Bonzo
If the definition is so strict then JBL doesn't make horn speakers ... Nor is the Voice of the Theater a "horn"speaker or the Avant Guarde Trio or ... yo see where I am heading
Live music, Tone and Presence: What most systems get wrong
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Bonzo
If the definition is so strict then JBL doesn't make horn speakers ... Nor is the Voice of the Theater a "horn"speaker or the Avant Guarde Trio or ... yo see where I am heading
"This full-range, horn-loaded speaker pair (2) has 1" titanium compression tweeters and 10" woofers with back-loaded horn construction."
I don't dispute it sounds different but my speakers are not a small driver in a conventional box, It is a mid sized high sensitivity driver that is coupled to a nearly 3 meter horn...big difference.
I like planar bass...but primarily with acoustic music where texture and detail matter more. I had only one planar that did bass as well or better than a big servo or powered horn sub and that was the Acoustat Spectra 4400, which had at least double the radiating area of your Duetta Signatures... more than a Full Range or Diva too. The had better bass than my IRS Bets servo woofer towers.
That said Duetta Sigs are one of my favorite Apogees.
My Spectra 2200s had better bass, low level resolution and coherence, which is why I sold my Caliper Signatures.
After leaving Apogees for big electrostats I never felt the need to go back to them even after hearing them over and over again at other's homes.
The horns give more visceral impact, call it punch,which has more to do with time coherence and dynamic scaling, or slam (more about weight through midbass to lower bass.
Yes, it's called insertion loss. Active crossovers also have insertion loss, but they have it at line level where preamp gain is easy to compensate. Passive crossovers on speakers leech power from amplifiers, although it might very well vary with the complexity and setup of the passive crossover. 3db is the commonly accepted approximation.
Ok, I did not think it was so extreme though. I would have thought more like 1db. What causes insertion loss? Impedance mismatch? I am familiar with this at radio frequencies as I had to design some equipment that reduced impedance mismatch and signal reflections with a mass spectrometer design.
Cal Sigs are bass constrained as, well, they are too small to do it really well. What they can do for their size is very good, though. But that needs to be qualified. I have heard not so good Caliper and a very good Caliper. One far more recently restored (about 13 years more recent).
Dug this up trying to find out more about Acoustat 4400. Al wasn't convinced by the looks of things. After 40 years in the hobby I've never heard a stat that can even match Duetta bass. Anywhere, ever.
That said it is all subjective and I am sure some might find ESL bass superior, even if it is not extended/as dynamic as a fair sized Apogee.
From what you say the Acoustats needed to be HUGE though. Bit of a disadvantage.
Hi Justin
Maybe Ked can comment on the bass debate between Acoustat Spectra22 and Apogee Duetta.
In my rather small upstairs room, the Acoustat bass is just gigantic, while they starve in my living room. But that said, quite everything starves bass-wise in my living room.
My Odeon 32 are at a friends place at the moment and while they perform really good in the bass in my living room, they almost tear the house down at my friends place. I have never in my life heard better bass than with my Odeon 32 at my friends place.
Cheers,
Christoph
Maybe Ked can comment on the bass debate between Acoustat Spectra22 and Apogee Duetta.
In my rather small upstairs room, the Acoustat bass is just gigantic, while they starve in my living room. But that said, quite everything starves bass-wise in my living room.
My Odeon 32 are at a friends place at the moment and while they perform really good in the bass in my living room, they almost tear the house down at my friends place. I have never in my life heard better bass than with my Odeon 32 at my friends place.
Cheers,
Christoph
I take it you mean these? http://www.odeon-audio.com/modelle/no-32-s-2/
Your main listening room is huge, though, isn't it Christoph? So I am not surprised.
The blue Duettas you heard at my place were rather bass enthusiastic. The Interstella is better controlled and less bass heavy than the blue pair you heard in my room.
The Odean 32 doesn't go that low according to the spec. But I'll take your word for it at your friend's place.
How do they compare to, say, AG Duos? Do you prefer the Odeons?
Your main listening room is huge, though, isn't it Christoph? So I am not surprised.
The blue Duettas you heard at my place were rather bass enthusiastic. The Interstella is better controlled and less bass heavy than the blue pair you heard in my room.
The Odean 32 doesn't go that low according to the spec. But I'll take your word for it at your friend's place.
How do they compare to, say, AG Duos? Do you prefer the Odeons?
Christoph, your Acoustats sound better in your small room, yours is among the top two small rooms I heard, and it takes a load of money to get past that, often taking people in the wrong direction.
That said, the other top room (Lissnr's) is an apogee duetta. Also, your Acoustats, when we brought them down, did not sound the same.
And here we are discussing what's best, and I prefer big apogees bass to any horn I have heard.
That said, the other top room (Lissnr's) is an apogee duetta. Also, your Acoustats, when we brought them down, did not sound the same.
And here we are discussing what's best, and I prefer big apogees bass to any horn I have heard.
Yeah rooms are super important. If I had a huge room, I seriously doubt a pair of Duettas could energise it properly enough for me to enjoy it. I kind of like to be a bit overwhelmed by scale. That wouldn't happen in a much larger room.
In a very large room a stack of bass horns and Trios for me. And a Silbatone WE/GIP based system in the next huge room. When I win the lottery.
In a very large room a stack of bass horns and Trios for me. And a Silbatone WE/GIP based system in the next huge room. When I win the lottery.
Just think about it. If you add a complex of coils, caps and resistors to the output of an amplifier. At the very least, you will be dissipating a good bit of the energy of the amp in heat instead of electromotive force to the speaker elements. A lot of passive crossovers are also designed to equalize volume relationships between speaker elements of different efficiencies and impedances i.e. differential resistors. All of the speaker elements have to be "dumbed down" to the lowest common denominator of efficiency of the least efficient speaker element to get an appropriate volume relationship.
A specific passive crossover would have to be measured, but my hunch is 2db insertion loss would be optimistic for even a simple passive crossover.
I can tell you that I have not heard an Apogee yet that has better bass; not deeper, tighter or with more slam than the 4400s. I have heard two different full ranges, a couple Divas and a Grand without subs. None are better.
That said, in a small room a Duetta Signature will have a powerful sound. Calipers are limited but in a smallish room they were pretty good.
I get Bonzos experience between the fundamental difference between horn bass and the kind of bass the big Apogees deliver. For me the Apogees bottom end is a high distinction.
I am drawn to a pure approach in speaker design. Having all drivers the same type and material pays benefit in terms of overall coherency. That choice comes with a price and set its own limitations. No one speaker type is perfect, no one material type is absolutely ideal. But every choice is a compromise in the end so that's all cool, especially once you get over the idea of obtaining unobtainium and that a universal perfect is an ideal and not an actuality.
That said, the nature of the bass that full range larger ribbons can do is something special and rather than just saying it's better I'll just try and describe it as best I can.
Most setups I have heard in some way trip over and don't manage to get an expressive, alive nature to the bass and then in both linear terms, from bottom to top and also in spirit carry this out through the range to make it have a seamless unified perceptual quality with everything seeming whole, complete and unwavering.
It's the coherence and agility of the bass foundation in full panels of ribbon that makes for me a potentially more engaging connection to the qualities of the sound of the music above.
It's nature is unlike any sealed or ported bass that I've heard.
Great bass moves with the music rather than having a static quality to it that comes about when the bass is presented as just too solid.
Ribbon bass has a fluid and lithe nature that seems effortless and keeps pace with the tune. This quality makes enjoying virtually any music type accessible and is preferable in nature for me and reflective of what I hear in real musical performance. It has a poised balance of grace and authority, is not unnecessarily emphatic or strident, and manages to reflect a more natural attack and decay relationship. It is good to dance to.
Speakers that have a blended approach to drivers, where the bass speaker type is fundamentally a different type to the upper range eg. mixing point source with line source, or part dipole, or a rear loaded bass with a front firing mid and tweeter in horns, or just even where the driver material is a mire of mix and match, say paper drivers with either composite or metal is going to have potential impacts on overall coherency. Not to say their aren't benefits in this approach but generally coherence isn't one of those benefits. The more different we make things the less likely they are alike. They can be complimentary but they are not the same. Experiencing presence in music for me is about union rather than separation. The music needs to be whole before we can be one with it.
Not to say that any one approach is going to give you the best outcome in every aspect of music and sound but just that there is always going to be a compromise in which ever route we take.
If this is what you think about Christoph's upstairs system then I am quite sure you would be pleasantly surprised by the sound of my current system and my planar systems in the past.
In general I agree, it is one of the main reason I went to full range electrostats...coherence. Even better than Apogees and Magnepan, which are far better than most others. One of my biggest problems with muti-driver conventional speakers is different sonic Signatures from each driver. Horns are a bit different if done right though because the driver motion is so small that driver flexing and breakup is minimized. My bass drivers never move visibly even with something bass heavy like Bjork Hyerbalad.
Horn bass is fast like planars but less ethereal...Spectras excepted.
I would point out though your Maggie's don't have identical materials for all drivers. The ribbon tweeter is pure aluminum and the rest are plastic with metal wires, which gives a bit of different flavor for the highs in Maggie's with true ribbon tweeters.
That is why I preferred two-way Apogees to Divas. The Grand had all three drivers in the panel from etched metal on plastic and sounds more coherent than Divas or Full Ranges.
I do see panels and horns as being happily relative in nature and see more similarities than differences in outcomes.
Responsiveness is a fabulous quality because music can be so fleetfooted and panels and horns can be so mercurial and respond like quicksilver. The problems for me with most every panel or horn setup I have heard is something in them holds them back at some point. Always just a little but, almost natural but... almost real but... They are so quicksilver in nature that their constraints are also just as obvious as their virtues.
I heard all the buts in all the previous Maggies and even the current smaller Maggies however I do believe that in the 20.7s Wendell Diller has managed through just amazing stick-to-it-ness to get his speaker approach refined it to the point where I don't ever get left wondering about what is at all missing in them. The nature and execution of this particular speaker within it's range is as near to seamless as I have heard.
Panel and horn people do seem to me so often connected by the same motivations and similar preferences and it is possibly because these approaches are quite reflective of each other. There is a sleight of hand going on in the way the inmediacy of responsiveness leaves no easily identifiable lag for the conscious awareness to ever quite catch up with the actual experience of the music. Music by its nature is about unconscious connectedness. Sharing experiences rather than thoughts. The thoughts come after. Consciousness rides on the back of the dragon. Consciousness doesn't steer the dragon but is just along for the ride.
Responsiveness is a fabulous quality because music can be so fleetfooted and panels and horns can be so mercurial and respond like quicksilver. The problems for me with most every panel or horn setup I have heard is something in them holds them back at some point. Always just a little but, almost natural but... almost real but... They are so quicksilver in nature that their constraints are also just as obvious as their virtues.
I heard all the buts in all the previous Maggies and even the current smaller Maggies however I do believe that in the 20.7s Wendell Diller has managed through just amazing stick-to-it-ness to get his speaker approach refined it to the point where I don't ever get left wondering about what is at all missing in them. The nature and execution of this particular speaker within it's range is as near to seamless as I have heard.
Panel and horn people do seem to me so often connected by the same motivations and similar preferences and it is possibly because these approaches are quite reflective of each other. There is a sleight of hand going on in the way the inmediacy of responsiveness leaves no easily identifiable lag for the conscious awareness to ever quite catch up with the actual experience of the music. Music by its nature is about unconscious connectedness. Sharing experiences rather than thoughts. The thoughts come after. Consciousness rides on the back of the dragon. Consciousness doesn't steer the dragon but is just along for the ride.
The coherence of big electrostatics is hard to beat. Curiously of the mini monitors shown in post #272 the more coherent (or less incoherent) uses a metal tweeter and a kevlar medium woofer - I am referring to the B&W SS25.
Coherence of a speaker needs a "coherent amplifier" - but it is a matching property. Some amplifiers seem to enhance the coherency of a speaker.
One modern multi unit dynamic speaker seemed to me more than once to have an excellent coherency when properly set - the Wilson XLF. We usually ask for a seamless transition between units, but like in a full range electrostatic, in the XLF it seems that all spectra has the same characteristic. Unfortunately no other Wislon is was as good as the XLF in this aspect
.I must say that I have not listened to competing speakers such as the top Rockport. The human voice is particularly sensitive of speaker coherency - and here I must refer to the ESL63 that IMHO is more coherent to voices than the ESL57.
I'll agree too, isn't this special?
I especially agree with the different sonic signatures from different driver types, it alone can kill coherency even if everything else is perfect. The Achilles' heel of many modern speakers (for me) is when the tweeter sounds different from the midrange, it's very common although it's gotten far better over the years. Today's Be domes are much better than previous Ti or Al but not perfect. Ribbons like Raal always seem to clash a bit with the mids. It was a problem for me to find a supertweeter that blended seamlessly with my extremely light textured paper-cone midrange for this reason. Most horn tweets or ribbons weren't good enough, too much of their own character. I ended up with a tweeter with a magnesium diaphragm and alnico motor, weighing about 11 kg each! Though, I have to say an Al diaphragm can be really convincing on cymbals, just not good on anything else.
Even a supertweeter is incredibly important, it can totally change the entire character of the speaker's tone down through the midrange. Also, having the same driver produce the lower midrange through highs in a consistent polar pattern is a huge advantage, trying to manage it with multiple drivers and crossovers can be done but is rarely done well and arguably will never be as good in some ways.
As far as panel bass, sometimes electronic music can be too much for them ime. They can't stop fast enough or with as much control, I've heard large panels bottom after a bass note stops too fast at fairly low volumes. Not a problem with most music though.
The big commonality between panel and horn is the much more optimal acoustic/mechanical impedance match between driver surface area and the air.
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