new living voice prototype horns

has anyone ever listened to oris swing

http://www.bd-design.nl/index1.html -> go to finished product, then oris swing

looks like a civilized domestic solution.

strangely this pic is taken in the city where i live, i should find the owner.... not many horns of this kind in belgrade.

 

Where's the sub then?

 

I guess it swings out of the way! These are very good if you have particularly low ceilings.

 

Any mention of drivers?

 

Yep they've probably got those Keith.

 

these are around 18.000E plus VAT

i think they have their own bass driver plus AER full range

 

Adopting a feline position, they'll be horrible.

Seriously the numbers don't add up for me - noticably in the bass. And I'm no fan of full range drive units. All show and no go if you ask me.

 

sorry it seems it's modded BMS driver

i remember romy once had a spectacular s*itting session all over these....

edit: OK i found it:

“Hm, the BMS drivers? Unfortunately they have very narrow margin of application. The BMS drivers are nice if you build a sound reinforcement system that would be placed in a truck that blasts drams during those gays pride parades. The BMS drivers are good in Jewish weeding when father of the bride invited too many dentists and he wants that everyone at the table #126 hear his toasts. The BMS drivers are good for Ohio audio installations where the system owners use the dB of their playback to slaughter chickens, pigs, horses and visiting libertarians. They are also very useful in demolition landscaping as they make any living subject to fade. Unfortunately the BMS drivers completely are not useful for sound as they pump pressure instead of the content, and it is no surprise why they are being used in today’s White House pressroom. BMS drivers have complete disregard to the tonal aspect of sound reproduction and they are a direct compromise of …anything. Yes, the BMS drivers are great to start at AA.”

 

i traced the owner - has a very interesting rest of the setup, BP300B etc.

he's away for holiday at the moment, i'll get in touch with him in 3 weeks and report more

 

this is what one owner wrote on the bass issue, it seems there are 2 drivers coupled in an isobarik chamber:



The SWINGs reproduce the lows better than any other speaker that I have heard.

The SWING incorporate a short (d = 80 cm) horn in order to provide the same sound character from the bass at the x-over frequency as is found in the Orpheans. At the same time the horn adds speed to the bass at this frequency range. The horn amplifies a little at the 200-400 Hz region, but this is liniarlized by the build in filter.
Hence the bass merges perfectly with the sound of the Orpheans. Your hear "one" sound source with no specific "split-up" sound character as found in most multiway speakers.

Further to the above Bert has laid enormous effort into getting this SWING bass system sound so good as it does.
He shaped the cabinet in a way that shows almost no parallel walls in order to avoid standing waves inside the cabinet. He incorporates a cellular structure of uneven sized damped chambers to cancel backward directed energy and to avoid such energy (distortion) to be transferred to the listener through the bass drivers diaphragm.
Bert also showed special attention to the chosen materials itself. By choosing a very light weighted wood composite the cabinet is allowed to vibrate a little while playing. As the chosen wood express very nice sounding harmonics it contributes to the overall musicality of the system. You may compare it to how most acoustical music instruments are made lightweighted in order to add or support harmonics to the basic sound.
I have heard very few speakers, where the aim was to ground the vibrations of the cabinets by choice of heavy and thick materials, that were able to express the inner soul of the music. Most of them sounded extremely dull.
Then Bert also showed attention to the overall size of the cabinet. By choosing 2 bass drivers in a push-push-pull-pull configuration (some call this "Isobaric" and some "Compound") the cabinet shows only half the size compared to the use of only one bass driver. Hence the remains of distorted sound inside the cabinet, which travels through the diaphragms, is dampened another 6 dB.

Summarised I may say that the SWING bass system excels and let the music slip out.

Talking about real sub-bass from speaker systems it is a general misunderstanding that a the enclosured basses should show linearity down to say 20 Hz.
Any listening room will amplify the bass from 200 Hz and down. So in order to have the bass linearity just right, Bert has mirrored the mentioned amplification in the roll off of the enclosured basses by selection of cabinet size, low Q bass reflex ports, inner cabinet air Q and the bass driver itself.

So can the SWING reach the sub lows. You bet they can. And they do that showing the same airy-ness as the highs.

 

Anu you need compression drivers, modified conventional a la Avantgarde just don't cut the mustard imho.

 

So it's an isobarically loaded bass reflex? With a cabinet that sings along to add some harmonics. I don't see the point of that conical thing sticking out of the front really, unless they believe it's useful from a marketing point of view.

Keith, they are compression drive units. Just Coaxial ones. See here

 

OK, let's try to hear this first before any final conclusions

 

Absolutely. They may well sound excellent regardless.

 

swing of bd-design

hello Gordan

i have the Orphean horns, same as used in the swing system. the midrange is ok, but high's are beaming. the bass, Bert uses his own Bass, witch you can see at his site. Romy's opinion is worthless, as for him, beside his own playback, almost anything else is good. He did not hear the Orpheans, so.....
The Living Voice seem to be good speakers.

rds Angelo

 

hi angelo,
strange and interesting, my first thought when i saw your work is they are somehow too similar to orphean horns. it was only later that i've realized they ARE a DIY version of oris design. i don't know if those are your first work but whatever they are, they look very competitive and i hope they sound good.
angelo, i noticed you've had quite a good experience with trends ta-10, even against viva 300b amps if i remember correctly - these cost £4-5k in the UK. would you mind sharing your views?

 

my speakers

hello Gordan

i bought a pair of original Orpheans last october. They are the ones you can see in my speakers, in my blog. I did not make a diy version of it, they are original. When i replaced a pair of Altec 288-16g with 1003 horns with the Orpheans, the improovement specially in the midrange, with the tractrix horns was remarkable. I was using a Coral H100 tweeter with the Altec's. Unfortunately i blow it, but with time i observed that the Orpheans beam in the high's , and the Corals were better. I will replace the Orpheans, as i came to the conclusion, that one horn covering the frequencies from 300hz up to 22khz has its advantages, like good imaging and stereo effect, but also one important disadvantage, wich is, as said, beaming. As you can see also in my blog, on page 2, i am making wood tractrix horns. They will be used with the Radian 950 pb compression driver and replace the orphean horns. Musique concrete from France and Vincent Brient ( who makes also wooden tractrix horns ) gave me the tip. He even replaced a TAD4001 with the Radian. From 6khz up, i will use the Fostex TA500a mkII. I believe this will be cerainly a very good combination, and i hope, after spend some time and tweak it, to get excellent results. I had some nice email exchanges with John Hasquin, who made the mid-bass tractrix horns from Romy, a very inteligent and friendly guy, and shared valuable information with me. i will just copy his answer, as you will certainly learn from his email too :

Romy does not use a high pass filter on the midbass horn to limit the low frequency going to the Fane Studio 8M. However, the custom wound output transformer his amplifier uses is bandwidth limited, so it behaves like a filter at both frequency extremes. In addition, the tuned rear chamber of the horn controls some the woofer's excursion. If you really want to limit the frequencies going to the midbass horn, then make a band pass filter of 50Hz and 1KHz.



The Radian compression drivers work just fine. However, it's got more to do with the content of the music and not with the design of the driver. See the attached graphic to see the relative acoustic power levels of the typical orchestra verses frequency. The highest acoustical energy is centered around 330Hz. You do not want to put a crossover anywhere near this! You should not put a crossover anywhere between 175Hz and 1KHz. The non-linear reactance of a crossover (active or passive, it doesn't matter) in this region will messes up the time, phase, and impedance constants. In addition, you need to stay at least one octave away from the resonance frequency of the driver when designing a crossover. The resonance of the Radian 950PB is around 550Hz, a 1KHz crossover barely fits this guideline.

There is no single answer, only various degrees of rightness.

I have worked with both the Radian drivers and the Vitavox S2. The thing you must remember is Romy is looking for a very, very, very, very specific sound and the S2 does it for him. I personally didn't think the S2 was a superior driver. It sounded good, but wasn't the Holy Grail of compression drivers for me. I like the sound of a lot of drivers, it just depends on what you are trying to accomplish. I like the sound of the JBL 2440, Altec 290-16L, Emilar EC-320, Gauss HF-4000 and a few others.

Some further toughs : Spend enought time to examine what to buy. If you buy speakers off the shelf, from Audio Retailers, ore even on the internet, then you pay , lets say a speaker costs us$10.000,00 by the manufacturing company : 35% distributor margin, and over 100% retailer margin, so this speaker will retail us$ 30.000,00. This is YOUR lost, as you just pay so much for the distribution, and not actually for real value of the speakers. not mentioning that most audiophiles loose a lot of money, when they want to sell their gear, specially when it is very expensive stuff, where is only very view people able to buy it.

A friend of mine wich will built up his whole system with me visit me recently and listened my bi amplified system. First with the Trends TA10.1 for the bass, and the Viva for mid-high section, for the whole day. The next day i switched, and used the Viva to amplify a pair of k-horns, and the Trends TA10.1 for the Orpheans. His reaction was the same as i had : WOW ! The Trends sounds MUCH better than the Viva. I was smilining.
This due to the fact that with Class T amps, the output of the tweeter is between 5 and 10db higher , above 10khz. he described the sound of the combination Viva - Orpheans sounds like coming from a small radio.... you know what i mean. Well, if you go thrue BD-design forum, Bert did a nice Test of Tamps and describes why Tamps give this impression. I acostumed to listen to the Vivas, as i know it is more natural. So , it is needed really some listening skills, to know what actually sounds more natural, even if in the first moment, something can sound more appealing.
You can give a look at http://www.audioxpress.com/ , there are some excellent articles, wich also teach what to observe when actually evaluate a speaker.

you can email me at [email protected], and share more ideas.

best Angelo

 

Look, you unfortunate,

how many times I asked you do not post the idiocy about me if that idiocy is based upon the facts that you are not able to comprehend. You are too green in audio, you run from person to person, annoy them like hell, milk them with information, but you personally too limited and too inadequate to be able to use that information in any more or less civilizes fashion. You are learning, please do so but do not do it by expensed of others, particularly the others who consider you are a worthless idiot. If you can not forgive me that I send you to hell then it is your problem, too many people told me what impression you made to them in Vegas, and I heard too much of your own thinking. So, please keep cruseing the audio web communities, beg for cheap friendship, kiss asses, lying and deceiving the people who are simple enough to read you BS but please, do not sell leis about me in order to get benefits for yourself. I asked you dozens times do not do it. There are intelligent peoples out there and I do not need them to be under an impression that Romy filters his channels with transformer?s roll off. It is how you understand the subject and it is what you are ? a simpleton with dirty hands and f?uck-up mind. Stick with it. Do not plug, John in it. He does not know who you are and what kind dirt he deal with. I will need to inform him. Do not response with you moronic biblical plasmas and do not blow up more cheep publicity around you adolescent loudspeaker using wrong data about me as your hostage. You are dead to me and I would prefer you understand and accept own sad state.

Romy the Cat
________
YAMAHA DS7

 

Romy, you could just point out that Angelo is wrong and that you filter the incoming signal to your amplifier - that would save all the unpleasentness and actually be mildly interesting. Only a complete moron would rely on an OPT as a reliable filter.

 

whoever is after a clean pair of klipsch la scala

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