Topic: More watts aren't necessarily better

[Church-Audio]

In a large number of my posts, I've suggested that I'm likely going to a single driver open baffle.

Is this tweeter offset the only thing that you guys don't like?
The designer has suggested that the cabinets holes were designed so that they're plenty big to mount the speakers on either side of the hole.
The speaker drivers themselves have a rubber isolating grommet that the original Saba engineers built into them to give them isolation from the cabinet face.
The people that have built the kits are the ones that have decided to leave the speakers within the cabinets as that's the way that they were originally designed to be mounted. The cabinet can go either way, but, the owners have decided that the original Saba design is good enough, and have chosen to mount them inside the cabs.  With as many kits as I've seen built, and the people that are building them,... there is something about the rightness, as these guys won't be fooled - there are too many that have played this game for far too long (its not a bunch of 20/30-somethings that like rad loud music, rather, its a bunch of 40 to 60-somethings with life long audio addictions).

Yes well we all know as we get older we loose some of our hearing maybe thats why this cabinet design is so popular? I dont know.. but if you want to build a good box start off with a good design AND a good speaker. Can I suggest something? If you are looking for a really good sounding speaker that sounds like the 60's and has nice fidelity? The Advent /3 these are probably some of the best little speakers I have ever heard at any price. I know people are going to think I am nuts.. but thats my suggestion.. If you want to go WAY BACK... check out this speaker http://www.visaton.de/en/chassis_zubehoer/breitband/b200_6.html

Most tube stuff at the time in the 60's did not really go out to 20khz.. most of it dropped off around 10k to 14k cps.. This was because most tweeters sucked back then and because they used snubber caps on the preamp and sometimes output section to control circuit oscillation crazy instead of actually running the wires properly So tube amps designers simply did not bother with high real high fidelity designs.

[mfrench]

Its popular because, despite the world having been discovered as being round, it works.

I can't help but be completely cynical. The same people that have built these kits, have also built their own amplifiers, their own phonostages and DAC's, etc.  They're not just fresh into the world of audio. I value their opinions on audio, as they've proven themselves to be very stable people, not prone to rushing out for the snake-oil-of-the-day. They're very well refined listeners, with immaculate alternate playback systems

[Gutbucket]

I like the open baffle concept.  Both for build simplicity and engineering reasons.  It eliminates many sources of resonance: no speaker box with sound bouncing around inside, vibrating things and re-radiating through the walls and speaker cone.  I also find it intriguing as sort of the reproduction analog of a boundary mounted microphone [edit- that is when implemented with a very large baffle (approaching an infinite baffle design), more like a figure-8 with a small one].  The drawback is that the baffle needs to be very large for the speaker to be effective at lower frequencies and the speaker used needs a stiff supension since there is not as much of an air spring supporting it. 

The simplicity of a single full range driver without a crossover is also attractve, as long as the tradoffs of rolled-off frequency extremes and a radiation pattern that begins to beam above a certain frequency as determined by the driver's diameter are acceptable.

[Gutbucket]

Lots of roads to Rome, just depends on which Rome you are headed to.  There seems to be one in most every state in the US.

Here’s the other end of the open baffle design spectrum.  It’s complex due to it's goal of accurately reproducing as many of the aspects of the live performance experience as possible in a typical domestic living space via stereo, and it comes from a quite different philosophical approach.  Regardless of whether you find the design and approach attractive or not, the engineering methodology behind it is unmatched and may be worth wasting some spare webtime exploring.  It does get somewhat technical in places, but not too bad (ignoring the electrical equations) and is some of the best material I’ve come across for clearly exploring the important core principles underlying speaker design and stereo reproduction in general-

The brass ring of DIY speaker building for me is Stan Linkwitz's Orion (the Linkwitz-Riley crossover guy, also credited with the Panasonic WM-omni capsule mod).  I stumbled across his website something like 10 years ago and devoured everything on it, then followed it as he worked through the design phase of the Orion.  His approach to speaker design, and audio in general made a huge impression on me- always logical and based on clear engineering methodology, pursued without any audiophile preconception bias, conclusions based on the results of testing data, subjective comparison to live performances and a rigorous analysis.  An engineer's engineer.   He first defines the goal and then figures out how best to get there, without audiophile preconceptions of how it should be done. It impresses me that he thoroughly addresses details but only after ranking them by their relative importance and seems always open to throwing out avenues that don't check out.  The epitome of the scientific method, applied.

All of his designs use individual amplifier channels for each driver and active crossovers and filtering of his own design to correct their raw response and alignment.  The Orion is an open baffle design using dynamic drivers, driven by four amp channels per side, 60W each, for 8 amp channels total. It is an effort to combine the clarity and focus of an open baffle electrostatic with the full dynamic ability and more even dispersion capability of dynamic drivers.   His emphasis on the importance of a controlled power response (a balanced radiation pattern in all directions, varying in level but not spectrum) is now becoming accepted as a very important aspect of speaker design.  In hindsight, that importance may seem somewhat more obvious to recordists who are attuned to the importance of accurate microphone pickup patterns on the other side of the music reproduction game.

The 3-way Orion has a figure-8 power response across it’s entire range, the Pluto is a 2-way, omni-directional until the top most octaves, with a smooth transition between those regions, somewhat akin to the directionality of a large diaphragm omni, and looks more like a giant mic than a small speaker.

I planned on buying the circuit boards and building the Orion, then bought a house 6 years ago instead and have too many other costly projects.  It’s pretty expensive to build, (more so now than then) but the design still stands out in my mind as unique in the audio world in many ways, and I've continued to follow his site through the design of the less costly Pluto- the end results of which seem to have surprised him in how closely they match the Orion. I think that is to his credit and says something about the way he follows basic underlying principles rather than specific solutions, even past the point of seeming self-contradiction.

[mfrench]

More on old speaker designs making a comeback,....

Western Electric 755 - DIY clones, with Saba drivers:


I had an opportunity to listen to a real pair of these WE speakers about three weeks ago. It was part of a console system where the speakers were separate of the console, but intended to draw together to give a console look. The console had a Fisher tube stereo integrate amp in it, and a technics deck of some model flavor, and R2R machine.
It was set up as a console when I heard it, and it was mind boggling good.
The speakers/console are mid 50's vintage?
So, this is something else I've been considering. They're supposed to sound quite amazing (the real ones were goose-flesh raising).

[Gutbucket]

I don't want to poke at a sore spot, and bring this up only because it seems to have become a point of contention in this thread based on the tweeter mounting on that reso design- but see how the baffle around the same drivers in that WE cabinet is camfered so that the edge angle is more closely aligned with the angle of the speaker cones, and doesn't have such a sharp angle in transition to the baffle surface?  That's not merely cosmetic, but is done so that frequencies of short wavelength don't diffract as sharply off the edges and re-radiate, creating secondary sources of sound radiation that can be problematic (mid and bass wavelengths are too long to be effected and wrap around, so the camfer around the woofer is less important sonically).  There are other design issues in play there too, both in this design and the previous one- mainly that the cavity formed by the thickness of the baffle acts as a resonant chamber at a certain frequency, effectively becoming a wave guide (which is really just a shallow horn).  Is that a big deal?  I dunno. Measuring the response of the driver in the baffle should reveal the effect clearly, listening might too, but maybe only in comparison. A good speaker design takes that response change into consideration and harnesses it, or reconfigures the design to work around or eliminate it.

These kind of things can have a meaurable effect on the on axis frequency response (and phase/time response)- which is a very traditional performance measurement and probably the most important one for any speaker.  And along with other things, they also have a big effect on the off-axis radiation of the speaker which is not a traditional thing to measure, but has become more of a focus for serious designers as the importance of how a speaker illuminates the entire room in all directions has become more and more apparent in recent years (because a large portion of the total sound that reaches the listener is reflected off the room surfaces).  That rings true with me as a recordist since I understand the importance of the direct/rebverberant ratio at the other end of the recordig chain.  Does that make sense? or too much technical speak?

[mfrench]

I understand the concept, entirely, prior to the discussion beginning. I just think differently, and chuckle at science being proven wrong on a daily basis - don't care for doctors much either, until they quit practicing.
I'm an artist, not a scientist. I think differently.
When everyone else was swearing by ORTF/DIN and directional mics (when it first passed through the dead camp en vogue), I was preaching baffled omnis as quasi-binaural/HRTF (20 years ago). Conventional doesn't always work for me, and I often look for a way around it.

I've spoken to the designer, twice, since this thread started, and he's going to take some digital samplings of the speakers both in and out. When he posts, I'll refer to the findings.
Still - how hard is it to consider just routing a chamfer in the kit?
People here just threw up their guards and closed their minds. That's what I was suggesting earlier in just cutting a larger hole (not realizing that they were already cut large enough), and finishing them differently.

His kit is minimalistic to keep it reasonably priced. Every single step in that takes set up and adds to the cost - you know this in production.  DIY'rs can take that kit, and hotrod the crap out of it - but no one has felt a need to thus far. Its a great DIY'rs starting base. Or, it would be a piece of cake just to clone it off yourself based on some rough dimensions. Its just a solid top plate of plywood, a spine, and a matching shaped, hollowed out plate at the base. You use the leftover plywood to make a gluing jig-clamp, and some lauan mahogany(sp?) 1/8" ply for the curved exterior, or the minimalist birch look. You could clone these things for cheap if you're handy. Again - thats what caught my interest.
These things would make a worthy DIY project, from scratch, or save time and buy a kit.
As far as the cabinet; it would take :30secs per hole to chamfer them, with a 5minute setup time.

[Gutbucket]

I hope I didn't come across as pendantic then. But I don't think you do understand why people are rasing legitimate objections, though some comments call for thick skin.

As a minimalist, inexpesive DIY kit I think that design is ingenious.  I expecially like the shaped clamp construction method and bent luan sides giving the sides hoop stength. It's light, simple, attractive, shippable, customizable, quick and easy to make.  I dig it.

So chamfer the hole, or mount the speaker on the outside, and make it better.  But claiming something like that doesn't matter on one hand, and that these speakers are rivaling the very best for acuracy on the other is contradictive.

The science is not being proven wrong at all, much less on a daily basis.  In fact is it far better than it has ever been, more is understood about how sound works, how speakers reproduce sound in domestic rooms, how we hear, and how the brain interprets it all then ever before.  Maybe bullshit audio marketing is being proven wrong, but not the sceince.  And I don't find it suprising that people will get riled up when you make some blanket claim that it is.  Why not apply that develping knowlege to our own DIY projects, when it can make them better?

Thinking differently is great, I like to do it myself, but it doesn't invalidate the science.

[mfrench]

Science invalidates its self frequently enough that it keeps me as the skeptic (and I'm referring to a far larger picture than just audio).

The only claim that I made was that allot of people have bought this kit for use with flea weight amps, have built it, and enjoy it and rave about it. Immediately people put up their guards, most without hearing them, or even reading a single review.
Amongst a group of hardcore audio enthusiasts, you will not find a single dissenter in that 50 page thread.
You don't have to mount them outside the cabinet to enjoy them.  Dozens and dozens of people, hundreds (I don't know how many kits he's sold), have assembled it, and found audio bliss despite the bad science malarkey claim behind it.
These people that I've referred to are not easily fooled, as they've been playing this audio game for many decades, each, not a cumulative sum of time; between our team members, we have 50 years experience. Not.
The science of audio has gotten better on a relatively miniscule basis, compared to the time spent, the time that they've had to improve it, and, from where they started with modern electronics. Yes we have wonderful t-amps, we have ipods, and bluetooth headhphones, and wonderful cellphones that we can text with while driving, and in-dash GPS for the terminally lost. We have ipod docks on just about everything. I'm playing mine from my refrigerator right now, and loving it (I don't own an ipod, just saying).WE have companies that put out the ultimate amplifier each tme they reinvent it, because they know someone will need that improved amp - marketing ploys abundant, all based in our scientific teams deep commitment to improving your audio.
But, even with all the improvements, speakers still have cones, frames, and coils, just like they did 80 years ago. Hell, even some of the finest electrostat speaker are 55 years old, and are more desired than their modern counterparts.
The old guys set us up with the bomb. The science that followed the old guys has barely followed them; the changes, not that drastic.

[Gutbucket]

Sorry to be blunt, because I respect you and your opinion highly, but that's simply bullshit.

You're reacting against marketing and the applications of technology filtered through the marketplace, what companies build and sell, driven by cost, and what they think people want.  Science and technology play a miniscule role in of that if any.  You are confusing craft, craftsmanship, marketing and economics with science and technology.

Science doesn't invalidate itself.  Can you give me an example of what you mean when you say that it does? Science is simply an investigative process, it is not right or wrong in itself, it is only a tool for figuring out what is going on in the world around us, and helps us build models that predict that accurately.  When one of those models of understanding is proven to be inaccurate and a new and better description of the phenomena is developed to replace it, that isn’t an indication that science is wrong or self-invalidating, it’s the scientific method working.  That's how the erroneous stuff is weeded out, the very process by which it works.  In areas where science does not apply, it is simply mute and has nothing to say.

Old technology doesn't go away, it is built upon, expanded and improved (in contrast to craftsmanship).  Sure, speakers used cones & coils 80 years ago. But claiming that our understanding of how they work, and that the materials and designs haven't been improved over that time is ludicrous.  People drove cars 100 years ago which had 4 wheels, an engine, seats.. just like cars do today. So by that logic the technology in cars hasn't improved in 100 years either.  The craft and craftsmanship has changed of course, and I dig the beauty of old gear and old automobiles as much as anybody.  We could build that stuff the same way today, given enough money, time and skill.  But go back 80 years in your time machine and you can't harness the more advanced technology of today because it hasn't been developed yet, regardless of what you wanted to do with it.

Today the materials are far more advanced and the understanding of what is going on is far more developed.  How those materials and that knowledge is applied is an entirely different thing, and I too have plenty to beef about in that department.

As I said before there is nothing wrong at all with people building, enjoying and raving about retro kits or old, well crafted gear that was often designed to work at low power because that was the only way to go at the time.  If people get bliss, excitement, engagement out of it then that's fantastic.  Their goal is a personal enjoyment and I have no doubt they are finding that in spades. But there are ways of measuring accuracy if that is the goal, and ways of agreeing on what the term accuracy means, which is the first step.

[mfrench]

The most glaring example, and the one I'll use - the earth is round.
Generalized, sure; overused, absolutely. But its a short concise point of how scientifically accepted fact is constantly changing. do they advance beyond it? lets hope so. I'm not going to spend the time finding deeper examples.
Well, maybe just one or two more -> The recently exposed diseases coming from MRI and CATscan, and the wonderful sciences behind that; once the glory child of the industry, now a known disease giver.
I don't see modernization as that great of a thing. I'm probably the last of a dying breed - people that don't have a cellphone, nor even know how to turn one on.
I'm not a fan of the rising cancer rates that are in direct line with the advancement of technology either. It might be interesting to see where brain cancers go in another dozen years,... I just hope the expenses of it don't get socialized.

[Jimna]

your spinning this like fox news.  I would agree to disagree.

[Gutbucket]

Science is constantly changing as we lean more and correct past mistakes. That constant evolution is essential to it's power and usefulness.

How the knowlege it provides us is applied and used is another matter altogether.

I don't know what you're getting at with the world is round bit and I haven't heard about MRI influenced disease.  CAT scans are performed with X-rays and the effects of exposure to them are known to be harmful, yet that harm is weighed against the benefits of the diagnostic tool.  Because we've discoverd X-rays to be harmful, the amount of radiation needed for such scans has been reduced by orders of magnitude over the history of their use, all because of advancing technology. How do we even diagnose the supposed diseases you are refering to? Technology.

Your blaming science for the problems you see in the modern world is misplaced. Lumping it in the catch-all category of 'modernization' is a gross and misleading over-simplification.  Belive it or not, I share much of your concern, though I draw far different conclusions.

[Gutbucket]

Stan Linkwitz-

When it comes to the practical requirements for accurate sound reproduction, then there are a surprising number of issues that are not fully understood. Sound reproduction is about creating illusions in our mind, in that amazing information processor between our two ears. Sound reproduction involves physical processes to generate air vibrations that move our eardrums and in turn stimulate mental processes, that have evolved over millions of years for the purpose of survival and for communication, processes that lead to perception of the sound source and its environment. While we can measure many different physical parameters involved in the generation and propagation of a sound field, it becomes exceedingly difficult to assess their relative importance to what we hear and how it helps or detracts from the illusion. The published scientific material on the psychology of hearing (psychoacoustics) is extensive and sometimes helpful in explaining phenomena in two-channel and surround sound reproduction.

In the following I describe what I see as frontiers, if not in yours, then at least in my understanding of what matters for accurate sound reproduction.  While I strive as an engineer to find answers and explanations based on the physics of the situation, I try to be honest to my listening observations as ultimate arbiter. I use my memory of un-amplified sound as reference for judging accuracy of the illusion. What I see as frontiers may be settled areas to others, or clear separations between opposing camps, that hold on to cherished convictions. I would hope that the exposé stimulates a few readers to research a subject further and share their insights.

More on speaker degins and 'what is accuracy'?
http://www.linkwitzlab.com/speakers.htm

[mfrench]

old guys and the audio bomb:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Blumlein

I'm glad that Linkwitz realizes that our ears and homes are not anechoic chambers. I don't feel that they are either.
We have the advantage of bringing home the evenings acoustic performance for critical analysis, rather than having to depend upon memory - memory is more oriented towards an artistic value than a scientifically measurable value. So is he introducing art into engineering?