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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater. |
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In Reply to: Radiation posted by Bill the K on November 19, 2024 at 18:20:06:
to help illustrate Tom's scholarly answer. First of all, I find this calculator helpful to determine the frequency of a given wavelength.Good practice is limit upper frequency of a given driver by piston size wavelength. Since you cited Henry Kloss, look at the New Advent's woofer. While nominally a 10" design, the piston size is about 9" which is about 1500 hz. Guess the crossover frequency!
Bad practice is exemplified by 70s era JBL three way bookshelves like the popular L100 Century. It uses a 5" midrange with nominal piston size around 4" which relates to about 3400 hz. Wanna guess how far they ran that driver? 6 kHz! What that meant was instruments that spanned the top end of the midrange driver with harmonics in the tweeter possessed a weird funhouse mirror effect in terms of apparent soundstage width. Dispersion clamped down at the top of its range only to be mated with a 1" dome sitting in its sweet spot with wide dispersion. Talk about discontinuity in a range sensitive to our hearing! Sin of commission.
Under Floyd Toole's watch, later versions of that speaker like the LSR6332 using identically sized drivers lowered the upper range of both the woofer and midrange by more than an octave to get them back down in a comfortable range for consistent radiation.
Full range dynamic drivers typically break that rule but at least they let the upper frequencies narrow without shining a spotlight on the challenged response. The ceiling mounted 8" full range drivers used in our around the house system don't have the most extended top end response but don't call out to themselves. Sin of omission.
A primary reason I've been a full range electrostat fancier for decades is because of their uniform character that sounds more like real instruments to these ears. BTW, Tom's Synergy horns are unique in that while they are multi-way, all frequencies radiate from the same "mouth" for consistent radiation. Here's an SH-50 as an example:
What I find interesting is the similarity to his approach and Dr. West's electrostats. Both offer multiple full range controlled radiation angle models and are designed to be configured in arrays to increase vertical or horizontal coverage.
Edits: 11/21/24 11/21/24
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Follow Ups
- Specific cases in point - E-Stat 07:04:22 11/21/24 (2)
- I wish I could afford the SH-50... - peppy m. 08:38:20 11/21/24 (1)
- Fellow over at High Eff loves his - E-Stat 09:06:02 11/21/24 (0)
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