Living with panel/electrostat speakers

Love it!

Henryt's Veritys are the same price as the MLs then - interesting.....

 

Exactly because it's a four foot line source.

Paul

 

Hey Steve,

There are tube amps and then, there are tube amps. Listen to something like the Maggie 3.6/R hooked-up to Audio Research LS25 MkII pre and VT100 MkIII power and I can assure you that you won't hear any bloat from that system. Well, I didn't anyway when I heard it and the system was being fronted by the Audio Research CD3 CD player.




Enjoy the music,

Lawrie.

 

Errm so why try listening slouching and sitting up then as you so cleverly suggested. Are you suggesting there will be differences? Or just being your usual argumentative self due to a life of boredom and solitude.

 

Ahem. May I quietly intervene on this one please, to prevent any ill will from other threads developing further on this one?


Paul wrote

Merlin replied

Chaps (adopting best Mick Parry tone)

Merl. If you read the link to the stereophile page at the beginning of this thread, you'll see that line sources have poor off axis dispersion characteristics which get worse as frequency rises. Which is why Paul thought that the treble might be a little beamy.

Paul. The curved panels of Logans and Soundlabs is an attempt by the designers to get around the beaming characteristics of line sources and achieve a wider dispersion pattern.

Now leave it outside :MILD:

reg

 

Thanks Reg, nicely put.

My point was that with Logan offering a curved panel, the dispertion characteristics of these panels allows for a reasonably wide sweet spot.

The comment just seemed to show a dangerously small amount of knowledge on the subject and as ever no practical experience to fall back on.

Interestingly, I found the sweetspot with the Ascents to be wider if anything than my current box speakers, and there is no change whether listening 18" or 5ft from the floor.

 

While the boys are outside ...

We're talking vertical beaming here.

This is the reason that I can do a Nonsuch 4 and I could do a Nonsuch 2 but I can't do a Nonsuch 8 (until Bandor and I come out with our revolutionary new drive units in a few months' time).

The four driver system gives a vertical array of about 28cm high and this means that you'll still get the full treble response, provided you are sitting down to listen. You've got a few degrees to play with but stand up and you'll lose output over 10kHz.

If I used, say, 8 drivers then you would lose high frequency even on axis as the comb effect would mean that high frequency from the top of the array interferes with that at the bottom (simplified explanation).

I could of course put a low pass filter on the outer drivers so that only the middle ones do the high frequencies and there would be less cancellation. However, I've never put crossovers or filters in my full-range speakers and I ain't going to start now.

The same is true for tall ribbons, panels or anything else.

The curved panel approach is one way to achieve a full frequency spectrum when listening on axis. I don't think this would help when listening standing up though.

... You can come in now.

 

Very true. Another (extremely successful, I might add ) approach is the delay line fed into concentric rings used by you-know-who.

reg

 

Wot, more bl**dy electronics?

 

I was concerned about height rather than width. But I defer the practical to those who've played with MLs and the theoretical to our resident speaker designer who seemed to know what I meant.

There are some who consider that extreme directionality and a tiny sweet spot are a very good thing indeed, the headphones with attitude approach. I was just suggesting that moving about a bit during a demo would be sensible, I don't really understand 'merlin's over-reaction.

Beaming effects are obvious with the old Quad ELS57, and that is obviously a relatively narrow tweeter panel curved vertically. They are completely unobvious with the Quad ESL63.

Paul

 

Paul. I think the first part of your original post confused the issue. The comment on slouching reveals what you really meant...

And as you say, it was Steve who realised this,

Presumably, a 4ft high line source will give you a reasonable (aprrox equal to or slightly more than 4ft at the listening position?) range of vertical dispersion such that sitting down or standing up shouldn't make too much difference.

reg

 

Hey Merl, have to admit, I've already been eyeing those up on the Maggie website. Pricewise, they'd be a realistic proposition. I'd love to hear the top of range 20.1 though.

Interesting, I've been plough through some of the Quad, Maggie and Logan reviews at Audioreview (haven't actually got around to reading any Logan reviews yet but will do). Interesting that people are split either between Quad and Maggies i.e. people who like Quad ESL wouldn't buy a Maggie given the choice, whereas people who prefer Maggies don't do Quad. Going just on the Quad/Maggie reviews, it further seems that those that like either Quad or Maggie don't do Logans and visa-versa!

Found out though that I might have a Quad ESL dealer no more than a mile away from my house, so will see if I can get a dem followed by a home dem, but no rush at the mo as I couldn't even put a deposit down on the credit card right at this time.

I know some ESL 63 and 57 owners like to stack them, hmm that gives me an idea. Wonder if anyone uses stacked 989's!?! :JPS:

So if I understand you correctly Steve, the upshot of this is that you can have a full range ribbon say that is too long i.e. it is so long that it could end up sounding very dull due to the HF cancellations from the end extremes of the length?

 

I've only designed using cones so don't know much about ribbons or ESLs. I'm assuming that a panel or ribbon would work like a number of cones but this may not be the case. It depends on the dispersion characteristics of ribbons. Never used the things.

The man you want to ask is Jim Griffin on the DIY forum/Audio Asylum. Now I think about it I've seen his line arrays which have long ribbon arrays. Here's one such beast: One of Jim Griffin's line arrays

Sorry I can't be more help. Better get back to me Bandors.

 

Any ideas what Pipedream do for their huge line cone arrays? And isn't there a Norwegian firm that also do something similar (forget the name, but heard them at S-o-M)?

 

Graham do you mean Dali?

Cheers
Chris

 

Graham - haven't you auditioned a pair of Logans of some description before, if memory serves me correctly?

 

No...having checked back it was Ton Art.

Logans? Had a couple of auditions of the Ascents. At S-o-M on Advantage S150 (or maybe your Gamut D200 can't remember), they sounded pretty wonderful. Did a damned good job of that Poulenc organ concerto - certainly gave me both clarity and impact (not sure whether they would have shaken apart in more than a 2hr demo though). At Oxford Audio, on the back of my M3 they sounded absolutely dire - great gaping hole in the crossover region.

Note that the panel only gets going at 2-300Hz - just about middle-C - so all the mid/low is from the bass-cone, and the main body of instrumental sound is right at the crossover.

I also had a go with 988s at S-o-M, on a Veritas poweramp. Amp kept on going into shut-down at anything more than mezzo-forte. Not good .

So my experience is that the panels do sound wonderful - but are pretty picky about the amp driving them. Anything decent is also really too big for my room - but you should have plenty of space for them. Only question in my mind is whether your floor would suck out what bass they can do.

 

Just to explain why I am so bemused by the theorising over ML's dispertion characteristics, I was demming a number of speakers a couple of years ago at Acoustic Arts and nothing was really doing it for me.

I asked them to put on the ML's (even though the brief was for a small pair of standmounts ) The music started as I was standing up by the door, to the right rear of the room. My face contorted into one ugly grin and I said " yep I'll take those!"

They were just so damned musical, even when I was totally out of the supposed sweetspot. Do get to hear the Odyssies Henry, if you are coming up this way, I can arrange a dem at AA and will drive over. Although it might be me who ends up getting the cards out

They are the finest hybrid I have heard to date. Given that many Quad owners, and Maggie lovers, end up mating their panels with subs to get more air moving on rock music, I feel the better ML hybrids get the closest to an all round solution. They do the CLZ11 pure panel if you cannot live with subs, but I would go to the Quad in that case anyway.

 

The best subs to match with ESLs are dipoles. They integrate quite well.

No offence Graham but I don't think they're designed to give of their best in the back of your BMW.

 

LOL

The bass units on the Odyssies and Prodegy use both a forward facing and rear facing bass unit, but they are not true dipoles. The force forward technology is i believe designed to cancel the back wave at certain frequencies using phase corrections between the drivers outputs.

Of course, if you do remove the backwave of the bass unit, transient impact is improved by removing time smear, so I guess this is why the percieved bass speed is closer to the panel at the crossover But hey, it's way over my head. Still sounds good though