Propeller Head Plaza Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

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Re: Your company might be overlooking something special

Posted by tomservo (M) on November 30, 2006 at 10:23:29

In Reply to: Re: Your company might be overlooking something special posted by Steve Eddy on November 29, 2006 at 21:06:14:

Hi

Well the company has my name in it but I don’t run it, I just design the products.
The issue is my partner (and the company for that matter) is totally into the “installed / commercial” end of the sound business.
He is not very familiar with the “hifi” market (as a business) and honestly I stopped paying much attention to the hifi magazines some years ago so I can’t say I have a current view either.
I do know that when I walk through the chain stores, that the looks, not sound, seems to be the primary driver in the design now. Not to knock Radio shack, but when you take “home hifi” apart, one is often struck by the fact that it is “realistic” but not the real thing, a glitzy looking but nearly empty metal box.
The few actual hifi stores I have found are better but at a breath taking price tag.
I know what goes into speakers, what it takes to produce and test them and most of the time, there is no excuse for the prices that I see. Between the prices for the real stuff and the proliferation of oily pseudo science products, no wonder people are turned off.

My reason for asking about size was that this group is most likely at the large size speaker end of home hifi area.
I was pleased to see that the “maximum size” is larger than I would need.

I haven’t a clue how to market a hifi speaker, I don’t see how that fits in with our current business and such yet, but on the other hand, I don’t have one suitable for the home yet either.
What I have now is too big, too industrial looking it just sounds the part.

I am thinking that in a full passive version if I can keep the 1 Watt sensitivity to about 96 –98 dB, that this will breath new life into many existing amplifiers which previously drove 87~92 dB sensitive speakers.

Conversely, if one said “self powered is ok”, then the bass section could be made smaller (lower sensitivity but bigger amplifier).
We use power amps that are based on the Bash amplifiers at work, these can be up to 3 way and would have the advantage here in that they have a decent DSP / crossover section.

Another possible configuration would be to use the home amplifier to drive the upper system with the lf signal taken from that to an on board subwoofer amplifier.

Anyway, I lean towards passive crossovers as once you include all the various aspects in to the computer model, they work exactly as desired.
I suppose it would make sense to also include elements that result in a flat or nearly flat impedance curve as regardless of amplifier type, it is happiest driving a resistive load.
Amplifiers with an output impedance of a few Ohms will produce a flatter frequency response into a flat load impedance than normal.
Anyway, thanks for the thoughts.

Tom Danley

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