It's a coloration and a strong one at that. I've heard it consistently across musical genres and in differing systems with Orangutans. Pleasant to some, perhaps. But not to me.
KeithR's "Dream Speaker" Search
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Yes but your preference once was Raidho. Which is grey color. As is Magico, for example.
Btw, I am not advocating devore because it's pleasant. But because it is transparent to recordings. That is a completely different attribute which Magico, Wilson etc don't have.
Sounds like the Devore Gibbon minimonitors that I've tested in my system. Not for me either.
Raidho has sounded good and relatively uncolored at a couple shows I attended, but I've never owned Raidho. Maybe a bit of a midbass hump, or maybe the rooms and way overpriced. Magico has never sounded good at any show or any house I've attended. Likewise with Orangutans, but for different reasons. Namely Orangutans generally being somewhat muddy, soft, relatively unresolving, and a homophonic wrongness to their timbre reproduction.
The treble is the question, isn't it. Ked felt nothing was wrong with the treble, but nothing else stood out about the speaker. Intuitively, I would have to think the treble can't be executed flawlessly despite the heroic design efforts.
Brian, do you want something to stand out about a speaker? There seems to be a distinct separation between those who do and those who don't.
I want to know what the characteristics of the speaker are. Those who have heard it should say something about its sound.
This is why Zu focuses on very high performance from their FRD up to 12kHz, and adds a supertweeter on a high-pass filter above 12kHz. You can get sound above 12kHz, but authenticity generally suffers. They want to engineer a true full-range driver as much as anyone, but face reality while pushing the limits. The signal to the main driver, operating 30-38Hz lower end depending on speaker, and 12kHz upper range, never gets split.
Interestingly, by Cube Audio's own measure, the Nenuphar has a 10db rise between 8kHz-9kHz, above its nominal flattish region, and then is about 4db down from there by 10kHz after which its HF response falls off rapidly. By 18kHz it's 30db down from that treble peak, and 20db down from its nominal flattish response area. Hence the speaker is harmonically muted and sounds that way. Midrange is very good, dynamics are no better than what you expect from 92db/w/m, and no worse. There's some obvious euphonic bass rise, and off-axis response variations aren't bad. It needs more shove than a one-hundred-ish db speaker and still has a trace of shout. The truncated harmonic output isn't grossly damaging, but there are a lot of spatial cues generated above 10kHz and subtle indicators of tonal rightness so it sounds harmonically incomplete to me, and compared to what I am accustomed to listening to. All things considered Cube has made reasonable compromises to stick with one driver.
Phil
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I'm not hearing any shortcomings in the BD full range driver used in the Pnoes and Audiophile Bill's horns. Indeed it's treble qualities, and seamless mids to highs capabilities are fantastic, to these ears. So much so that every other spkr I've heard sounds disjointed into the highs.
Thanks, Phil. Did you hear these in So Cal? I should be down there in a couple weeks and would try to hear them if there's a way to do so.
The response (of course) depends on the toe in. It looks like the 10dB hump won't be there at about 20 degrees off axis. Though in all cases, the response does fall off rapidly at the high end. I'm not sure how they advertise 30Hz - 18kHz (6dB) with this chart (on their own website) looking more like -20dB by 18k (my reference point being 1k).
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Toe-in helps a little but the peak is still there between 10°-30°, and the falloff ends up in the same place. I heard them in a private residence in SoCal on the invitation of an owner who was seeking amp advice for the Nenuphar. He has since sold them, having been seduced by their initial snap and midrange clarity but unable to live with the chronic bass hump and the down-tilted harmonics-range response.
Yes as I noted the top end responde ends up -20db relative the the flattish region but it sounds worse that that due to the top end response being -26 to -30db relative to the obvious and noticeable peak in the (even 7kHz) 8kHz-9kHz region. I wanted to like them more than I did, based on everything I had read prior.
Phil
The hump does go away somewhere between 10-30 degrees, but your description of the muted harmonics is enough for me to have lost interest. Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, I agree it's seamless and in many cases better than a separate tweeter. For many folks a good FR is better w/o a tweeter. I've owned BD3 and my own wideband driver hits 15 kHz fairly smoothly and does extend to 20 kHz. Feastrex also makes some FR drivers with very nice highs.
However, a really good tweeter is better. TAD (horn and Be), Fostex T500MkII and MkIII, RAAL, etc extend further and reproduce the highs more accurately.
Many people and maybe most older people may not be very sensitive to this. It's been a bit of a conundrum in my own speaker design, in the end I'm going to give people the option to use no tweeter, 1st or 2nd order xo. All 3 options are quite different from one another, and all have their charms.
The AER BD4 and BD5 ae an exception to the rule. Anyone likely to replicate a single driver strategy because the Pnoe works is likely to fail. The Pnoes worked at the General's because of extreme software and source matching and electronics. Will the cube nenuphar work in that room? I don't know. It certainly didn't in the system I heard, but then the Pnoes also sounded poor in Munich with the wrong set up.
Me and Barry have heard the upper echelon BD in another iteration at Bill's, and it certainly didn't need any special circumstances like specialist LPs to make it shine.
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