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Vintage Asylum Classic gear from yesteryear; vintage audio standing the test of time. |
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In Reply to: Speaker design philosophy posted by Bold Eagle on February 21, 2007 at 06:18:33:
Back in the 60s and 70s, the popular stereo magazines regularly evaluated the bass output on a woofer on the basis of how low it would play the fundamental w/o eccessive "doubling", that is, producing a strong harmonic of the fundamental exactly one octave higher than the fundamental. Some speakers that simply doubled the bass notes below a certain frequency were actually pretty good, nearly convincing some listeners that they were hearing the music in all the octaves. THey used to say things like "THe lowest octave was mostly doubling, but this was not obvious without direct A-B comparison with a speaker capable of reproducing the lowest octave fundamentals."What's interesting is that I have almost never in recent years heard a reference to doubling by the DIY crowd. Given that most of these people seem happy with woofers 6 1/2 inches in diameter and smaller you would have thought that this would be a major topic of discussion for these guys along with phase coherence, baffle step compensation, driver interference etc. Could it be that modern woofers using modern materials are indeed less prone to doubling than an old 10- or 12-inch paper-cone woofer still is? Or is doubling still with us.
The Large Advent's (And the AR3's too)real claim to fame, of course, is that it could reproduce the lowest 1/3 octave (coming from the pedal tones of a pipe organ, for example) with minimal doubling.
On an only slightly different topic, I finally figured out what was wrong with that keyboard/pa amplifier speaker at church. Aside from the horn treble dispersion problems, basically its a big 12-inch woofer unhappily stuck in a vented box that is way too small giving a prominent mid-bass rise. Whenver the keyboardist hits a low piano note, it doubles an octave up, giving a warm but wooly, and decidedly artificial non-piano sound. The ear interprets the doubling as decidedly not sounding correct, and interestingly practically everyone, not just trained ears are sensitiveOf course, pianos themselves double, and a key reason to move from a 5 ft baby grand to a 9-foot concert grand is that the 9-footer will produce a stronger fundamental bass note with less doubling. In the case of the electronic keyboard, what started as decent sampled sounds ends up sounding arificial and "cheesy" aka wooly.
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Follow Ups
- Re: Speaker design philosophy - DavidLD 11:04:22 02/21/07 (3)
- Re: Speaker design philosophy - Bold Eagle 12:38:24 02/21/07 (0)
- Re: Doubling - Ron Oehlert 11:28:28 02/21/07 (1)
- Re: Doubling - Crazy Dave 13:34:44 02/21/07 (0)
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