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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Thanks and another question. posted by Laszlo on April 3, 2007 at 21:52:01:
As far as I am concerned one of the reasons, why you have heard the lacking of cohessiveness between the panel and the subwoofer is you are under powering them. I have heard this anomaly before when I was using the Adcom GFA 555 (200 w/c) power amp to drive them. You would think that 200 w/c was enough to make them sing properly I was wrong as the Adcom didn’t have enough current to fully control the bottom end.BTW, Martin Logans speakers are very transparent so if you feed them with garbage, garbage you get.
Hybrids: the promised land
The obvious promise of a hybrid loudspeaker is that it combines the best of two worlds—the bass extension and punch of a dynamic speaker with the midrange transparency, speed, and detailing of an electrostatic panel. However, the hidden promise is a speaker that does much more. For example, a full-range ESL suffers from poor sensitivity due to the need to space the stators far enough apart to allow the diaphragm sufficient excursion to reproduce bass frequencies at high levels. The size of the panel also escalates to intimidating proportions to maintain decent bass extension in the face of dipole or front-to-back cancellation in the lower octaves. Relieving the panels of responsibility for reproducing bass frequencies allows the designer to optimize the design for greater sensitivity. It also makes it possible to use a curved diaphragm for increased high-frequency dispersion.However, there are three basic problems standing in the way of a successful integration of two disparate technologies.
The first has to do with driver "speed." The common (mis)conception is that a dynamic driver isn't fast enough to keep up with an electrostatic panel, the overall presentation lacking cohesiveness. The disparity in speed constantly calls attention to itself, giving the impression of a sea of upper-range detail emerging from a sluggish low-frequency foundation.
Such a picture, while useful for a taste or flavor of the problem, is technically misleading. Dynamic woofers have received a bum rap in audiophile circles. There is no reason that a cone woofer's acceleration or risetime could not equal that of a lightweight diaphragm. It's a question of force over mass—as Newton discovered three centuries back—and ML proudly makes mention of its woofer's risetime in its literature. But this is all a red herring. Woofers don't need speed. Yes, Virginia, tweeters do, but, most emphatically, woofers don't. Spending their time in the basement, as it were, reproducing a bandwidth limited to just the first several hundred hertz or so, woofers don't require large accelerations.
(Dick Olsher, October, 1993)
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Follow Ups
- Re: Thanks and another question. - millen 08:29:42 04/04/07 (0)
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