide on a planar speaker may well be new, but if there were similar waveguides used on cone driver speakers I for one would raise an objection for reasons of lack of invenive step.
Of course, it depends on what prior art the examiner is able to retrieve during his search. Note that there is lots of prior art that has never made its way into a commercialized product so you may not be aware of that art.
Well do I know of which you speak. In my youth, for five years, I prepared translations for patent attorneys in Munich. Claims, disclosures, continuations, challenges, searches, Examiner communications, opponents filings, the works.Now, my patent attorney is sure we can differentiate my invention from the prior art (patent attorneys are always sure they can do that). Plus we are obliged to make the Patent Office aware of ANY prior art, no matter how obscure or tangential. Helpful posters to my forum and elsewhere have sent more than one of these along.
I've never seen anything like our CD device on a planar system. Have you??
In almost every case you can differentiate the invention (as claimed) from prior art, but this will mean that the claim is probably very restricted, which limits your possibilities and my hence be of no great interest, commercially speaking.
The corresponding units in our European classification which would have to be searched, contain about 1300 documents, you most certainly don't know them all. You are obliged to cite prior art in the application, but what you cite will be only a fraction of what's actually existing. If not, a prior art search would not be needed.I'm searching US classes whenever appropriate, does the USPTO examiner search European classes?
I did not look at all 1300 documents, and I don't know how your claims are drafted, but from my quick search I would conclude that an inventive step objection might be possible. The fact that your waveguide panel is (possibly) new on planar speakers does not automatically mean it's also inventive. But that depends on what documents the examiner finds and how he approaches the inventive step issue. I know from personal experience, that for those applications which are treated by USPTO first and then go the European route, in most cases we at EPO find better documents than the USPTO. And I had also cases where the US examiner granted the claim and I rejected it, using the very same documents.
Good luck in any case.
I can see how using it with a planar is different. Don't much care about the patent but congratulations. I just see many parallels of what you are doing and what Karlson and others have been doing for years.How do you eliminate standing waves and cancelation between the element and the slot and still bend the wave?
Close proximity and absorption inside the slot and under the wave guide.I think I mistook you for one of the many hostile trolls in this thread. My apologies. You can email me with specific questions since this site has a no-advertising policy and too much technical information about the invention might be construed as promotional material.
"Spectacular sound--competitive with (or better than) a certain very large system you're familiar with!"Not in my room :) At least in the opinion of myself and my wife, and audiophile and non-audiophile friends who have heard them both. And amateurish measurements I made of both speaker systems with the same equipment (posted on AudioCircle, email me for direct link) give some objective support of this.
Of course my VMPS didn't have the benefit of your new technology, and who knows... maybe they were off by just a fingernail full of putty or a 1 degree turn of an L-pad :-D
If you are so confident that a VMPS system can compete with the Exotica Grand Reference then why not send a pair of your best to HP so he can do a legitimate comparison ? TAS has favorably reviewed VMPS in the past so there shouldn't be any bad blood there. Given the huge price differential, a favorable review head-to-head with HP's reference could really give your sales a boost.
I'd be particularly interested in what he thinks of the mid-upper bass range, which I would have to say is the single biggest area of improvement. Listening to percussion is a totally different experience going from VMPS to Alon/Nola. Below 350hz those 8" Seas magnesium cones you so hate make some spectacular sound in their expanded array configuration, and Carl Marchisotto has seemlessly (from a listening and measurement standpoint) integrated them with the line arrays of 5" alnico cones and Raven ribbons. I did have to stray from Carl's recommended straight ahead positioning, in my setup adding a little toe achieved excellent time alignment of the outputs of the midrange and tweeter.
Oh, and the Alon sub towers start kicking right where the bass on my two VMPS systems dropped into oblivion.
My current setup sounds quite spectacular. Even more so when I had the amazingly good Blue Circle hybrid amp on them. This winter I'll be choosing between the LAMM and Blue Circle hybrids, ASR Emitter, DarTZeel, and fully rebuilt/modified TacT amps.
Maybe the Alons didn't present well at one or more shows. I heard them at one and was impressed enough to later buy them when I found a pair at a reasonable price. Audio press generally seems to have liked them at the shows too.
I was just teasing you. I'm sure the Alons perform very well. But for VMPS it's a whole new ball game. The waveguide makes for smoother, solider, deeper bass even with CD EQ. Without it bass is a lot more prominent, as you might expect.I'll take you up on that visit when I'm in Arizona. Feuding is kinda silly. Much of what you said about our products, pro and con, was based in fact. I can understand bass problems in a small room and am glad you are expanding it. However, you could have just added a Larger Sub or two. Didn't I read you were planning to add additional bass columns to your current system?
We are now pretuning our passives and setting level controls at the factory to make the speakers "plug and play". You can still do very small adjustments if you like.
My invention is a neat and simple solution to curing the directivity problems of planar speakers wider than a 20 kHz wavelength, and there are great benefits to maintaining that source width down to 280Hz as we do in the invention. I'll be publishing measurements that show improved response in the crossover region, better than with standard first-order filters (also used by the Alon--there's good reasons for it!)
You're welcome back on the VMPS Forum, pro or con. Doesn't hurt to get a Second Opinion from the Good Doctor.
Thanks. I look forward to the progress reports on your new patent.
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: