All change please :D

[bottleneck]

Electrostatics are expensive. So are horns of course but here one has the option to DIY the cabinets. Sadly I am not made of money :cry:

It occurs to me that although DIY horns might still be pretty expensive as the drivers are pretty special and quite costly, they might work well with Sonic-Link T-Amps which are ridiculously cheap. The total system cost could then be on a par with what I have now.

Hiya

It seems to me that my own horns disperse more widely than electrostatics - they certainly reflect when put next to a sidewall. Obviously also with horns they tend to be large, which might not be acceptable domestically (?).

Sound-wise, obviously I am a little biased but I think they do something that other drivers dont - scale, dynamics and tangability..

If you do go that route, you could get an inexpensive valve amp - IME horns need a softer sounding amp than a digital one, or they can sound hard.

Cheaper stats, well, Ive seen second hand martin logans for reasonable money before, and certainly quad 57s and 63s wouldnt be more than the second hand price of your existing 2 sets of speakers..

I dont know if you've heard logans/63/57's etc, if so what did you think?

Another one for 'flea power' of course is the single driver/full range thing, like a lowther/fostex design, which you could horn load for greater bass depth and efficiency. You could aid the frequency extremes with a supertweeter and a sub if you wanted. The crossoverless design and ease of drive certainly give real impact and dynamics...

 

[T-bone Sanchez]

I like the valves bit! What about something like a dipole design?? Just a thought, might give you a happy medium. Plenty of lowther/fostex designs as bottleneck mentioned.

Thorsten really can come up with some leftfield designs! He's more or less designed a speaker for me which is probably quite tame for his standards!

 

[Dynamic Turtle]

:lol:

Fortunately the good Lord saw fit to make me gay :techno:

Really? With your taste in interior design, I'd say you were very straight indeed!

DT

Oh, I'm *such* a bitch!!

 

[Tenson]

A crossover at 1440 Hz!!! Are they crazy?

My PMC AML1's are a two way design that crossover just below that. To my ears they have far better phase coherence and mess up things like vocals far less than speakers with a crossover around 3KHz, especially 3 way designs.

 

[technobear]

The crossover is the key. By considering the crossover as a complete system and accounting for the effects of all the drivers together in each frequency range, it is possible to create a phase coherent speaker system. There are several papers on the subject out there on the net.

It still won't have the impact and realism of a single full-range driver in a horn though because of all the other problems with conventional speakers.

 

[3DSonics]

Hi,

Eeek! As an engineer, the Linkwitz Orion looks on paper to be the complete opposite of what is required for coherent and accurate music reproduction. A crossover at 1440 Hz!!! Are they crazy? Must be a pretty special crossover network and pretty special drivers.

Hmm, I suggest you think a bit harder....

First, the lower the crossover point the less critical timealignment becomes.

Secondly, with a 4th order highpass at 1.44KHz the attenuation at 720Hz will be the same as a second order highpass at 2.88KHz (but below that the higher order filter will have a lot more attenuation).

You must understand that the Orion was designed from the word go to be active, use high order filters and all such stuff. For a conventional speaker using conventional and affordable drivers it is probably close to the limits of what is doable.

Of all the research I've done lately into the subject of coherent speakers, the ones featuring Lowther or AER drivers seem to ellicit the most praise from their owners. I know you owned a pair of Beauhorns yourself.

Lowthers, AER etc suffer from a rather uneven frequency response which requires correction using acoustic or electric equalisation. Acoustic equalisation means usin g a horn and a front one at that (eg Beauhorn Virtuoso).

Supravox Drivers (which I'm afraid we distribute in the UK so you might discount my recommendation) are much better balanced tonally and can handle more LF than most AER's or Lowther if you get the Signature Version. In that case you don't quite get as much efficiency, but reflex and/or TQWT enclosures will at least give a evenly balanced sound, using the right drivers you can even get away with dipoles.

I wonder what tricks I can employ to get a similarly efficient sub without it being as big as the room. Can a closed box sub be efficient?

Efficiency is a direct result of size and frequency, that means for loud LF you must go large. The way out is to up the power to "insane level", use drivers with a large cone surface and a small box, with a suitable equalisation.

The way I do that in my current system is with two 12" long throw pro-audio drivers and around 250W power in a 15" cube.

The Behringer is a toy I have considered before but I wasn't convinced of it's worthiness for audiophile applications.

Well, it can use some mods to get the best from it (change levels from pro-audio to something more compatible with home audio, upgrade the rather basic Op-Amp's and coupling (electrolytic) capacitors, but the basic stuff is there and even unmodified, as long as you set the levels right and when coupled with a sensible relatively cheap multichannel Amp (Panasonic aparently has something reasonably nice - the XR45) can be surprisingly better than the same money invested into a 2-Channel Amp and a passive crossover....

Ciao T

 

[Tenson]

Most of the 'full range' drivers really aren't though

I really enjoyed the Ferguson Hill room at the show, it did some things just so well, but it had many other issues which I could never put up with. Its all just personal taste n the end.

My point was though, that a 1KHz crossover isn't necessarily bad, its all in the implementation and the rest of the speaker I suppose.

 

[technobear]

Thanks for all that. I still have a huge pile of reference material to wade through but I think I'm beginning to understand what works and what doesn't.

Horns would, I think work best in corners and I only have one decent corner in my living room. In this house, I will stick with the Castles. I will continue to study alternatives in the hope that when I move house, I will be able to do something better. (At the very least I will make sure I have a suitable wall and room shape for the little Dynaudios to work properly).

 

[bottleneck]

Horns would, I think work best in corners and I only have one decent corner in my living room.

I only have the experience of my own living room, but I found the corners to be the worst place for the horns (and other speakers) Ive had.

Using the corner seems to add bass (presumably reflecting from the floor and both side walls).

I suspect (but dont know) that some horns (like certain klipsch, tannoy etc) were designed to go in corners to be more domestically acceptable because they are so large..

 

[technobear]

Yes, sorry, I didn't make myself very clear there. A domestically acceptable horn needs to go in a corner if it is to have a reasonable bass response. Otherwise you will need some other kind of bass system to augment the horn, which of course will itself take up more space.

 

[technobear]

Well today I changed it all back again - well almost. The bass hump wasn't completely avoided by the new layout. It just depended what I played. Overall the sound was far too resonant and boomy. So now the system is back firing across the width of the room but I didn't put the furniture back. It stayed down the far end. The Dynaudios are sitting on chairs (I know but it's all I have at the moment ). The kit is on slabs on the floor. It sounds better this way but still too lively and confused. I tried hanging a duvet from the picture hooks and light fittings. This lead to a much calmer drier sound and it was easier to hear what was going on. Removing the duvet bought the confusion back again. So now I need:

1) Speaker stands

2) A small equipment rack

3) Absorption

I have some of the carpet so I think I can make some simple absorbers for the lower part of the wall behind the speakers that should look alright.

Not sure about the upper walls. Some rockwool or foam covered in the curtain material perhaps.

Oh, and the Castles are still for sale

 

[Tenson]

There probably isn't much point putting carpet or rockwall behind the speakers, only bas is really going to get round there and such thin absorption will be helpless at absorbing it.

You would have more luck with putting some of that rockwool on the side walls or ceiling.

 

[Carl]

Very nice room and very nice photo's. I think the LS do not suit such a small room. Why not trying monitors? There are lots of them. You can always ask Alco, he tried nearly everything on the market.

Is a subwoofer working in your room.

Carl

 

[technobear]

Well there isn't a side wall to the left. There's a dining room And to the right is a very large window. Pulling the curtains helps as they are quite heavy. I'll try and make sure all the bare bits of upper wall get something on them. The trick will be to keep it looking good.

 

[technobear]

Carl, thankyou. I have now turned the room back the other way and I am using the Dynaudio Contour 1.1's again. The Castles need a large living room that isn't also a dining room!

 

[adam]

Why not found what freq the hump is at and ask RPG to make some traps for that freq?it maybe the best £300 you'll spend,they're not that big either, 60cmx60cm.I don't think foam is the answer to your problems,but bass traps.

RPG foam help my treble and mids an great deal,but still had a few freq humps foam wont cure.only bass traps.

 

[technobear]

Nothing 60cmx60cm can cure a bass hump unless you fit about 30 of them. Acoustics products look good value until you find out how many you actually need. I spent a lot of time reading up on bass traps and the like about 2 years ago. I still have all that data. Small bass traps will only perform broad band absorption. They will improve things if you have enough of them but they won't do much for a primary room mode. For that you need panel absorbers at least 8ft x 2ft and then two in each corner.