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I gather from one of your recent posts that you're a manufacturer of an OTL-friendly array loudspeaker. Is that correct?If so, that's great news! An array speaker can easily be wired in a high impedance OTL-friendly configuration (though some loudness-tapering techniques might be difficult to implement while maintaining high impedance).
It sounds like your speaker will have an OTL amplifier built in. Will it also be available without the built-in amplifier?
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Hi Duke,well, now, that's a good question. hadn't thought about providing that option, but by gum it is a possibility.
Yes, it's a vertical line array, BUT with some special tweaks of angles to avoid the comb interference effect and to enlarge the stereo image volume (so you can move around the room without losing too much stereo image) and a very long folded horn inside to really extend the bass. I have done all the figuring out theory I can do; now I am building a whole bunch of cabinets with slightly to vastly different dimensions and angles and folded horn parameters, and then I'll be testing testing testing. It might take a month, it might take two years - dunno! I'm not going to stop until it is breath-takingly frigging gorgeous, and I'm going to put an SE OTL live chassis (no transformers at all - no line tx's, no output tx's - BUT some honkin' big chokes in the PS stages) inside to make this sucker BREATHE. So, it's an internally-amplified-completely-transformerLESS-very-modified-tweaked-line-array-multiple-driver-folded-conical-inside-horn monster - seven feet tall, maybe 7 1/2 feet tall - two of them, left and right, with a center channel amplified much smaller unit that contains the line/mixer/preamp/etc with a top specially designed for a turntable to sit on, and the whole thing is going to come in two versions: hand-built for mega-bucks, and totally kit for micro-bucks. yeah, baby. life. cool. no messing around. the beauty of the amplified speaker combo is that the amp and cabinet can be tweaked to the drivers so the whole thing has esthetic unity - on the other hand, i can definitely see how the cabinet/driver, once it's worked out, could work well with many amps, including otl amps, although in many cases there would probably be mods that would have to be made to the output of the amp to match it up correctly; we're not talking 8 ohms here. frankly, i am not going to stop working on this until it is so frigging wonderful that you probably wouldn't want to not include the amp part of the kit. thanks for asking. hope this hasn't been too much of a commercial; i don't mean to bend the rules; when I have the bucks I will definitely put some serious dough into helping sponsor this forum.
"It ain't a comeback until it's left the shop" Jimmy Dunne, the first man to drive a VW Beetle faster than 200 mph, and he has the forehead scar to prove it; I will always honor him for taking a chance on me when I wanted to be an engine mechanic.
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Thanks for taking the time. Sounds quite interesting. My preference also tends towards speakers that allow you lots of freedom to move around the room without the tonal balance collapsing, and with a line source even the inevitable image shift is not as severe because there's less loudness discrepancy as you move off to one side.As far as the rules goes, I think you pretty much have free reign to respond to a direct question about your product(s) as you see fit. If someone hands you the ball, go ahead and run with it.
I built these back in the '80s. 3 stacked Strathern ribbons a side, 10 - 6.5 inch drivers stacked and 4 - 12 inch stacked..
Never did figure out how to make them sound great.
But I liked the way they sounded but sold them and got into electrostats and haven't looked back since. I didn't use the transformers and used modified Dyna MKIII's to drive them directly. That made a huge difference over the matching transformers. I've been to your place many times years ago and you had been to my place to hear my Koss electrostats when I lived in Scotsdale. I lived in Mesa when I had the Stratherns. I was the guy that only drove antique cars and worked for Motorola....
I was born with NO memory. I think it improved for a few years, but I'm 62 now...and I can't remember what I was going to write...I too never used the transformers. I seem to recall I ran 2 (or 3?) in series and drove them with 150-Watts-into-2-Ohms tubed amps, c-j MV75s paralleled into mono. The Stratherns had raggedy--peaky--upper frequencies and sounded a bit 'hard', about the same as the Eminent Tech.-8 MR drivers do without a lo-pass filter on the top.
I know Entech, the speaker company Damien Martin and Keith Johnson and ? were involved in and made that fabulous 3-driver, servo-controlled subwoofer that Two Jeffreys Audio sold, tried Stratherns. They put a small cone driver (6"?) on the bottom to warm it and a ribbon tweeter on the top to make the treble sound decent. They gave up on that.
http://community.webshots.com/user/jeffreybehr
wow, very cool, and you built them yourself. nice. i notice they are straight up and down; according to theory, you might have noticed some nodes and dropouts as you moved your head around - did you? - from comb filtering effect. the BIG advantage of a vertical line area is that you have a vertical ovoid cylinder of sound; the intensity decreases more or less linearly with the distance - with a point source speaker, you have pretty much a globe of sound, and the intensity drops off by the INVERSE SQUARE of the distance - and the stereo image tends to be really defined just for the one guy in the center of the couch. was this your experience?
"It ain't a comeback until it's left the shop" Jimmy Dunne, the first man to drive a VW Beetle faster than 200 mph, and he has the forehead scar to prove it; I will always honor him for taking a chance on me when I wanted to be an engine mechanic.
Just for the sake of further discussion - someone please explain.
A loudspeaker comprised of a number of identical drivers.
then I hope the sonics are superior to that of the Bose arrays (which can hardly be said to have any sonic "quality" at all). Further, while one can hook up the speakers in an array such that the impedance is OTL-friendly, the typically huge power requirements of an array (because of equalizing networks etc) might negate any such advantage. But I will keep an open mind.
...more than just two or three elements (two fullranges with a tweeter in between or on top, all in a vertical line, is a common proven design)...but an array with a serious number of drivers can be a real problem if it has crossover networks - just too much interaction between the electronics of the network, the sound waves in the cabinet, and the comb filtering nodal effect in the room.....so the rule I was told was only use full range drivers and they all gotta be exactly the same, and it's better to curve the front surface slightly instead of a flat plane. Sooner or later, i AM going to build the vertical array I have EIGHT fullrange drivers for, with a curved front surface (actually, I'm going to try a double-curve), and the cabinet internally rear folded horn loaded. Whew!! We'll see. It'll be great, lousy, or somewhere in between, but at least I'll have learned something. :) BTW, I plan to drive it with the 813 that is also slowly in process...... :)
"It ain't a comeback until it's left the shop" Jimmy Dunne, the first man to drive a VW Beetle faster than 200 mph, and he has the forehead scar to prove it; I will always honor him for taking a chance on me when I wanted to be an engine mechanic.
god, no, bose is the opposite of a well-done array; bose is mush sound all over the place with no really good stereo image anywhere. bose was a fad; i got snookered into thinking they were good for a few weeks, then realized i had wasted a lot of money. sigh. life is so full of expensive lessons!!! one of the advantages of being older now is i don't have to make those mistakes again.
"It ain't a comeback until it's left the shop" Jimmy Dunne, the first man to drive a VW Beetle faster than 200 mph, and he has the forehead scar to prove it; I will always honor him for taking a chance on me when I wanted to be an engine mechanic.
like what's in the Rendition Evloution One guitar amp.
Yea. Good for a guitar amp but ? for hi-fi.
However, I was privy to Nelson Pass voicing his original 'swinging class A' amp through a pair of 'sweet 16's'.....
(Well at least partying with his new amp and 'sweet 16's') :)
line arrays CAN be mega cool. they have pros and cons. first, if the baffle is a verticle flat plain, you may get comb filtering, with nodes and dropouts. if the front baffle is curved in so the overall curve has lilke a ten foot radius, than that actually defeats the comb filtering effect, loses some of the cylindrical effect but still has a large stereo image than point sources. my personal belief is the more different the mixup of drivers in the array, vertical or not, the more problems you're gonna have, and i do mean problems, although i've seen a bunch of bookshelp designs that work pretty decent with two vertical aligned mid-range range speakers that can also extend into the bass some, with a tweeter in between, all in a vertical line (the vertical line keeps the sharp stereo image - start adding extra stacks horizontally, and the stereo image doesnt' broaden, it smears. the one i'm working on has EIGHT fullrange drivers in a more or less vertical line with some interesting sliht tweaks in the angles and this huge folded horn behind - it's gonna be SUMPIN.
"It ain't a comeback until it's left the shop" Jimmy Dunne, the first man to drive a VW Beetle faster than 200 mph, and he has the forehead scar to prove it; I will always honor him for taking a chance on me when I wanted to be an engine mechanic.
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