Is he really flying in the face of everyone else - since the well proven design has been there since the 1940's - and modified once by Snell and then by PQ?

Your assessment was similarly asked on AA:

"The reason violins, guitars, etc. have boxes is because they PRODUCE music. Speakers don't. They REPRODUCE music. The box is a big, heavy, distortion producing artifact. The best box is either no box, or a silent box. The only silent box I've personally ever heard were on the Wilson Audio X1 GRAND SLAAM...$65k. 2 inch thick synthetic marble.

So the previous poster is fairly correct. Speakers do NOT need box resonance to operate, look at any dipole.
Read up on speaker design theory, and you'll understand a lot more.

-tal"

"Dear Tal,

Let's put this to bed once and for all, Mount Everest has a resonance frequency, low yes, but it still resonates.

We can therefore reasonably conclude that everything resonates, there is no such thing as a speaker with no box (popular as the concept may seem, you have to mount the drivers in something, even if it is a panel driver), so we have essentially two choices,

1.) Build a box that minimises the resonant behaviour by applying mass, which does nothing useful in most cases, because whilst a lower resonance frequency at lower amplitude may look great on a waterfall graph, the reality is that it prolongs the amount of time the resonant energy is present, which leaves it present for long enough to disturb the replay.

In addition, damping is "stupid" in the sense that it removes both the sounds you want and the ones you are trying to get rid of.

2.) Build a cabinet which has a fast enough recovery time to stay within the human ear's time constant, that is, be close enough to the original note, to be indistinguishable by the human ear.

Method no. 2.) is much much harder to apply, as working out how to RAISE the resonance frequency and shorten it towards inaudibility requires hundreds of hours of experimentation AND does provide beautiful waterfall graphs with which to present your latest resonance removing technique as another breakthrough of "innovation" with which to sell next years crop of speakers with.

All our measurement methods and conventions dictate that making the cabinet heavier is better, unfortunately the truth is that it is a convenient, but poor way of solving the problem.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup "


Dear RGA,
It should say - 6 dB at 23 kHz, the problem with this kind of information is that it largely depends on how far away it was measured and in what kind of environment, anachoic or reverberant, so you need a whole load more information to be able to determine what the speaker actually does.

Given that most software, whether LP or CD does not have much energy above 15kHz and also considering that many of the recognised best recordings don't either, I think it is a mute issue whether bandwidth above 15kHz matters that much to the musical hearing experience, I think, as with most paper specifications, that they are designed to impress the less knowledgeable consumer into believing that they are making a choice based on "solid" information, which is important when they are making a buying decision.

A number of magazines and audio companies use our speakers, as do several mastering studios, we do not advertise this generally, because I do not feel that it is right to influence people's judgement of performance this way, I have the same view of specifications, they tell you little or nothing about the real world performance.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup"



The comparison to musical instruments is for the layman in that they actually use the cabinet itself like a musical instrument does, to create the sound. Most box speakers don't - which is why so many of the speakers you hear in a given price range say sound nearly identical - different treble and one might have more bass etc but they sound almost identical in the dyamics room filling kind of weightyness aspects.

In the end though I am forced to simply go by what I hear - you have way more of a technical background and have the right to question his approach. But right or wrong it sounds right to me. And I know you are not impressed with a LOT of speakers currently available yourself because you have oftened mentioned that "Brightness" that I also complain about.

Thus does it not make sense that an entirely different approach would or at least "could" be better. If the New accepted designs are not exactly getting you to sell your old designed AR9's then maybe other old designs are also better than the new ones. His master speaker is the Snell AII I believe. I can honestly say that take away all other considerations I would take the J ~3k over the N801 at $14k. So yes things at AN may be overpriced but to me then what is the N801? The point is to make you feel something when you listen for me that is AN for you may leave you totally cold and another it's Quad etc. I don't think this is rocket science.

Also:
Why not ask him some technical questions - He spends time on AA, he answers people's questions but has to dumb it down for less technically minded people - he's at every show, runs the company puts the stuff together designs and still takes the time to frequent AA and admittedly come under the gun on occasion. His digital products took a lot of flack too - I wonder if people actually heard and compared though.

The guy is pasionate and thinks he's right - and if he's right then to him everyone is less right to outright wrong - presumably Peter Walker felt that way about electrostats and whoever runs Magnepan feels that way too...and the people who buy those speakers because they genuinely love the sound will believe that those designers were dead right - even though someone like yourself can easily come along and find the "technical" flaws or weaknesses in planars and stats - nothing is perfect.