Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

Haven't tried all your speakers

but I have experience with the Totems you mention. The woofer is out of polarity with the tweeter. Many mini's employ this technique, and in increasing numbers after the Proac Super tablettes were so highly praised By HP in TAS. Having a tweeter in correct polarity ( in respect to the music) gives pinpoint imaging, but the inverted woofer seems to impart a huge , but very diffuse soundstage. For most listeners, this is translated a having great lateral imaging, but I personally find the discontinuities involved as you pass through the frequency response irritating and not very realistic. Of course YMMV.

Ditto for the Martin Logan hybrids you mention. At least in the earlier models, the dynamic woofers were inverted in polarity to the panels. This smears the transition points and seems to blend in the woofer better with the faster electrostatic panels (I've owned Aerius, Sequels, and the next larger model). It doesn't help much that the woofers are mounted on a plane behind the panels themselves.

I've had very limited experience with the Thiels, but did work on a pair of 7.1's. One issue which really screws up the woofer is that molded lip on the outboard edges of the basket of the driver. It creates and traps a large amount of diffraction and reflective energy, muddying the bass propagation. Smoothing over that decorative lip, certainly aids the bass dispersion significantly.

A similar issue lies with the M L woofers, in my opinion. In the older designs, with the perforated metal grill, a casual examination reveals that it actually traps a lot of the bass energy behind the grill , particularly at the edges and thus limits the dispersion of the woofer. However, the dispersion fo the electrostatic panel is limited as the sound propagated moves directly out tangent to the surface of the clear panel. Thus the acoustic center of the electrostatic speaker is pretty much the middle of the vertical height of the panel and as you are well aware electrostatics are usually very sensitive to placement. Martin Logans respond well, in my experience with careful tilting of the the speaker system so the acoustic center is aimed at the listener's ears.

In using a pair of time and phase aligned speakers ( Vandersteens(, the image is pretty much limited to being located between the speakers, but I can spread my speakers extremely far apart with no hole in the middle. I have them placed almost 14 feet apart, but I am listening only about 10 feet away. Sound stage is huge and tall.

With a recording with great depth, the three dimensional quality is available in spades. For a manufactured soundstage, try the Bob and Ray Throw a Stereo Spectacular, and the original uncut Phantom of the Opera.

One listener complained that Elvis sounded like his mouth was four feet in diameter, although the system sounds quite fine for massed choir. I attribute that to the microphone position in respect to the singer. If you have the mike a foot away from the mouth what perspective does it give to the vocal presentation?

In my experience, most complaints of small soundstaging was due to polarity issues. Of course, certain speaker designs with offset tweeters throw a bilateral soundstage centered on a line which runs through the centers of the tweeters and the woofers. If the tweeters are inboard, they tend to through the soundstage lower between the centers of the the pair. If the tweeters are placed outboard, they throw a very high soundstage but the imaging will be high in the middle and slowly arc lower as you move outboard.

All this , of course assumes that you have some control over the polarity of your entire system. And of course, YMMV.

Stu


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  • Haven't tried all your speakers - unclestu52 23:20:54 08/14/09 (0)

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