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I have been reading quite a few of the posts on this site, and have arrived at a conclusion that their seems to be a gulf between speakers such as Dunlavy and Waveform (I know they are gone now)and speakers from companies seeking to place the newest technology into their designs such as Audio Physic and Merlin.I think this is a very interesting contrast. On one side we have makers who very carefully make less expensive, less cutting edge, parts sound as close to real music as their ears and measuring devices can allow, and on the other side of the spectrum manufacturers work with large corporations (or in fact are large corps! ie Harmon, dynaudio etc)to develop brand new technologies that hopefully try to trancend what even the best designer can do with older technology.
A good example of two speakers which contrast in this way migh be the new Audio Physic Avanti III vs Dunlavy IV or Cantata.
Which side to you think is winning?
Follow Ups:
Technology is always changing and new technology is often in the hands of its owners/inventors for a period. That enables them to recoup their development costs and ensures they make enough of a profit to keep manufacturing and re-investing in R&D.It's not a contest between technology as "leading edge" and design as "conservative" as your question makes it appear. Good design always ensures the successful use of the technologies utilised, whether they be old or new. Good design ensures good results regardless of technology. New technology only brings benefits when it enables you to achieve something that hasn't been achieved before, do something better than it has been done before, do things more economically than they have been done before, or a combination of two or all three of those benefits. If it can't achieve any of those 3 things, there's no need to use a newer technology because the end results will be the same.
You can get improvements by pushing the technology edge, but you can also get improvements at the design edge. These can sometimes outweigh the gains from technology.
Neither of your sides should be winning - ecxcellence should be winning.
David Aiken
I don't think cone and dome speakers in a box are new technology. IIRC, Acoustic Research perfected the dome tweeter and dome midrange in the mid-1960s.I think it would be better to say that in the last 30 years or so, we have seen to optimization of old technology. Computing power is able to replace a lot of trial-and-error. Materials technology is much better -- which shows up in better cabinets and better drivers. And measurements are much better, not only of output, but of cabinet vibrations, spurious resonances from drivers, etc.
Most of the new technology I can think of has had mixed success. Electrostatics are still problematical. The Heil tweeter which truly was new technology is not being used. Perhaps non-electrostatic planar speakers (Magnepans) are the only successful "new" technology -- and I first heard them in 1972.
What I haven't had the nerve to listen to (because they're so far out of my price range) is the Avantgarde horn speakers. Although I recognize their advantages, I was never a fan of Klipschorns; and they never impressed me except with their ability to play ear-splittingly loud. I would love to hear of the Avantgarde folks have successfully optimized the classic horn speaker, as they claim to have.
Of course, even Avantgarde has abandoned the effort to reproduce bass with a horn in a consumer speaker, which was one of the things I liked best about the Klipschorn. The absence of stored energy in the bass system gave the Klipschorn the most realistic (although not the lowest) bass reproduction I have ever heard because its reproduction of bass transients was so good.
The Klipschorn uses a bass horn and it is flat down to the mid-30 hz range. By contrast, the Avantgarde horn cuts off at either 150 or 200 Hz, depending upon the model. It uses 200 watts per channel of solid state power to reproduce bass with conventional drivers in a box; so Avantgarde's efficiency claims are somewhat less impressive. Even a conventional speaker could show pretty high efficiency if it were not called upon to reproduce frequencies below 150 Hz.
Not much that's really new, even though a lot of it is better.
Bruce---There are better horns (IMO) than Khorns out there and I don't mean Avant Garde. You ought'a try listening to a well tuned Altec VOT rig sometime, MUCH nicer mids and highs than Khorns. JBL horns are better than Klipsch too. Bruce Edgar makes some very nice horns too, both turnkey rigs and parts for DIYers. You should hear Bean Counter's JBL 2420s on Edgar Saladbowls, hubba-hubba. I plan on going right back to the 1930s soon with Altec 288s on multicell horns.
pardon the punYeah, tom; I don't claim to have surveyed the horn universe. I guess what I was thinking was that PWK built speakers that were sized and intended for your living room, which leaves out a lot of pro stuff, like Altec VOT, and some of the stuff in the pictures on your web site.
Unfortunately, for horns "size matters" and some of us are stuck making compromises as a result -- one of which, in my case, is listening at average levels of no more than about 85 db, measured with the Rat Shack meter.
It seems like from your comments on your site, you would agree with me about Avantgarde's practice of essentially strapping a low-midrange horn to a conventional box subwoofer and calling it a "horn" speaker.
Personally, if I had a room with free corners, it would be fun to get a pair of K-horns and see what could be done in the way of tweaking them by damping the mid and tweet horn with putty, re-doing the crossover, etc.
Ah, well. Some other time. . .
Would digital room correction, e.g. Tact RCS 2.0, take care of the tweaking for you? What about the much derided "horn" sound?Would apprecite your thoughts.
Merlin is hardly "newest technology".
Painted silk domes and coated paper woofers are over 10 years old, and the basics about them is even older.Seas and Accuton, that is new!
/Peter
The Great Horn Gods of the 1930s and 40s were aware of the need for proper time alingnment and often used 1st order crossovers but rejected them because they limited output. Speakers still work the way they did back then too and many of the material advances are not to improve good speakers but to make bad speakers better. For instance I'd say that bad speakers like 8" direct-radiators have gotten much better but good speakers like the Altec 515 haven't, where can you go with a 515, the thing was damn near perfected in 1945: precision machining, tight gap with a huge Alnico magnet, underhung 3" voicecoil with edgewound wire--where you gonna go? Note that the designers of the 1930s had HUGE resources behind them: The Phone Company, MGM and RCA. Since then science has moved on. Designers today do have better tools for designing, that mainly means that a small company can do cheaply and quickly what took guys like Hilliard, Lansing, PWK and Olson lots of time and money. Some of the old empiracally designed bass-reflex boxes fit right into the Thiel-Small alingments, they just got there with less info and more testing. Yeah, I'd say that bad speakers (direct-radiators in small boxes) have gotten much better but good speakers (horns) haven't. And with ESs many ES fanatics prefer the Quad 57 of 1957 to modern designs. Of course whatever one prefers is the best speaker so this question only has opinions as answers.
Interesting question! It's probably obvious, but neither will win if the execution isn't top shelf.One of the comments on this thread talked about Western Electric speakers being the best he ever heard. That goes back the mid 30's and the beginnings of the movie sound industry. Some of those old Altec theatre systems were superb, particularly the ones from the "Premier" theatres of the day. (I'm not talking about A-7's here, I'm talking about bass boxes that dwarf an A-7) A local rock band used some of that stuff in the early 80's and the sound was perfect. Even at 110 dB, they didn't sound amplified. It was as if they were posessed and could play and sing at inhuman levels. Then in the early and middle 60's Acoustic Research did their live versus recorded demos where the musicians would put down there instruments and nobody could tell when they had stopped playing. Used to be a regular event in Grand Central Station. Also at Carnegie Hall.
Point of this is that correct timbre and dynamics have been available for a long time with conventional (for today) technology. But the thatre and AR's demos were multi-track recordings, so that creation of a stereo image was not a factor. That's one area where much progress has been made since the 60's. The other two critical areas have been the revolution started by Neville Thiele and Small in tuned systems and progressing since, and the other is the work on crossover design that has made huge strides since the 60's. In both cases computers have made it all so much easier.
If I had to guess, my personal vote would be that the winning speaker types would be meticulously executed designs using incremental advancements in existing technology. Add in some creativity and some innovative configurations and there's your future.
I've owned conventional dynamic speakers, ribbon/planar dynamic (magneplanar), electrostatics and electrostatic/dynamic speakers, and finally, a pair of speakers with a horn midrange and a paper cone woofer with a pleated paper surround in a Jensen-Onken bass reflex cabinet. In terms of the age of the technology, my latest speaker has the most "primitive" technology. It is by far the best speaker I have owned.The best speaker I have heard is a custom system utilizing Western Electric drivers from the 1930s.
I have never found that the technology employed or the design philosophy (time-phase alignment, first order crossover, non-resonant cabinets, etc) correlates with sonic quality.
My current pair of speakers is the S.A.P. J2001 (twin). S.A.P. (Strumenti Acustici Precisione) is an Italian company which makes speakers, OTL amplifiers, and magnetic levitation isolation platforms.The S.A.P. J2001 (twin) is the top of their line. At the present time, I believe I have the only pair of this speaker in this country. The distributor, bluecowaudio.com, is waiting for an order to come in. Since the speakers are made in very small quantities, it takes time to get them.
The J2001s utilize two 12" paper coned woofers. The midrange horn and a bullet tweeter sit on a magnetic levitation platform on top of the woofer cabinet. They are mounted in free air (no cabinet or baffle). One has to either like the industrial form-follows-function look or be indifferent to the appearance as far as aesthetics are concerned.
I auditioned both before going with Dunlavy. I just don't understand the appeal of the Audio Physic Avanti. I found the bass to be off and the imaging to be sub Dunlavy. Of course there is a huge price and size difference between the larger Dunlavy's and Audio Physics, but I just don't have them on the same page.
Brain,
Was the Avanti you heard, the III?
Probably not, it was mid last year.
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