Florian vs. RGA

[RGA]

I editied my post about 5 minutes after because I knew it would fall into a mire of arguing. Nevertheless my comment on Apogees' 30hz was taken directly from the Apogee Acoustics spec sheet. An ex poster hear Skeptic kept saying his AR9 was dead flat at 20hz but I have the original AR sheet on the AR 9 which states 28hz- 3db.

I have directly heard the Apogee Duetta sig and I was unimpressed with its bass response and it's fatiguing lower treble upper mid noise and lack of lifelike dyynamics. I like the holographic stage and the big sound but all in all for the money they were to me a rippoff. And that was YEARS before I ever even heard of Audio Note.

And if one is going to get on Peter Q for his comments well firstly -- he's a manufacturer of a different approach just as any boxed speaker maker is so of course they're going to be biased to the sound they think is better.

Peter owned several of these speakers and was a dealer in the UK. He buys many of the best competitors speakers to see what they're doing right (in his view) and determining if there is something to improve.

This is what he stated on AA on and around June 12, 2004

"I am serious, alright!

Ask anyone who has heard my system over the past few years, it [AN E] will play organ notes so deep you will need the toilet to relieve yourself after the first few bars, assorted percussion instruments have both the sparkle, punch, depth, pressure and energy reminicent of the real thing, provided the recording is up to the job (try the Sylvio Gualda, Erato Recording, Percussion II, especially the Xenakis piece on side one).

I had my friends (Bjorn Borja and Jan Paus) from SEAS visiting Wednesday, and Bob Neill from Amherst was here Monday/Tuesday this week as well, they heard it, and so will you if you care to drop by.

It was done with a parallel SET 2A3 amplifiers as well with no more than 8 watts from the 1930's single plates.

Your Apogees have separate coil woofers?

The Scintilla never measured more than about 40 Hz when I had them and they needed a billion watts to give any impression of bass energy, at least as far as my definition of real bass goes, they died very quickly from metal fatigue when pressed hard with a big amplifier for a couple of hours.

The square area needed from panels to give any really low bass depth is considerable, and the Apogees just don't cut it here, I am sorry to say."

"You are just assuming that because the cabinet is undamped (because we told you) that the colouration you perceive comes from the speaker, this kind of uncritical and unsupported conjecture is what has driven the pursuit of better audio round in circles for years.

I recommend that you read Leonard Norwitz's and my piece on the Comparison by Contrast evaluation method, this should give you some idea why I am saying what I just said above.

Ribbons and electrostatics have lower diaphragm mass that may be hard to argue against on a pure pound for pound basis, however what is hard to dispute as well is that they are driven by the most anaemic magnet fields and have so little room to "move", which makes their dynamic ability completely unacceptable, not to mention the fact that their load behaviour is more than a little cruel to the poor amplifier, to add further insult to injury the bandwidth efficiency is laughable and their resulting real world frequency response interesting to say the least (in this regard I recommend a quick study of Harry Ohlsons analysis of the panel speaker principle in several of his books), so how you can find them "better" is difficult to see, at least a good dynamic driver in a decent box offers some meat on the bone dynamically.

In my view we need to remove a great deal of colouration from the recording and reproduction chain in order to be able to say with any certainty where the best of the traditional dynamic speaker problems truly begin, but suffice to say that removing the dynamic energy to get rid of colourations by a combination of low efficiency (most electrostatics, ribbons and I am afraid also most dynamic speakers) or poor coupling to the air in much of the frequency area (electrostatics and panels in general) is not an improvement, it is just another blind alley from which the industry will take years to find it way out of, once it has realised that it is actually there.

Combining a dynamic woofer with a smaller panel or combination of panel and ribbon falls foul of the fact that you need drivers with a very similar sonic signature across the frequency range to sucessfully negotiate most music and get a harmonious and homogenous overall result and an integral part of this is to use drivers that have a similar dynamic ability for a start.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup "


"I think you would be horrified if you ever heard any of your favourite Infinity or Apogee speakers (I have owned or tried them all!) subjected to the CbyC method against what we consider good, but that is for another day.

I have been around for long enough to have tried pretty much every state of the art solution that has been offered, I still own a Beveridge System II, ESS Transar, Siemens Klangfilm system, several Snell Type A models and one of two more, and have over the years worked on and modified practically every vintage speaker system made and what that has taught me is that the reason panel speakers live in the shade commercially is for good reason, their limitations are simply too glaring for the cold light of the wider market.

You may like them, but that does anything but make you "right".

"Long excursion drivers are only needed because designers for commercial reasons need small size enclosures, they represent such a severe compromise that they can hardly be considered, based on any serious merit, certainly not when we talk high quality, linear excursion is the least of the problems, variations in the magnetic field due to the large movement of the voice coil, cone break-up etc. are at least as problematic.

The older drivers represent a far better example of how a driver should be made to work when made to suit less commercial size and cost requirements, the fact that the old enclosures were resonant and less well made should not be held against the drivers of that time.

You need far more and much wider experience to be able to make the sort of sweeping statements you make, one way would be to join the audio industry circus yourself and test whether your theories "float", but as you may already know only Quad, ML, Soundlab and Magnepan have managed to stay alive making panels and if your expressed preferences are anything to go by then neither of them made or make the best, so draw your conclusions and make your decision from that."

June 03, 2004
"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."


And Flo -- you can take him up on his challenge as you live in Europe no?

"While we are on the subject of cheating physics, why don't you study Harry Ohlson's work on panel speakers and then decide who is cheating physics and who is deluding themselves.

I for one would happily put a pair of AN-Es against the Klipsch corner horns and even more so any pair of Apogees, I should be living in Switzerland sometime next year, so I will be close enough to you to do just that.

Horns have great leading edge speed, but generally lack the carry through energy of the complete note, on piano this is particularly apparent, the difference is off course only there if the rest of the system has the ability."

But why not go the Speaker forum at Audio Asylum and ask him whatever you wish if he has the time to reply he will.

This post was about the sound of the Duetta -- if you like them great but for the music I listen to -- my Wharfedales do a better job -- and interestingly have meat on the bones bass that the Duetta seriously lacked. My Wharedales are rated to 40hz and despite thier problems were more musically enjoyable and alive sounding with real balls than the Duetta could muster. I never heard any other Apogee speakers because the press said this was the best one.