In Reply to: Re: JBL Signature series components posted by bean_counter on May 1, 2000 at 18:33:50:
I can't really say, yet. My cabinets are old old stock Barzilay's, made of low-density particle board, and they jump and dance with the music - really need some major stiffening. The woofer range is fairly muddy, but pleasant in a euphonic way. No detail however.I think the D130s can sound reasonably good if you don't go above 1200Hz with them, and don't ask for too much excursion. The will never have electrostatic clarity (!) of course, unless you drive a bass horn with them. Their linear excursion is quite small - the voice coil almost exactly fills the magnet gap. Maybe 2 or 3 mm. The cone breaks up very smoothly, so they have a rising response with frequency up to about 8kHz. It gets more directional and colored as you go up. I think the 2225 or 2235 woofers are much flatter, and probably cleaner (less audible micro-resonances and less subtle distortions), but they are closer to 96 and 93dB/w/m sensitivity where the D130 is 101dB or more. They'll rock you with a 2-w amp, which nothing else can do short of a bass horn.
The HF horn that I have is quite short - about 4" long with a 4" mouth. The compression driver adds another 4" to the length from diaphragm to mouth, but the mouth is small relative to a wavelength so there is some "organ-pipe" resonance. Some recent studies have indicated that as long as the pipe is shorter than 12", these resonances are not detectable as a horn honk, i.e. not especially unpleasant, but they are still there quite audibly. I found that I became accostomed to them in about 2-3 weeks. Other than that, the horn has great clarity and extremely low audible distortion, and I find those benefits more than outweight the colorations. I'm working on some ideas for a better solution, but that's where I am today.
Incidentally, I cross it over at 800Hz, but JBL did it as low as 500 on the old days. I believe that would exacerbate the horn loading problems, but I haven't actually tried it yet.
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Follow Ups
- Re: JBL Signature series components - Paul Joppa 22:06:46 05/03/00 (1)
- Re: JBL Signature series components - bean_counter 19:02:54 05/04/00 (0)