bass reflex vs, acoustic suspension and japanese speakers

[skeptic]

"3.)"... "We"......" set each crossover up under dynamic conditions using an in-house test set-up."

Do you work for these people or do you have part ownership or some other vested financial interest in the sale of their products? This is the closest you have come to making such an admission. In the vast universe of loudspeakers, this seems to be the ONLY one you like in its price range. I have sometimes wondered why. This would explain it. The only other explanation I can think of for you referring to this company as "WE" instead of "THEY" is that you have some identity association problem the way sports fans have some sort of identity association delusion with their team who would pack up in the middle of the night on zero notice and move anywhere else they could make more money.

[skeptic]

"and of course the drivers are closely matched which no speaker using a metal tweeter can ever be unless the woofer is metal too "

To truely match a woofer and tweeter, the first thing that would have to happen is that they should be mounted coaxially. If they are not, the mere fact that they are at different locations would mean that there would be interference patterns at every point in any room in the general frequency range where their respoinses overlap. Secondly, the faster driver would have to be fed a time delayed signal so that the two drivers produced vibrations that exactly coincided in time and space. To do that, the system would of course have to be biamplified and the faster driver fed with a delayed signal preferably frequency compensated. I do not know of a single example of any loudspeaker commercially available configured this way. On the bright side, as far as I know, nobody has ever demonstrated that this would yield a better or more accurate sounding speaker.

[RGA]

"3.)"... "We"......" set each crossover up under dynamic conditions using an in-house test set-up."

Do you work for these people or do you have part ownership or some other vested financial interest in the sale of their products? This is the closest you have come to making such an admission. In the vast universe of loudspeakers, this seems to be the ONLY one you like in its price range. I have sometimes wondered why. This would explain it. The only other explanation I can think of for you referring to this company as "WE" instead of "THEY" is that you have some identity association problem the way sports fans have some sort of identity association delusion with their team who would pack up in the middle of the night on zero notice and move anywhere else they could make more money.

Nice try that is the answer Peter gave me on Audio Asylum. We is their company. Peter does not build them all himself you know just as Bowers and Wilkins are not building all the B&W's - which would be a neat trick.

There are lots of speakers I like in that price range. And like when I touted the De Capo for 2 years before ANY of the magazines got on board I like to tout yet another unknown which I think has a more accurate sound. Still like the De Capo. And you give me the impression you dislike standmounts because a lot of them sound bright and don't have much bass. Well these two - while still won't impress you enough in the bass department have jmore than all the other standmounts for the money and don't have the ringing either. And there are many I have not heard that seem to be liked like those from Von Sweikert, Quad, and ATC. But I can't recommend them because I have not heard them - yet I still say check them out because they seem to be well liked from reputable high end names - especially Quad.

[Debbi]

If there were a truly superior speaker out there made from readily available materials ( that probably includes 99%), the larger companies could buy a pair and recreate them over the weekend....makes you wonder....auto companies already hit the design wall and thats why most of them look about the same....the wind tunnel dictates a design that 95% of the cars come close to ....I would like to think that some of these products have a "soul" for the extra buck paid, but beginning to look at speaker purchases like my shoes...."what name do you want on the product"?

[skeptic]

I still can't get used to the idea that speakers that cost thousands of dollars can't producte deep bass. OK, Electrostatics and Magneplanars are exotic and require special manufacturing to build them in relatively small lots. This crap can be built from off the shelf equipment at a fraction of the cost but if the guy who is selling them had "special drivers custom engineered" for his design, it wasn't because there weren't off the shelf models available that would work just as well. It's because he doesn't want anybody reverse engineering them and building them at home for a fraction of the cost and because once they are out of warrantee, if they need repairs, he's gotcha!

High end audio equipment is the only area of electronics where over the years, you got less and less and paid more and more. High end TV sets are getting to be in the same league and many of them are jokes for the money. Especially the rear projections sets.

[RGA]

If there were a truly superior speaker out there made from readily available materials ( that probably includes 99%), the larger companies could buy a pair and recreate them over the weekend....makes you wonder....auto companies already hit the design wall and thats why most of them look about the same....the wind tunnel dictates a design that 95% of the cars come close to ....I would like to think that some of these products have a "soul" for the extra buck paid, but beginning to look at speaker purchases like my shoes...."what name do you want on the product"?

Maybe it's about truly different than truly superior. There are rights to designs as well. For years Sony touted Trinitron as the superior picture tube all else sucked. Well the patent ran out and nobody jumped on it.

In the case of Audio Note they purchase the rights to what they like and tweak them. Their turntable which gets raves is simply a modified SystemDeckII and a Rega 250Arm with AudioNote Silver wiring their own cartridge for a budget price. Their second from top end turntable is a Voyd who went out of business.

Mr. Qvortrup and crew OWN some of the best spekaers available - looked at how to make them sound better and chose Snell. Granted a big reason would no doubt be because they dislike the sound of horns and needed something SET friendly. That alone would cut the options - though their SETs are fairly high powered actually - not the 5 watt variety.

The good stuff that was already good in the 1970's should still be good today - the low end is better today than the low end was then though. But you got more bass back then as Skeptic notes. But I would rather a good sounding speaker that misses the last 1.5 octave than a horrible speaker that produced the whole range - bass costs a lot then or now. For $2500.00 the AN E is a full range 2 driver standmount speaker which will produce to 12hz. That's about as good as it gets for the price and size.

Also:
The reason others don't simply copy is because most people want a cool LOOKING speaker - and that unfortunately is not Audio Note or Snell(which is why Snell changed from the original models to make worse sounding speakers but better looking ones - and sales went up - it's a business not a toy for many companies after all).

[RGA]

I still can't get used to the idea that speakers that cost thousands of dollars can't producte deep bass. OK, Electrostatics and Magneplanars are exotic and require special manufacturing to build them in relatively small lots. This crap can be built from off the shelf equipment at a fraction of the cost but if the guy who is selling them had "special drivers custom engineered" for his design, it wasn't because there weren't off the shelf models available that would work just as well. It's because he doesn't want anybody reverse engineering them and building them at home for a fraction of the cost and because once they are out of warrantee, if they need repairs, he's gotcha!

High end audio equipment is the only area of electronics where over the years, you got less and less and paid more and more. High end TV sets are getting to be in the same league and many of them are jokes for the money. Especially the rear projections sets.

Well the Snell E sold in the 1970s for roughly the same as it does under the AN E label taking into account inflations. The AN E uses much better materials and has had the port changed to produce higher sensitivity and more bass response.

And the AN E tweeters and drivers can be purchased from Audio Note separately. Looking at the driver and the "upgraded" AN driver they are not insanely out of whack and all are well under 100 GBP. Well except the Alnico woofers on more expensive E's which go for about ~600GBPea.

And I have never blown a driver yet. The AN tweeters while there is no circuit cutter will disconnect under too much abuse saving them from being blown.

And you can attack Audio Note all you want but what is the difference between that and being FORCED to buy a Paradigm or B&W in house tweeter - there is no OEM for them and if they change speakers(which they seem to do every few years) if they don't have any you're COMPLETELY screwed. And there was an B&W owner that was flatly told that they no longer have a tweeter for his speaker - and there is no OEM Matrix or whatever tweeter. So it's in the scrap heap. Audio Note does not hide from what they use - why make the drivers internally when you can use something that works just as well? These companies like SEAS Vifa MORELL already build the BEST drivers on the planet --- they specialize in them - why spread yourself thinner building the mundane?

II'm not arguing with you about bass - it should be there for the money charged - but there is more to it than just bass - it has to be done right. Interestingly the reivew of the AN E the guy who owns Klipshhorns apogees and the mammoth Genesis Subwoofer system mentioned that the latter had more base but pedal Organ sounded BETTER and more organic with the E despite not going as low. Speakers are a series of compromises and bass is an area that can ruin the entire speaker if it's not done correctly. UHF noted that some speakers that could go deeper DELIBERATELY cut-off low frequencies just because they know the box resonance would be awful. Cut it off? Deliberately?

And some people don't want two 9 foot speakers in their room. Since most music will never go under 40hz anyway - a speaker going to 25hz is fine. The AN J which is rated 25hz -6db by Audio Note was actually measured to 20hz -3db by Hi Fi choice under measurement with very low distorion. That IS deep bass.

Now if Audio Note would re-make the Snell type A which they're considering I will be interested. Until then they're working on a Single Ended (using 845) Tube powered Subwoofer - which I have never seen done.

[skeptic]

The real truth is that like in most businesses, there are no secrets in this business either. Most advanced hobbyists and all real pros could reverse engineer any product on the market. And among the hobbyists, some of them do just that. Even paying retail for the parts, most loudspeakers can be built for a fraction of the cost of buying them already assembled by the manufacturer. The exceptions are those that use parts that have been exclusively manufactured for a particular brand. As I have posted elsewhere, IMO this is not done for any particular technical reason but to prevent people from "rolling their own" and also to have exclusive control over repair. In the past, there were drivers for which no comparable parts were available. These included speakers like Acoustic Research and KLH especially in the early days. You may also find it impossible to obtain one of a kind types like EMIT tweeters and EMIM midranges. But most loudspeakers are made from off the shelf products that you can buy yourself.

One speaker I aspire to build one day, JBL Paragon D44000 is interesting in that by the manufacturer's own reckoning, of the approximately 1000 built over the many years of production, no two were exactly alike. The people who made them had the whole thing in their heads. The manufacturer claims there are no plans in existance anymore but once in a while you'll see them offered on e-bay for about $250.

[skeptic]

I wasn't picking on any one brand in particular, I think the whole high end audio industry is outrageous. The tube amplifier designs are pretty much the same as they were 40 years ago. Do you really think there is anything new under the sun about the topology of an amplifier using 12AX7As and KT88s? They use better capacitors, that's all. Even so, the cost difference is wholly unjustified. How to build a 2 way or 3 way acoustic suspension speaker and optimize it is 50 year old technology. Theil Small is 20 years old. Computer programs will spit out all of the parameters for you for enclosure and crossover design in seconds. All you have to do it tell it what you want. And you can tweak it to your hearts content but please please don't ever have the audacity to call it research. Real research takes a lot more knowledge, skill, and equipment than almost any speaker manufacturer has. Qvroteoupeovvqou not withstanding. BTW, the class A designs are more like 70 years old. It is the easiest of all of them. It's the first type engineers learn.

[RGA]

I don't think I'm disagreeing with you. You seem to have a dislike for Peter but he doesn't deny a single thing you stated. He does not hide from the fact of what he's doing - he is not saying he re-invented the wheel. Indeed, he is saying what you just said that it was already built WELL before and why change a great product simply because it is fashionable to do so with no sonic improvement whatsoever - but actually going int he reverse. You have the money but I don't see you buying into the latest and greatest B&W - and you have stated the exact same thing I have with a shift to more fatiguing speakers.

Unlike B&W who ramble on about Nautilus technology that makes all other tweeters sound like Crap in comparison - AN tells you straight up it's a Snell design they tell you where they source their drivers, what they build their turntables and cd players out of all the parts inside the units and if you so wish you can buy the blue-print or kit. Hell with the E you can buy the drivers and scematic for a coubple hundred bucks - you supply your own wood - they tell you which to use.

Why does not Paradigm or B&W do such things so you can buold the N801 for $500.00 which is all it costs. Look how many people complained about the horribly cheap crossovers of the N801 - this an industry standard recording monitor.(or the M801).

I don't see any wild claims - If you were to start a company would you not have the AR 9 in your line-up? You would no doubt have that speaker and then have to go out and get someone to get you those drivers - or are you going to build them all yourself. If no one is making those drivers you have to get the next best thing - so you phone up Vifa or SEAS and see what they can do - they meet your spec and you're set to go. Call your company "Audio Re-Invisionment" build old AR speakers because they're bound to sound better than new lousy stuff they make and put your 70's inspired AR up against the current crop and blow them all away.

I suppose I don't see your problem with them other than price - which can be ludicrous - but pricing is about the competition. If you go out and hear a Paradigm Studio 100V2 and you got your re-vamped AR 9 and see the price of 2k on the Paradigm and you know yours is better - just because you paid $400.00 to build it does not mean you're going to sell it for $500.00. You see geez people are willing to pay 2k for the Paradigm and $11k for the N801????? Hell I may as well charge $20k for my AR 9 because it's at least twice as good as the N801. And if people go listen to your revamped speaker against those other ones and they agree - well more profit for you and the customer, even knowing the price is "too" high, will be happy knowing they didn't get stuck with an inferior sounding speaker.

In other words would you rather overspend on a speaker you really love rather than saving 20% and get something a lot worse?

And then you canpander to the audiophiles by filling your AR 9 with exotic woods and wiring and jack the price way up. You know you may only sell 5 such units over a 10 year period but you gain a prestige factor and a sort of mythos - you're still mostly selling your stripped down models.

The only thing I see different from you and him is you don't personally like his liking for SET and or Snell and probably SystemDek or Voyd or his No times oversampling cd players etc. Or even their belief of listening to their entire system because that's the way they build and intend it be used as a system run in concert. But he's up front with it - it's an opinion and he believes it sounds better. They don't advertise. It looks pedestrian.

The compnay is the size of a flea on a Blue Whale. You should be going after the Big Boys wo charge just as much if not way more money for worse sound, worse materials but nice looks and an expensive ad-campaign.

[Geoffcin]

"and of course the drivers are closely matched which no speaker using a metal tweeter can ever be unless the woofer is metal too "

To truely match a woofer and tweeter, the first thing that would have to happen is that they should be mounted coaxially. If they are not, the mere fact that they are at different locations would mean that there would be interference patterns at every point in any room in the general frequency range where their respoinses overlap. Secondly, the faster driver would have to be fed a time delayed signal so that the two drivers produced vibrations that exactly coincided in time and space. To do that, the system would of course have to be biamplified and the faster driver fed with a delayed signal preferably frequency compensated. I do not know of a single example of any loudspeaker commercially available configured this way. On the bright side, as far as I know, nobody has ever demonstrated that this would yield a better or more accurate sounding speaker.

That would be the Thiel 6 with the new coaxial mid/tweeter driver.

http://www.thielaudio.com/THIEL_Web/Pages/cs6.html

Thiel lives on thier engineering. I've heard the 3.6's and I was impressed, and I've been told that the the 6's were incredible. The crossovers they use are a work of art to bring the phase responce to within a few degrees. The drivers are also precision time aligned.

[WmAx]

The crossovers they use are a work of art to bring the phase responce to within a few degrees.

At least Theil, in this case, has made an improvement over most multi-way 1st order speakers. That is, since the sound at around fc of the mid/tweeter is eminating from the same point(relative to <1/2 wavelength), the combing effects caused by traditional mult way 1st order acoustic crossover speakers that produce significant off axis errors, are eliminated. Off axis response still will be far from linear with this example, but much improved, at least.

I question whetehr or not the transient-perfect result of 1st order acoustic slopes is of any signficant audible importance. In ABX tests, it was identifiable by myself in some music clips, specifically containing high amplitude transients, reliably. But a sublt difference, for sure. In general musical content, it was not possible to discern. These tests were performed with professional grade headphones, which are void of any room interferences. Audibility can be assumed to be considerably less in a normal listening environment(room).

The drivers are also precision time aligned

This certainly helps with crossover design(make it easier).

-Chris

[RGA]

Thiel is quite an innovator - I just wish they would make a speaker that sounded musically satisfying - and before everyone or anyone dumps on me I'm not alone --the follow-ups have both camps - http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.pl?...52122&review=1

Though I admit the ones I heard were several years ago - so maybe they improved.

[speakerman3]

Japanese speaker components can be excellent. Foster and Fostex tweeters are some of the nicest tweeters out there. The problem is that you won't find them on any Japanese speakers that are commonly sold in America. You will find them in some of the nicer U.S. designed speakers, however. Don't expect them to sound like the old school Technics speakers, though. They sound much better.