# A Bateman Project That Isn't Patently Insane



## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

In this thread, I am going to map out a method of making a front stage which can sound very good, and is also reasonably easy to implement, and affordable. This is in sharp contrast to most of my projects, which tend to be expensive, ugly, and impractical.

My inspiration for this project was the Consumer Electronics Show. I've been going to CES since the 90s, and it's given me an opportunity to listen to millions of dollars worth of loudspeakers. When you are spending $50,000 on a speaker, you would think that it would do EVERYTHING right. But this is not the case. Engineering always involves a series of trade offs. So even if you have fifty thousand to spend, you still need to be prepared to weigh what tradeoffs you can live with. Just as you wouldn't buy a Porsche 911 to haul furniture, expensive loudspeakers cannot do everything either.

Whenever I go to an audio show, *I find that most of the loudspeakers do not sound good.* This isn't to say that they're bad (though some of them certainly are.) It just says that most of the designs don't meet the criteria that I use to judge loudspeakers.

Here is my personal criteria for a good loudspeaker:









*#1 - reproduce the human voice believably.*
When testing a loudspeaker, the first thing I listen to is plain ol' audiobooks. In mono no less. I believe a loudspeaker should be able to reproduce the human voice convincingly. A lot of multiway loudspeakers make the human voice sound sibilant. It's particularly noticeable on consonants. *Basically, I find that 90-95% of loudpseakers make the human voice sound unnatural and processed.* Even the expensive speakers. (Remember, you can't have it all - engineering is all about tradeoffs.)








*#2 - be dynamic.*
Every time someone demos a loudspeaker for me, the first thing they do is put on a female jazz recording, at a ridiculously loud volume. This is a clever way to sell a loudspeaker, but a terrible way for me to make an educated purchase. First of all, female voices are higher in pitch, and are less likely to expose flaws in the transition from midrange to tweeter. Second of all, due to the higher pitch, the midrange doesn't have to work as hard. (This masks distortion in the midrange.) Worst of all, female jazz recordings tend to have wheelbarrows full of reverb on the vocals. The reverb masks distortion, and even worse, it obscures problems in the time domain. (IE, if the loudspeaker is sibilant, the reverb obscures it.)

What I'm getting at here is that my definition of "dynamics" is different than most. When I audition a loudspeaker and I ask to here something dynamic, they often put a rock track on at a high volume. *I do not think that's a proper test of dynamics.* Remember, it all comes back to the midrange for me. _Can the loudspeaker play the human voice loudly?_ Due to psychoacoustics, when you play something full range, it actually masks the problem.

One thing that's interesting about dynamics is that 'bigger isn't always better.' For instance, I once auditioned a two-way with an 8" woofer and a 1" tweeter. Due to the large size of the woofer, you'd think that dynamics wouldn't be a problem. Yet the speaker was absolutely crushed by a male vocal, because the crossover was too low. I've literally heard $50 computer speakers that passed the male vocal test better than this 'hifi' speaker did, despite it's cost and complexity. And again, I need to clarify that *this is my own personal bias.* The hifi speaker in question had excellent treble and bass, but it failed the midrange dynamics test miserably. *That hifi speaker would be completely unacceptable to me, because I'm a midrange guy.*








*#3 - Create a big soundstage.*
Sometimes it's fun to have a speaker that can throw out a big soundstage. My home speakers excel at creating a _realistic_ soundstage, and having listened to them for thosuands of hours now, I've realized that 95% of the recordings that I listen to have nearly no soundstage. *Basically a lot of popular music is mono with some studio tricks tossed in to liven things up.* That's why I can grudgingly understand why magazines like The Absolute Sound go gaga over speakers like the Pipedreams. *Line arrays throw a BIG stage, not an ACCURATE stage.* But that can be 'fun', particularly since most recordings have no soundstage to speak of. (IE, most line arrays totally blow out the size of the stage, but that can be 'fun', thought not 'accurate.')








*#4 - Wide Bandwidth.*
Personally, I have very good hearing at high frequencies. I have no trouble hearing 16khz, and when tweeters have a resonance above 16khz, I can perceive that it's there. Some people cannot hear at these frequencies, and they will not value response out to 20khz. They will also be less sensitive to high frequency resonances that bother me. As for reproducing 20hz, I'm not particularly concerned about it for car stereo because there simply isn't much down there. (I have a thread on this forum where I've analyzed the spectral content of tracks. There simply isn't much below 30-40hz in popular music.) It's trivially easy to do 20hz in the car, so it's 'nice to have', but not particulary important IMHO. I'll take improved dynamics over infrabass any day, at least in the car. (Infrabass is great for home theater, but that's another project.)

These four things are my criteria for an excellent loudspeaker. I hope you consider your own criteria as I map out the loudspeaker in this thread, because what sounds good to me may not sound good to you. For instance, there's a lot of things that I don't particularly care about when it comes to loudspeakers. I don't care about the cost of drivers. I've achieved good results with $10 drivers, and I've also had to shell out $300 for a tweeter because it was necessary. I am not the type to buy Scan Speak and Seas Excel because I haven't encountered a loudspeaker project that required them. That's not to say I'm cheap - I *will* spend a lot on drivers if the project calls for it. I don't like line arrays. I tend to use a lot of horns and waveguides, not because they're in 'vogue' these days, but because they solve a lot of the three problems that are listed in this post.

I know this first post was extraordinarily long, but I think it's important to define my criteria for the project. One size does not fit all. This project will be optimized for a very specific criteria, at the expense of others.


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## trumpet (Nov 14, 2010)

I respect the amount of effort you put into sharing ideas on this site, whether you're reposting from other forums or not. I'll be watching to see how this thread goes.


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

We are missing you on your own forum though...

If it were an array, there is a Harman patent on arrays for automobile use...Keele worked on it. I can dig up the patent number tonight (if I still have the issue of Voice Coil) if you would like to take a look at it.


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

US8073156

Is the patent number

Bose got in on the action too patent: US8045743


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

The funny thing about my four goals is that they're all at odds with each other.









It brings me back to my car comparison. A Porsche is great for going fast, but it's hardly suitable for carrying four people. If your engineering goals are single minded, something's gotta give.









If you want to reproduce the midrange well, it's hard to go wrong with a single driver. (Not saying it's the ULTIMATE - but it's hard to go wrong.)

But when you using a single driver, you sacrifice the bandwidth that's my fourth criteria.









A good two-way can cover nine octaves, but frequently fails at reproducing the midrange properly.









There are ways to extend the bandwidth of a full-range driver - but these methods generally require cabinets that are impractically large for a car.

It's a real pain in the ass isn't it?

lol seriously, satisfying these four goals is devilishly difficult. *Almost everything we do to maximize one of the four goals comes at the expense of the other three.*

However, I'm certain many of you have wondered, _why does Bateman always do these Unity horns_, and why doesn't Bateman just do something 'normal' for once?

It all comes back to my first priority, which is to get the midrange correct. I can literally count on one hand the number of 'conventional' loudspeakers that did the midrange correctly. I don't think I am alone in this respect - if you look at sites like diyaudio, you'll see a big chunk of the participants are listening to single driver speakers.









I've been interested in audio for over twenty years, and another thing I've noticed is that *people tend to obsess over things which aren't particularly important.* For instance, people obsess over frequency response, yet there are loudspeakers like the Quad which have *terrible* frequency response, yet they sound excellent. 








People obsess over harmonic distortion, yet there are loudspeakers which are audibly high in distortion and sound good.

Basically, *there are a lot of strange paradoxes in audio, particularly car audio:*


If frequency response and distortion are important, why are so many people satisfied with single driver speakers, which are terrible at both?
If frequency response and distortion are important, why are so many people dissatisfied with conventional loudspeakers, which excel at both?
Why haven't I met a single person who was truly satisfied with their car stereo?
Why do a lot of $3000 car stereos sound fatiguing and unnatural?

And the biggest question by far, the one that *really* bugs me - *why do a lot of cheap simple systems sound good?*


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## asawendo (Nov 22, 2009)

Gee Patrick your experiences and also experiments always makes me wonder.

I have the same goals in my searching for high quality loudspeaker system I want them as natural sound as it gets. 

But especially in car audio, I found lots of "big name" speaker I already heard have a noticeable distortion or coloration in midrange domain no matter what their given prices. They tends to have unnatural or unpleasant voice also the masking effect you aforementioned before. 

So I will subscribe this thread, it will help me to understand more about this. Thank you Patrick.


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## slade1274 (Mar 25, 2008)

Those are truly sexy!









Look forward to this installment of the words/wisdom of "Mr. Bateman"


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

I have been wondering why I like "old" speakers better than new "properly" engineered speakers? Seems like (to me) vintage speakers just are more real and emotionally engaging that a lot of modern speakers.

Maybe these unitys that I am working on will help me in all of these regards.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

One paradox about the really great speakers is that people tend to 'get off the merry go round' after they buy them.

Here's what I mean by this:

I work in software, and I know a lot of people with money to burn. Guys who have 'man caves' that cost more than the house I grew up in. *And a lot of these guys are completely unhappy with their systems.*

And I don't mean that they're super-critical and picky - I mean they spent $150,000 on a home theater and it sounds like crap. Literally worse than a $200 home-theater-in-a-box from Walmart.







On the other hand, I've never met anyone who bought a Unity horn that bought another loudspeaker ever again. The same can be said for Quad. People with Magnepans and Klipschorns and Altec VOTs and Vanderstiens seem to be a loyal bunch too.


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## Aaron'z 2.5RS/WRX (Oct 24, 2007)

Patrick Bateman said:


> One paradox about the really great speakers is that people tend to 'get off the merry go round' after they buy them.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
The real paradox here is that fact that, that guy can't hear what he built anymore... :laugh:

How does he know if it sounded good or not.... who's going to tell him it sounds like crap... :laugh:

everything sounds warm when you've lost half your range..


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## Aaron'z 2.5RS/WRX (Oct 24, 2007)

You know what REALLY kicks me in the balls... 

The fact that most of the people that can afford high end gear to play with, have already most likely have hurt their hearing enough to not warrant all of the money and effort.. 

I'm pushing 40, been to tons of concerts, loud system, guns, stupid ****.. I know my hearing isn't ANYTHING like it was when I was in highschool... 

So why the effort? 

Like a 70yr old woman with a Vette... what's the point...

Please DON'T get me wrong Sir, I'm am immensely grateful for your incredibly informative posts...


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

Hell that old man is PWK himself...


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## asawendo (Nov 22, 2009)

I'm glad to hear you mentioned about my favorite loudspeakers which is Altec Lansing Voice of Theater and Quad ESL 63, Patrick.

Still rock after all those years!

Recently I fallen in love with my friend accuton ceramic driver in DIY custom build enclosure










By the way the speaker beside accuton is 6.5 full range lowther in single reflex enclosure. Also build by my best friend Mr Handy.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

asawendo said:


> Gee Patrick your experiences and also experiments always makes me wonder.
> 
> I have the same goals in my searching for high quality loudspeaker system I want them as natural sound as it gets.
> 
> ...


Yes, that's been my experience too. Over twenty years ago, I read Stereophile religously. I earned $13,000 a year, and figured that the road to 'audio nirvana' would be to reach a point where I could afford the expensive equipment they advertised. My early experiments in audio used gear like Dynaudio, which was a hefty investment for someone making six bucks an hour.

*I never achieved really spectacular results with conventional speakers, even with the best components.* (Dynaudio, Seas, etc. This was back in the 90s.)









Roundabout the same time (during the 90s) Eric Holdaway demo'd Harry Kimura's car for me, and that basically slammed the door shut on all of my pre-conceived notions about horns. Up until that day, there's NO WAY i could have believed that a car stereo could sound like that.

The thing that's funny though - and the thing I'll explore in this thread - is that my bias is a complete 180 from 90% of the people on this forum. I have a bias AGAINST conventional loudspeakers, just as a lot of people on here have a bias FOR conventional speakers.









Conventional loudspeakers always seem to suffer from a predictable set of problems. I would describe the midrange as 'murky.' It's not that it's unintelligible, it's just that there's something 'wonky' about the timing. As noted in my first post, a lot of this 'murkiness' is masked by the source material. For instance, the shimmering treble and taut bass of a Norah Jones track masks the midrange problems that I hear with most conventional loudspeakers.

And clearly, *I like horns a lot*, but it would be great if there was a way to get the midrange purity and dynamics of a good horn in a conventional loudspeaker.


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

I love me some horns. Every couple of years I get the notion to try something new and different, but I keep coming back to them...though I am glad I tried the AMTs, which I like a lot. That includes my current car...it hasn't ever had horns, but I'm coming back around to them and working on some micro sized unity horns for the upper front doors and one for the center channel good to about 800 hertz and up based on my sims and small. I too am biased towards horns...and never having heard a unity completed, I figured why not now? So it goes...

Sorry for the derailment...lol.


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## asawendo (Nov 22, 2009)

Patrick Bateman said:


> For instance, the shimmering treble and taut bass of a Norah Jones track masks the midrange problems that I hear with most conventional loudspeakers.
> 
> And clearly, *I like horns a lot*, but it would be great if there was a way to get the midrange purity and dynamics of a good horn in a conventional loudspeaker.
> 
> [/font]


That Norah Jones Album is heavily compressed album and it sound compressed


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## nubz69 (Aug 27, 2005)

Patrick, we are birds of a feather and end up on the same forums, discussing the same topics, quite often.

I am not sure if you are just using this post to feel out your idea or if you are leading up to some work you already have done. Personally I think that a FAST system (I think thats what it is called) is where you are heading.

For those of you who don't know, here is an example.
Tip_43

The only systems in cars that follow this train of thought, which I have seen so far, are horn setups and small full range + decent midbass. I am curious where you are going to take this. 

I am also curious if your plan will take into account that the vast majority of people on this site want to use stock locations, off the shelf products and have an easy installation. Guess I will just have to wait and see.

FYI I feel like this could be a fun contest as well. Who can do the most, with the least, and not sacrifice anything in SQ.


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## pimpndahoz (Dec 11, 2011)

Subscribed. When this guy is talking, Im all ears.


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## chevbowtie22 (Nov 23, 2008)

I'm looking forward to how this whole thread plays out. I'm just about to start my build which consists of a set Image Dynamics HLCD's full size horns in my car. I've never heard a set of horns in a car before but just on the recommendations of quite a few on here, including yourself Mr. Bateman, I'm taking a leap of faith.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

thehatedguy said:


> I love me some horns. Every couple of years I get the notion to try something new and different, but I keep coming back to them...though I am glad I tried the AMTs, which I like a lot. That includes my current car...it hasn't ever had horns, but I'm coming back around to them and working on some micro sized unity horns for the upper front doors and one for the center channel good to about 800 hertz and up based on my sims and small. I too am biased towards horns...and never having heard a unity completed, I figured why not now? So it goes...
> 
> Sorry for the derailment...lol.


It's actually not a derailment at all.

When I was at the Consumer Electronics Show, I was shocked by how the Herron Audio ESP-1 got the midrange 'right.'

And by 'right', I'm talking about the points I made in the first post. A lack of sibilance, consonants sound 'correct', etc.

Youtube videos are an easy way to 'hear' what I mean by this.

First, lets start off with a youtube video of an award winning car stereo:
World Championship Car Audio System Demo - Calypso - YouTube
Listening to this track, Suzanne Vegas voice sounds 'detached' from the midrange and midbass. It's like there's a transition from the lower midrange to the upper midrange. This is a problem I had with my own car six years ago - and the very reason I went to Unity horns. I think the 'disconnect' between the upper and lower midrange is due to the radically different waveform shapes, since everything above 600hz is coming out of the horn.

Please please note, before anyone says that I'm throwing Joe Black under the bus, *I am not a sound quality judge.* Perhaps this is how most people prefer their car stereos. It sounds sibilant to me though.

jbl control now.mov - YouTube
Here's my JBL Control Now array. I *also* think that this sounds sibilant. When you play the video, can you perceive that there's a funky ringing and a nasal quality to the author's delivery?

unity-horn-crummy-xover.mov - YouTube
Here's one of my Unity horns. *This isn't even a good one.* The one I had in my car in 2009 was leaps and bounds above this one. But note how the consonants sound 'correct?' No weird ringing like you hear in videos one and two? (Admittely the frequency response is crap, but the entire crossover is a single capacitor. And I'll come back to that point shortly...)

Jericho Horn J3 Debut - YouTube
Here's a Danley Jericho J3 horn, *at one quarter mile(!!!)* Hear how intelligible it is? Listen at the 1:04 mark - IMHO, the intelligibility of this is comparable to a single driver loudspeaker, and audibly superior to all three videos above.

Listening to the Orions - YouTube
Here's a Linkwitz Orion, for comparison's sake. IMHO, the Danley PA system is more 'intelligible' than the Orion. (ugh I am stirring up one hell of a hornet's nest.)

THIEL /VAN DEN HUL / TRANSPARENT / dedicated amplifier - YouTube
Last but not least, a loudspeaker from Thiel. A CS2.2, which is actually quite affordable. Cut to the 1:00 mark to skip to the good stuff.


Here's the thing - I know Linkwitz is regarded as an audio God, and for good reason. But listen to the Orion in the video. IMHO, the Danley PA system gets the midrange 'correct' in a way that the Orion does not. *And the Thiel sounds better than *all* of them.*

I think it's also interesting that you can't blame the microphone, because in both the Danley and the Orion videos, there is narration. And the narration is very intelligible in both. So it's not the mic that's to blame.

These are just my opinions. I am not looking to get banned by the Orion fans, which is why I'd invite people to listen to the videos and decide for themselves.


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## bassfromspace (Jun 28, 2016)

What song is that they're playing through the Jericho's?


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## ErinH (Feb 14, 2007)

My $.02





Patrick Bateman said:


> If frequency response and distortion are important, why are so many people satisfied with single driver speakers, which are terrible at both?
> If frequency response and distortion are important, why are so many people dissatisfied with conventional loudspeakers, which excel at both?
> Why haven't I met a single person who was truly satisfied with their car stereo?


FR is proven to have a strong correlation with pleasurable sound. There's entire books written on it. Floyd Toole's Sound Reproduction is pretty much centered around this and chapter after chapter provides great detail and data backing up his findings.

Getting 'flat' in a car isn't as cut and paste as it may be with home audio. Flat doesn't sound the same every way you do it. Throw a mid out of phase and EQ it back. It sounds like crap. But it's flat...

People are tolerant of certain aspects of a speaker. Just because they're tolerant doesn't mean they shouldn't shoot for something better. 

I always say that best system you've ever heard is only as good as the best one you've ever heard. That is to say, you don't know what's out there. 


I'm actually very satisfied with my car stereo. But, I do this stuff for the hobby, challenge, and the learning experience. Seeking 'perfection' is the fun part. You obviously feel the same because you start so many threads discussing the matter. You and I probably come from the same place... we both seem to really love the technical aspect of it.




Patrick Bateman said:


> Why do a lot of $3000 car stereos sound fatiguing and unnatural?
> 
> And the biggest question by far, the one that *really* bugs me - *why do a lot of cheap simple systems sound good?*
> 
> [/font]


Because they are still learning? Because they don't really understand or know what to listen/measure for? Many answers to this. 


Cheap systems that sound good... maybe acceptance? Maybe because they did something right? Maybe the install was just right? Less issue with integration of multiple drivers?.... the list can go on and on.


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## redit (Jan 14, 2012)

Patrick Bateman said:


> It sounds *sibilant* to me though.


Had to google that. Glad to have a word for that, 'cause I hate it.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

bikinpunk said:


> My $.02
> 
> FR is proven to have a strong correlation with pleasurable sound. There's entire books written on it. Floyd Toole's Sound Reproduction is pretty much centered around this and chapter after chapter provides great detail and data backing up his findings.
> 
> Getting 'flat' in a car isn't as cut and paste as it may be with home audio. Flat doesn't sound the same every way you do it. Throw a mid out of phase and EQ it back. It sounds like crap. But it's flat...


Earlier today, I posted a video of a MECA winner using big compression drivers. In the video, there's a 'disconnect' between the lower midrange and the upper midrange. (these are my opinions, of course.)

This is one of the things that's really vexed me about horns; the only practical way to get them to 'sync up' with a midrange is to use on that's the same size. I seriously do not know of any other solution besides that. EQ can't fix it, DSP can't fix it. _They just have to match, physically._

















Even on the Thiel, you can see a shallow waveguide on the tweeter, designed to 'mate' the woofer and the tweeter.

So I think frequency response is important, but power response is a pretty big deal too. A lot of these 'audio classics' have good power response in the midrange. This could be due to any number of things. Thiel used a gentle waveguide on the tweeter to match the power response to the midrange. Magnepan just uses a ginormous midrange, so large that the crossover is waaaaay lower than normal. Same story with Quad and Soundlab.



bikinpunk said:


> People are tolerant of certain aspects of a speaker. Just because they're tolerant doesn't mean they shouldn't shoot for something better.
> 
> I always say that best system you've ever heard is only as good as the best one you've ever heard. That is to say, you don't know what's out there.
> 
> ...


Here's the thing that I want to explore in this thread. *Does phase matter?* That's the crux of this thread. (Leave it to me to post two pages of nonsense before getting to the point.)

Even with a crappy cel phone video, this Thiel loudspeaker NAILS the midrange, IMHO:
THIEL /VAN DEN HUL / TRANSPARENT / dedicated amplifier - YouTube
The midrange almost gives me goosebumps at the 1:00 mark.

KEF REFERENCE 207/2's - YouTube
Now compare the Thiel with a Kef 207/2. To me, the Kef sounds a lot like the JBL, and the Linkwitz Orion.




Now what do the JBL, KEF, and Linkwitz have in common? You guessed it - high order crossovers.

The Thiel uses 1st order crossovers. Do we know what Danley uses? It's hard to say - it's clearly proprietary. *But Danley and Thiel are both proponents of phase coherency.*


















It's interesting that both Kef and Thiel are on the 'no diffraction bandwagon.' So this sibilance I'm hearing likely isn't an enclosure thing. It's also consistent with what I've found in my own experiments. Reducing diffraction improves imaging, but sibilance and articulation is a time-domain problem, not a frequency response problem.


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## jpswanberg (Jan 14, 2009)

Subscribed. I love my Maggies and wish I could have a pair in my car.

John


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

I am hearing the disconnect as "reverb" in those videos and some Danely posted of a shoot out between his horn a couple of line arrays...very echoey on the videos where as the Unity was not.

BTW, my Misco RDC3Ts should be here this week for the beginnings of my unity...keep checking your forum for updates.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

jpswanberg said:


> Subscribed. I love my Maggies and wish I could have a pair in my car.
> 
> John


I've never heard a Quad in my life - I've only heard about them.

The person who clued me in to phase distortion was from Sound Lab, and he was the one who suggested that I would enjoye the Herron ESP-1.

But here's the funny thing - the first thing I thought when I listed to this video of a Quad is that it sounds very similar to a tube-driven Unity horn that a friend of mine has:

Decca London + Lenco + Quad ESL57 - YouTube

And the Vanderstien, which is also 'phase coherent', sounds similar IMHO:

lungyim~Vandersteen Model 1 .MP4 - YouTube

The Unity has a couple of advantages. First off, it's WAY more dynamic. The thing will pin you to the wall, it gets LOUD.

But the whole point of this thread - is the question of phase.

According to Linkwitz, "I had convinced myself that the phase distortion of a LR4, 24 dB/oct midrange to tweeter crossover is not audible." (Phase distortion)

But the whole reason I've been posting videos is that I imagine phase audibility varies from person to person. For instance, I have a tough time hearing mpeg distortion, but phase distortion makes me nutty.


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## omegaslast (Nov 4, 2010)

I dont get what the project is


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## Neil_J (Mar 2, 2011)

Patrick Bateman said:


> Here's the thing that I want to explore in this thread. *Does phase matter?* That's the crux of this thread. (Leave it to me to post two pages of nonsense before getting to the point.)


Absolutely. And every crossover, DSP, and speaker coil in the system will do a great job to screw it all up  
Sometimes a simpler system will end up with much less phase distortion than someone with a 4-way, DSP, and other "fixes".

But how do you completely get rid of phase distortion, across the entire frequency spectrum? (or even get in the ballpark, which no commercial car audio system in the world does)? I haven't a clue how to do this mechanically... But what about in the digital domain, and some clever measurement techniques? FIR filtering, maybe some Viterbi decoders? It works well for the comm/nav/military/telecommunications guys.


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

Danley does it in a 3 way horn. The phase was actually flatter with a 3 way over a 2 way...and I think he can do it in a horn with 28 speakers mounted to it as well.

Anyways, enough Unity talk...Patrick said this wasn't going there from him, but I took it there cause I have caught the unity fever.

How to do it? You either need one driver to do as much as you can or have a bunch of drivers acting as a single driver.

And that last part may take some thinking out of the box to pull off.


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## Neil_J (Mar 2, 2011)

Even with a single speaker, will still have a huge phase shift that follows the speaker's impedance curve, which IMO (and Patrick has hinted on before) makes recorded speech sound like a speaker, rather than a real human voice.

Let's think about this backwards for a minute... You're the sound guy in a movie and you want to make recorded speech *sound like a speaker*. In the biz, they use a problem like SpeakerPhone 2 that applies a software model of a speaker to the audio, including phase distortion (yes they're also changing frequency response and harmonics as well, but I believe you can try the VST plugin and just play with the impulse response). So they're adding a transfer function for effect, while we're wanting to remove a transfer function (by adding the inverse, or other clever tricks) for accurate reproduction and listening pleasure.


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## ErinH (Feb 14, 2007)

Neil_J said:


> Even with a single speaker, will still have a huge phase shift that follows the speaker's impedance curve, which IMO (and Patrick has hinted on before) makes recorded speech sound like a speaker, rather than a real human voice.
> ]



Non issue really in the grande scheme. Cross outside of the crossover. Think about where the impedance curve is vs where you'd likely cross it anyway. Te only type drivers we cross near this reason are midbass drivers. That's because we want up front bass at that expense (whether it works is a topic in and of itself). 

Food for thought. The quickness at which the phase goes through 0 and back to minimal vs the qts. The higher the Q, the faster the transition. Does this bleed into the topic regarding transients and Q? ....




Sent from my iPhone. Pardon the grammar.


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

18 speakers

http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/pdf/GH60 spec sheet.pdf

21 speakers:

http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/pdf/JH90 spec sheet.pdf

4 speakers plus impdance:

http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/pdf/SM 96 spec sheet.pdf


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

omegaslast said:


> I dont get what the project is


A big part of that is because I'm in uncharted waters here. I literally started thinking about phase and group delay during the last year or so.

It was actually the tapped horn that got me thinking about this. The tapped horn's 'claim to fame' is high efficiency out of a small footprint. But when I juggled the numbers, I found that it wasn't much more efficient than a vented box of comparable footprint. (I know I said that it was more efficient a few years back, and the dude from Stereo Integrity swore up and down that it couldn't be. He was right, I was wrong. You can't break Hoffman's Iron Law.)

The thing is, the tapped horn may not be more efficient, but it DEFINITELY sounds 'tighter' to me. For instance, there's a Metallica song called "Eye of the Beholder" with these synthesized drum strikes, where there's a series of drum hits in the span of a second. And with a tapped horn or a sealed box, the hits are distinct. But with a vented box? One big blur.

It's pretty easy to calculate the timing difference for a vented box versus a tapped horn. For instance, if you have a drum strike at 60hz, that cycle is 16.7 milliseconds long. (1000 milliseconds in a second, divided by sixty cycles per second.) So the tapped horn is 'theoretically' about 4 milliseconds 'faster' than the vented box. This is because the rear wave is 90 degrees out of phase, versus 180 in a vented box.

Now four milliseconds doesn't sound like a lot does it? 4 THOUSANDTHS of a second?

But think about it this way:

If you were in a small empty room with wood floors, could you perceive that there's an echo? I'll bet you could. And if you were standing a couple of feet from the walls, that echo is about four milliseconds. (Sound travels 27 inches in two milliseconds.)

Jason's description of the phase problem as 'reverb' is pretty accurate too. Reverb behaves in a similar fashion - it takes the original signal, delays it, and mixes it back in. (And a recording with lots of reverb will mask the phase problems of the loudspeaker.) Probably one of the reasons that loudspeaker phase problems sounds so obnoxious is that they only affect part of the frequency spectrum.


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## Lateralis (Jan 22, 2012)

Well... I've come to realize how very little I know about sound theory and application. I find it hard to comprehend some of the stuff discussed as I have not personally seen/heard such applications before. As you mentioned everyone has a difference in taste for "how" they listen to their music, but how can anyone really make an informed decision on the different options out there if they haven't experienced it? 

None the less you sir have my attention and interest. I will attempt to wrap my head around what is being said in here with a lot of assistance from google :lol:


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## jp_over (Dec 21, 2011)

Interesting... subscribed!


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## 60ndown (Feb 8, 2007)

i think 'the problem' for many is that, 

people stop hearing and enjoying the music, 

and start listening to and not enjoying the system.

the trick is to ignore the minimal system imperfections and just enjoy the amazing sound that all these amazing musicians have put on media we can use time and time again.....


id say spending time (ones life) practicing not being obsessive about the system and re-learning to enjoy the music is time much better spent then trying to figure out why a flat system sounds worse then a system with 3rd order i.m. distortion (whatever that is)

did Hendrix sweat the exact driver/s in his amp/s when he was mid show?

did tina turner check thd stats before going on stage?

did bob marley insist on rear ported cabs only?? 

no,


why,


because its not about 'the system' .......

music is emotion not science


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

Lateralis said:


> Well... I've come to realize how very little I know about sound theory and application. I find it hard to comprehend some of the stuff discussed as I have not personally seen/heard such applications before. As you mentioned everyone has a difference in taste for "how" they listen to their music, but how can anyone really make an informed decision on the different options out there if they haven't experienced it?
> 
> None the less you sir have my attention and interest. I will attempt to wrap my head around what is being said in here with a lot of assistance from google :lol:


Yeah I hate thinking about phase! Makes my head hurt.

But I'm really starting to think Linkwitz is wrong - even his own site indicates some self doubt about whether phase distortion is audible.

It's odd that phase distortion is one of those things that really isn't discussed a whole lot - people spend a lot more time arguing about which amplifier sounds best.

Yet there's no way I could pick out which amplifier sounds best on a Youtube video, but the 'ringing' in these high order filters sounds pretty clear to me.

Maybe I'm just sensitive to it? I dunno.

It's one of the reasons I wanted to state my bias up front. Low order filters are hell on loudspeakers. If you google around, you'll find tons of horror stories about Thiel owners blowing three and four tweeters. Low order filters will definitely blow your drivers up in a hurry.

I use them routinely on my Unity horns not because they sound good, but because they're easy to implement. I'd never even considered that there might be a sonic benefit.

Seriously - phase is just one of those things I ignored until recently.


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## Darth SQ (Sep 17, 2010)

60ndown said:


> did Hendrix sweat the exact driver/s in his amp/s when he was mid show?
> 
> did tina turner check thd stats before going on stage?
> 
> ...


Because all three of them were completely stoned out of their minds. 

Bret
PPI-ART COLLECTOR


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## 60ndown (Feb 8, 2007)

PPI-ART COLLECTOR said:


> Because all three of them were completely stoned out of their minds.
> 
> Bret
> PPI-ART COLLECTOR


meh, maybe maybe not, either way, they were deep into having fun and enjoying music, whereas some people spend months and big bucks to reproduce,

a cannon shot

accurately.

whos out of their mind??


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## Lateralis (Jan 22, 2012)

PPI-ART COLLECTOR said:


> Because all three of them were completely stoned out of their minds.
> 
> Bret
> PPI-ART COLLECTOR


:laugh:

Yeah, you're right there. I believe with out drugs music wouldn't be what it is. I mean how the hell would some of these people come up with what they did if they weren't stoned out of their minds lol? 

What I think we're going at with this though, is "reproduction". Lets face it. The craptastic system doesn't let you "feel" the music the way the artist probably intended it to be heard. They want you to hear it the same exact way the day they recorded it. At least I'd assume... This thread is just going to go to the extreme of reproduction. I just wish I could actually hear it in person. A lot of the youtube vids probably don't do any of the systems any justice as to what they can actually do. As said earlier, a system is only good as the best one you've heard. Shoot I think my current system knocks my old one out of the park and my speakers are running off the deck with no amps! Then again, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. 

Mr Bateman, what vehicle are you planning to dissect for this project?


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

Lateralis said:


> :laugh:
> 
> Yeah, you're right there. I believe with out drugs music wouldn't be what it is. I mean how the hell would some of these people come up with what they did if they weren't stoned out of their minds lol?
> 
> ...


I disagree. I've heard a lot of these systems personally, and these Youtube videos are consistent with what I experienced. For instance, in videos with planars you can tell that the vocal/midrange is very good, but dynamics are 'pinched.'

I've heard the megabuck Avant Garde systems a bunch of times, and the Youtube videos are consistent with what I experienced : big dynamics, but the treble is a bit 'shouty'. Not as bad as your average prosound horn, but there's still a hint of horn 'honk.'

The one thing that *does* suck about Youtube is that the 'room' sound is more pronounced. For instance, I have hardwood floors, and in the videos I uploaded, the room echo is more noticeable in the video than what it sounds like in real life. *But tonally, the Youtube video is spot-on.*

The room sound was so annoying with my Summas, I went to the extreme of dragging them out on my deck to shoot the video. But I haven't linked it very much, as the sound of the rain interferes with the mic quite a bit. (it's always raining here!!!)

Anyways, long story short - Youtube is a great way to demo speakers. The mic on your phone won't do 20hz, but it covers most of the frequency spectrum, and it's a helluva lot more accurate than the reviews in Stereophile.

If it sounds good on Youtube it will likely sound good in person.

If you don't believe me, listen to this. Their flagship is a quarter of a million dollars. The music sounds pretty darn good doesn't it?

AudiogoN @ CES 2009: MBL high-end audio from Germany w/ omni-directional ribbon speakers + BIG amps - YouTube


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## jainbaby (Nov 6, 2007)

Patrick,

If you have not already done so, please buy "Sound Practices" on eBay. There is a CD ROM of all 16 issues. The editor is Joe Roberts. Start at issue 1 and I bet by issue 2-3 your eyes will be wide open to what Joe and the other contributors figured out a long time ago. We are on a backward evolution in loudspeaker and amplifier design and technology. Once we "engineer for measurements like "flat frequency response" and "20-20" and other things that logically make sense, we kill the music.

I am reminded of a famous quote that has stuck with me for many years for the founder of MTV "how much science can you throw at something that is art?"

Watch this video:


Check out this video on YouTube:

1928 Western Electric cinema speaker - YouTube


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## jainbaby (Nov 6, 2007)

You can just tell that this sounds amazing in person...


Check out this video on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjPShlDbbf0&feature=youtube_gdata_player


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## Lars Ulriched (Oct 31, 2009)

Subcribed


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## Notloudenuf (Sep 14, 2008)

jainbaby said:


> Patrick,
> 
> 
> Watch this video:
> ...


Wow 



jainbaby said:


> You can just tell that this sounds amazing in person...
> 
> Check out this video on YouTube:
> 
> Avantgarde Acoustic Duo Buddy - YouTube


and WOW. Thank you for posting these videos.


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## 3fish (Jul 12, 2009)

Patrick Bateman said:


> Due to psychoacoustics, when you play something full range, it actually masks the problem.



Just found this article on psychoacoustics. http://lib.tkk.fi/Dipl/2008/urn011933.pdf


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## SSSnake (Mar 8, 2007)

Phase distortion is definitely an issue but with a reflective environment like a car it will be impossible to eliminate. Reduce sure, eliminate never. There is some merit to shallow xovers and acoustic filtering. The ringing in high order xovers is something that I have become acutely aware of... I began using 48db per octave when I got the behringers installed. I have since moved on due to ringing. On acoustic filtering, if done properly you get the added benefit of greatly reducing harmonic distortion above the Xover freq.


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## nubz69 (Aug 27, 2005)

Damn this thread is moving fast.

"I know Linkwitz is regarded as an audio God, and for good reason. But listen to the Orion in the video. IMHO, the Danley PA system gets the midrange 'correct' in a way that the Orion does not. And the Thiel sounds better than *all* of them."

2 problems, unless you have heard them in person in the same room, the video is no comparison. It's not just the fact that they are all recordings of recordings but every camera has a different mic + different preamp in each camera. There is absolutely no way to tell if the defects you are hearing in the videos are from the system or camera.

The second problem is a problem I and Alan Parsons have almost all these rooms are this (Alan Parsons on audiophiles - Boing Boing). THEY SUCK FOR AUDIO. IMO any person interested in audio, especially home audio, better know the basics of room acoustics. So many people spend thousands on their gear and never spend the money where it will make the most difference, in the room. Any difference you are hearing in midrange could easily be attributed to the acoustics of the room. Noise, reverb delay, diffraction, diffusion, etc. all have huge affects on things like intelligibility, frequency response, phase and transients. The problem is way worse with home audio enthusiasts then it is with car audio. Damping and absorption using Dynamat and Ensolite are the basics of any audio system that is going to sound good. Now if the home guys would just realize this, the world would be in harmony 

"If you were in a small empty room with wood floors, could you perceive that there's an echo? I'll bet you could. And if you were standing a couple of feet from the walls, that echo is about four milliseconds. (Sound travels 27 inches in two milliseconds.)"

Actually, no if the room is small you would perceive reverb and a smearing of the sound which would reduce intelligibility. The amount of time it takes for the first reflection of any sound to hit your ears has a huge affect on how you perceive it. If it is a small delay, you hear it as reverb. If it is a bit longer your brain will filter it out more. If it is to long it will be perceived as an echo. You can find how to measure any room for these figures in any text book on room acoustics.

Taped horn vs. ported box vs. sealed on sounding "tighter", this is mainly controlled by group delay of the sub system. Our perception is also affected by how well the sub is "coupled" with the air it's rarefying. Nothing new or amazing, just most people don't consider it when designing their enclosures. The truth is that you can design different types of enclosures to sound "tight" if you create them to have similar group delays. Personally I feel that total group delay means little, what matters is the group delay being as flat as possible between all the frequencies in the range the driver will play. I believe this is why bandpasses sound so "tight" when designed correctly even though they generally have a higher group delay.

"Once we "engineer for measurements like "flat frequency response" and "20-20" and other things that logically make sense, we kill the music."

How about this, lets assume all distortions to a signal affect the sound negatively, the question is which ones are the most perceivable. Realizing that an idea audio system should be able to play 20-20 isn't killing anything. It is the focus on any one aspect that kills it. 

Patrick, it sounds like you have hit a point where you have learned a lot but you now feel like you are back at square one. that happens to all of us when we have throughly researched on part of a topic and achieved a high level of knowledge. Now it is time to apply what you learned + learn a different part of the same topic. 

Try this, work backwards. Imagine what a perfect audio system would be able to do, then select design ideas and parts that fit your idea as best as possible. So many people build an audio system from the botom up, try it from the top down.

Phase distortion is very audible. The problem is that it is directly correlated with the room (car). Drivers with good polar responses (horns) help remove the rooms affect on this distortion but they cannot negate it entirely. This is one of the reasons why you are perceiving a disconnect on the car horn system. The midbasses may have flat frequency response but I guarantee they do not have flat phase at the listening position. Because of their location and polar response, you are also hearing a larger number of reflections in the sound. This is the underlying reason for the move to waveguides in the DIY audio community, it helps mitigate the issues of a bad room. Most just perceive it has better detail, dynamics, SQ, etc., this is only partly the drivers. This is why even lower quality drivers sound so good on a waveguide. 

If you get a chance to make or listen to a set of speakers in an acoustically perfect room for an extended period of time, or a very good pair of near field monitors set up in the most idea setting; you will begin to see that even lower end speakers can sound very good in the right setting.


*This is just my opinion based on years of playing with audio gear in homes, cars and elsewhere. I am self taught in many subjects but I did have a little formal training on the basics of acoustics.

**I also want to mention that if you want to see how phase affects your sound look into trying Digital Room correction. http://drc-fir.sourceforge.net/doc/drc.html 
I was dreaming of using it in my SQ setup ~ 2003, when I had more money than brains. I am still at that point but carputers are common place now and it would not be hard to implement. I am just not sure it can handle the amount of issues in a car environment just yet. If someone has a carputer and the gear to set it up, please give it a shot and share your results with us.


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## Neil_J (Mar 2, 2011)

Lossy audio compression also wreaks havoc on phase, so be careful comparing speakers from YouTube videos. Lossy compression at low to medium bitrates always sounds sibilant to me, cymbals don't sound right. Unless they've been encoded the same by the user (and re-encoded the same by YouTube), it may be an unfair comparison

Edit, previous post beat me to it


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## The Baron Groog (Mar 15, 2010)

sub'd


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## durwood (Mar 7, 2007)

Based on what I have read so far in this thread, many people severely underestimate the effect of the room (on recording AND playback) even when presenting evidence of how much it WILL change the sound talking about echo and youtube videos. If you don't find creative ways to deal with the room, everything else is throwing money at a problem that gives you an insignificant return on investment.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

durwood said:


> Based on what I have read so far in this thread, many people severely underestimate the effect of the room (on recording AND playback) even when presenting evidence of how much it WILL change the sound talking about echo and youtube videos. If you don't find creative ways to deal with the room, everything else is throwing money at a problem that gives you an insignificant return on investment.


Dang about time you came back here.

While I'm *talking* about building audio projects you're actually *doing* it!

Love the BMS coax project you have in your car.


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## asawendo (Nov 22, 2009)

durwood said:


> Based on what I have read so far in this thread, many people severely underestimate the effect of the room (on recording AND playback) even when presenting evidence of how much it WILL change the sound talking about echo and youtube videos. If you don't find creative ways to deal with the room, everything else is throwing money at a problem that gives you an insignificant return on investment.


Yeah Bro That is very true! I always remember the principle* "Acoutic First Then Audio".* Especially in car audio environment with lots of obstacles (i.e diffraction, reflection, absorbtion, diffusion etc) in order to sound right and accurate


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

Patrick Bateman said:


> This is one of the things that's really vexed me about horns; the only practical way to get them to 'sync up' with a midrange is to use on that's the same size. I seriously do not know of any other solution besides that. EQ can't fix it, DSP can't fix it. _They just have to match, physically._
> 
> 
> 
> ...




Here's a quick synopsis of this thread so far:

#1 - I've built a lot of horns, both for the car and the home. I have a bit of a bias against 'regular' loudspeakers
#2 - At this years CES, I heard a speaker that did a lot of the things that I like about horns. Basically it had a midrange that didn't sound sibilant or nasal, like a lot of regular speakers do.
#3 - After talking to the designer (Herron Audio), it got me interested in doing something similar for the car.

The 'trick' seems to be phase-coherency. So this thread will explore that.

I don't have any real info on the Herron speaker, but the Thiel CS3.6 is a well docuemented loudspeaker that's known to be phase coherent. So let's reverse engineer it.









Here's a picture of the midrange and tweeter. They're both from Vifa. Less than $100 worth of parts right there.









A little bit of a waveguide on the tweeter. If you play with A.R.P.E., you'll see that this waveguide is actually functional. It helps to reduce the interaction between the tweeter and the woofer in the octave from 3000hz to 6000hz.









Here's the simulated response of the two drivers. You may notice a couple of things. First, the tweeter is beaming quite a bit above 10khz. (the red line is 45 degrees off axis, peach is 15 degrees.)

But the overall response is pretty darn good I'd say. I think this is attributable to a couple things. First, the phase behavior is quite well behaved with these low order filters. The yellow line in this graph is the phase response, and you can see it's very well behaved. *It fits in a sixty degree window.* At the crossover point, that translates into less than 0.75" of delay. So basically, this is pretty close to a point source, *if it's aimed carefully.*

The devil is in the details though, and aiming becomes a pretty big deal with these types of crossovers :worried:









This is stereophile's measurement of 'the real deal' (Thiel CS3.6, from sixteen years ago.)









Aaaaaand here's my sim of the VERTICAL response of this loudspeaker. See that giant suckout in the midrange? That's due to these funky 1st order crossovers. Because both drivers are covering a great deal of the same octaves, *aiming becomes very critical.* For instance, the crossover point is at 3khz, so both drivers are interacting significantly in the two octaves from 1500hz to 6000hz.

IMHO, the Stereophile measurement shows a giant suckout because the microphone was a bit above or below the axis where the speaker would measure best. Basically, if you move your head up or down a few inches, the sound will change significantly.

That kinda sucks for home stereo, but is a bit more tolerable in a car, where we know exactly where everyone will be sitting.









Here's the frequency response of the speaker, but substituting fourth-order Butterworth for 1st order.

*See how the frequency response is MUCH better off axis?*

That's (one of) the great things about high order crossovers. There's less driver interaction.

But check out the phase - the two drivers are waaaaaaaay out of sync.

You can see this in a waterfall plot, if you compare something like a Dynaudio or a Thiel to a Focal. The Focal will have a delay between the midrange and the tweeter, due to the high order crossover.

There's about a bazillion things I skated over here - this article would be a good one to read if anyone's curious about investigating it further. It's by John Kreskovsky, who's also one of the authors of the ARPE program that I used to do these sims.

Speaaker Transient Analysis

In a post coming soon, I'll start to explore actual parts that we can buy to implement a front stage that's phase coherent.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

Here's Stereophile's measurements of the horizontal polar response and the vertical polar response of the Thiel CS3.6, respectively.

A few things to note:

My sims aren't an exact match, but they're in the ballpark. The real speaker is complicated by the driver's natural rolloff, the rounded shape of the baffle, and the small waveguide on the tweeter.
The vertical polar response is horrendous. A small MTM instead of a TM would yield some improvements. Thiel went with a coax, which is a far superior, albeit expensive solution.
If you were clever, you might use the awful vertical polars to your advantage, by 'aiming' the lobe in way that off-axis sound is reduced. Aiming these would definitely require more care than a 4th order design.

I'm still learning about phase here. The ARPE program helps a lot. One thing I noticed is that even a 1st order crossover has some phase rotation. Based on what I read, this is due to the driver's resonance, and the natural rolloff of the driver. In other words, if you REALLY wanted to have perfect phase, you'd have to crossover at a point that's well above the resonance, or use DSP to shape the response.

This might explain why the JBL Control Now array, that I posted a video of, rings so bad. Besides using a high order xover on the tweeter, the horn will increase the rate of rolloff. So you might end up with something on the order of 5th or 6th order rolloff, which would entail a great deal of phase rotation at the xover point - which is right in the midrange frequencies, where it's most obnoxious.


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## strakele (Mar 2, 2009)

So much science. Very interested to see where this goes..


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## durwood (Mar 7, 2007)

Real simple observations...anyone can do this 


First video critique:

-Speakers are spaced away from the back wall. Pass
-Left speaker near sidewall, right speaker near open space. Fail
-Stereo recorded with a monophonic mic. Monophonic mics usually fail miserably in dealing with reflections. This however does not mean monophonic cannot capture the required information, it just means you need to be careful.



Patrick Bateman said:


> Even with a crappy cel phone video, this Thiel loudspeaker NAILS the midrange, IMHO:
> THIEL /VAN DEN HUL / TRANSPARENT / dedicated amplifier - YouTube
> The midrange almost gives me goosebumps at the 1:00 mark.





Second critique:

-Speakers against back wall. Fails stereo requirement
-Right speaker near sidewall, left near open space. Right fails stereo requirement.
-Monophonic recording of a highly reverberant space.



> KEF REFERENCE 207/2's - YouTube
> Now compare the Thiel with a Kef 207/2. To me, the Kef sounds a lot like the JBL, and the Linkwitz Orion.
> 
> 
> It's interesting that both Kef and Thiel are on the 'no diffraction bandwagon.' So this sibilance I'm hearing likely isn't an enclosure thing. It's also consistent with what I've found in my own experiments. Reducing diffraction improves imaging, but sibilance and articulation is a time-domain problem, not a frequency response problem.


Seems pointless to worry about diffraction if you are also not worrying about nearby surfaces. 

Third Critique:

-Left speaker near back wall, the right floating. Might be saved by the horn's ability to focus the direct sound resulting in a better direct to reflect ratio, but still a horrible room mismatch
-Looks like the right might also be further from the sidewall.
-monophonic recording with highly reflective room again.



jainbaby said:


> You can just tell that this sounds amazing in person...
> 
> 
> Check out this video on YouTube:
> ...





Patrick Bateman said:


> Dang about time you came back here.


Not back, just passing through.

"Accuracy" is a mythical creature. Who defines this "accuracy"?

It's easier to try to achieve dynamics..something a good system should be capable of. It will sound more believable. I think most people would chose something that sounds "louder" and doesn't really sound stressed in the process. These puny systems have a hard time sounding believable. Been there done that. A nice big 3 way can easily achieve dynamics and have good power response. This stuff doesn't have to be hard, people make it hard.


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## Catman (Mar 18, 2008)

60ndown said:


> did Hendrix sweat the exact driver/s in his amp/s when he was mid show?
> 
> did tina turner check thd stats before going on stage?
> 
> ...


I don't think any of those had the mental capacity to comprehend this stuff. Plus ...they were about 'entertaining' ...not sounding 'great'. Sounding 'good enough' is all they cared about.


>^..^<


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## ErinH (Feb 14, 2007)

durwood said:


> Seems pointless to worry about diffraction if you are also not worrying about nearby surfaces.


Thank you. 




Sent from my iPhone. Pardon the grammar.


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## 60ndown (Feb 8, 2007)

Catman said:


> I don't think any of those had the mental capacity to comprehend this stuff. Plus ...they were about 'entertaining' ...not sounding 'great'. Sounding 'good enough' is all they cared about.
> 
> 
> >^..^<


better to keep your mouth shut and let people think you are stupid then open it and remove all doubt.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

durwood said:


> It's easier to try to achieve dynamics..something a good system should be capable of. It will sound more believable. I think most people would chose something that sounds "louder" and doesn't really sound stressed in the process. These puny systems have a hard time sounding believable. Been there done that. A nice big 3 way can easily achieve dynamics and have good power response. This stuff doesn't have to be hard, people make it hard.


_"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."_

The reason I announced my bias in the very first post, is that I generally veer towards projects which have anything but mass appeal. After going ambio with my home system, the conventional stereo triangle seems a bit antiquated.

In fact, a few weeks ago I started a thread where I basically offered to design some HLCDs and give 'em back "free" to the forum, but the thread didn't get a single reply!

So I'm definitely a fan of dynamics and high efficiency and ambio, but I'm not sure if there's a big audience for those types of systems.

This project is definitely an attempt to explore something a little bit more conventional than my Unity projects. (Although the engineering is quite similar.)


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

omegaslast said:


> I dont get what the project is


I've considered a bunch of options for this project; everything from conventional two ways to horns.

I'm leaning towards a three way, using a faux-axial midrange/tweeter, along with a midbass. Very similar to the Thiel PCS.

The main advantage of pairing a faux-axial with a midbass is that we can keep our crossover points low. For instance, let's say I wanted to do a 3000hz first order crossover from a tweeter to my midrange. If I wanted to keep the center-to-center spacing down to one-quarter wavelength, the tweeter and the midrange would have to be 1 1/8" apart (!!!)

So that's the beauty of the faux axial - *it lets us achieve an ultra-tight spacing between tweeter, midrange, and midbass.*

You can see this really easily in the measurements of the various Thiel speakers.

















Here's the horizontal polar response of a Thiel 3.6, which uses three woofers. The dips and raggedness is due to the shallow xover slope and wide spacing. We deal with this in the car, due to the spacing between tweeter and midrange, but it's far more severe for us. This is probably one of the reasons people have had good results with the Founteks. (they're virtually immune to this.)

















The Thiel 2.3 improves upon the old speaker's polar response, mostly due to the use of Thiel's faux-axial midrange/tweeter

















By moving the midbass much closer to the faux-axial, the Thiel PCS achieves the best polar response of all three speakers.

If anyone's curious - here's why the PCS measures so much better:
_Even though the 2.3 and the PCS use the same faux-axial, the center to center spacing on the PCS is much tighter. The smaller woofer in the PCS starts to beam about 2khz, AND it's closer to the faux axial. So the 6.5" in the PCS blends a lot more seamlessly, and the measurements prove it. The big woofer in the 2.3 will play deeper, but the measurements demonstrate that it's not as well matched, particularly in the octave from 500hz to 1khz. Ideally, the polar plot would be a flat line that descended smoothly from zero to -24dB._

Here's some 'shop talk' about the faux-axial in these speakers:

http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum...t-my-car/44450-genesis-autophile-ps-16-a.html

http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum/diyma-sq-forum-technical-advanced/8102-genesis-3-mid-info.html

Some of the reviewers complained that the top octave was too hot. This is actually unavoidable; I'll explain why in a future post. In a lot of ways, the extra energy in the top octave is a BONUS if you listen off-axis. (As this project will be designed to do; it's going to be cross fired.)


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## nubz69 (Aug 27, 2005)

Patrick Bateman said:


> _"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."_
> 
> The reason I announced my bias in the very first post, is that I generally veer towards projects which have anything but mass appeal. After going ambio with my home system, the conventional stereo triangle seems a bit antiquated.
> 
> ...


There is an audience but many people have just never heard such a system. The other problem is that a system that uses these types of drivers has to be relatively sophisticated, which many people can't or won't spend their money on.


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## traceywatts (Jun 2, 2008)

Patrick Bateman said:


> _"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."_
> 
> The reason I announced my bias in the very first post, is that I generally veer towards projects which have anything but mass appeal. After going ambio with my home system, the conventional stereo triangle seems a bit antiquated.
> 
> ...


I dont know HOW I missed THIS one. Please point me back to it.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

traceywatts said:


> I dont know HOW I missed THIS one. Please point me back to it.


You know HLCDs are d-e-a-d when I offer to make a set for free, get 253 views, and not a single reply 

http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum...l-advanced/124193-anyone-want-some-hlcds.html

Basically my idea was to design a set of HLCDs, come up with a crossover, but detail the entire setup so that anyone else could duplicate it. I mean, how cool would it be if we had a series of 'open source' stereo recipes? For instance, what if Harry Kimura published *everything* he knew about his setup? The crossover points, measurements, frequency response, driver selection, amplifier, processing, etc? Basically laid it all out, so anyone could duplicate it.

My inspiration was the Econowave.


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## whoever (Nov 21, 2008)

Patrick Bateman said:


> You know HLCDs are d-e-a-d when I offer to make a set for free, get 253 views, and not a single reply
> 
> http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum...l-advanced/124193-anyone-want-some-hlcds.html
> 
> ...












my car is sitting wide open and I sent a PM asking you if you had any ideas you'd like to try out as Id be more than willing to give it a go, you didnt mention the HLCD's at that time, you said keep my eye out for this thread, just sayin


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## pocket5s (Jan 6, 2012)

Patrick Bateman said:


> You know HLCDs are d-e-a-d when I offer to make a set for free, get 253 views, and not a single reply
> 
> http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum...l-advanced/124193-anyone-want-some-hlcds.html
> 
> ...


Being in the software world, open source really gets my attention  Like a lot of free information, I think a lot of people would be reluctant to give it out, even though there are forums like this one which thrive on sharing of knowledge. 

The perception being that they have spent a ton of money and/or time getting to a certain point (especially competition vehicles) and don't want to give away all their secrets. The flip side being that most people wouldn't spend the money or time anyway but would still like to know _how_ it was done, especially the tuning aspect.

Personally I'm all for it the idea. Having heard Harry's car, Richard Clark's GN and a few other HLCD equipped vehicles in the past I've always wanted to do horns and other semi-crazy installs. I even have to resist the temptation to find a vehicle that I could stuff a unity horn into. yea, thanks


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

If you want a compact compression driver, the B&C DE5 is TINY. The BMS 4540 looks like a TAD sitting next to the baby B&C.


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## mitchyz250f (May 14, 2005)

Patrick/Jason- Have you heard the DE5? What is the smallest horn you can use with it that will go down to 3000-3500Hz? How does it sound compared to the AMT's?


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

Just literally got it 3 hours a go...right as I was walking out the door to go to work. US Speaker and Pro Sound Service haven't sold many of them. Ideally I wanted the DE7 but there are none here in the US.

The horns I intend to put them on are small small unity-styled horns...like 4x6 rectangle to go where my planars are at in the upper parts of my front door.


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## mitchyz250f (May 14, 2005)

Let us know how they sound, please.

I just got off the phone with USSpeakers asking about horns for the DE5---he has got nothing. 

I then asked about a tweeter that was comparable to the Beyma CP-21 (slot tweeterO which I use at home and am very familiar with. He suggested that the Ciare 1.26Nd (neo mag-103db) conventional style tweeter was comparable to the CP-22 (bullet style horn) and the many people had replaced the 22 because they sound better! He also said it was comparable (but not quite as good) as the Beyma AMT which is badass and pushing $400. 

3 1/2" dia. and 1.5" deep...Ever heard it or heard of it?

Ciare 1.26NdTW tweeter- Ciare 1.26NdTW is a lightweight neodymium tweeter for all high quality high frequency speaker systems - Ciare Speakers - Ciare 1.26NdTW tweeters available now.


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

The Beyma is about as badassed as they come...the home guys say it's second to only the RAAL ribbon, but can go much lower. They were my first choice, but coming off of the hip for 3 of them with the wife being pregnant again, well, is impossible to justify right now. I am going to have about $250 (in speakers) wrapped up in the 3 of my micro-unities when I get them done. If I had more room to work with (which I might, but playing it safe for now), I could get the cost down A LOT more using the Goldwood tweeters over the Misco tweeters. I am trying to document this over on Patrick's site as I learn and go through it all.


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## 60ndown (Feb 8, 2007)

id bet $50, in a darkened room, if we set up a curtain and some sound gear with gains/volumes/etc matched closely, and played a few songs, 

very few (if any) would be able to determine which speaker design was playing repeatedly and accurately.


richard clark pwnt the whole world with this theory and amps,

id bet exact speaker design is about as hard to identify accurately, mayb e a little easier then an amp, but good speakers sound good, how you gonna tell them apart?

what does that mean? 

it means spending all this time designing and building the 'perfect' speaker will actually leave you with a speaker that sounds almost the same as many other speakers that have existed for a long time.

and i bet some of them only cost $50.

a pair


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

mitchyz250f said:


> Patrick/Jason- Have you heard the DE5? What is the smallest horn you can use with it that will go down to 3000-3500Hz? How does it sound compared to the AMT's?


If you want small, and you're willing to do some experimentation, I think I stumbled on a way to horn load the BG Neo 8.

But first a funny story -

I'm one of those guys who will totally nitpick your PA system. When I go into a club, if the PA sucks, I will totally make a mental note of it. This is actually one of the ways I first discovered the Unities - I was at Club RA in Las Vegas, and noticed that the club's PA system was clear as a bell, I checked out the speakers, and they were SPL TD-1s.

So I was at the Hoover Dam a couple years back, and noticed that their PA is killer too, and guess what it uses? BG NEO 3.

It's amazing the speakers can take the abuse - this PA is in the biggest room in the whole place, you could land an airplane in that room.

Anyways, over at diyaudio, in the Unity thread that Puggie started, I'm exploring the idea of using one driver at the apex of the horn instead of five. It's basically the same idea as what Thiel and Genesis did with their "faux-axial" drivers that a few people here bought. You basically isolate the dustcap of the woofer from the rest of the cone, and by doing that, it acts like a tweeter at high frequency, not a woofer.

But I think you could do the same thing with a NEO 8. You would use felt or close cell foam to partition the ribbon into quadrants, *and then horn load the partitions seperately.*










Basically turn the Neo 8 into a ring radiator, using felt or foam to subdivide it into rings


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## thehatedguy (May 4, 2007)

I think DS-21 had a blind listening test he posted the results on over on the PE forum.

Dunno if I would go where you are going though...somethings I can buy into, but not this at such a basic level.


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## DeanE10 (Apr 19, 2011)

thehatedguy said:


> Dunno if I would go where you are going though...somethings I can buy into, but not this at such a basic level.


I agree...


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## mitchyz250f (May 14, 2005)

Back to the Ciare 1.26ND tweeter. Anybody ever use it? There is not alot of info on the net, but all is very good. From what I have read online and what the guy at USSpeakers said, it is comparable to the Beyma CP-22 and Beyma CP-25, bullet and baby cheak horns. Both those tweeters are very well liked and i believe the use the same motor as the Beyma CP-21 slot tweeter.

Volti Audio - NL9 - Klipsch Upgrades - New Horn Speakers

Ciare 1.26NdTW tweeter- Ciare 1.26NdTW is a lightweight neodymium tweeter for all high quality high frequency speaker systems - Ciare Speakers - Ciare 1.26NdTW tweeters available now.

Pretty small 3.1/2" dia, x 1 3/8" deep.


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## sqshoestring (Jun 19, 2007)

Going back to some of the initial points, sure I wonder why some things work like they do. A cheap paper cone speaker can sound so good sometimes, like stock car systems, though sure a lot of them were bad too. I have a old panasonic mono portable radio with a cheap 4" (?, It looks similar to the goldwood GT25) speaker in it. While not perfect the range and tone is great and surpassed many more fancy units. Its from the 80s hard to believe there is that much electronic wizardry in it, it only has a tone control lol. 

Before internet audio like this, most of my findings were experience. I used to run a lot of lower power speakers in my cars for the sound, I would blow them and replace at times....they just sounded better. The efficiency was nice too. Another thing I liked to do was run the mid as wide a range as I could, I always figured it was a point source thing similar to why people like full rangers. Anyway, it keeps the xovers out of the vocal ranges thus it avoids a lot of issues.

I don't have the time to study all the science that explains this, certainly Patrick's threads are some of the best and I along with many get glued to them.

If I had the time I would try to make some kind of array in a car, a tiny one, or try to engineer a multiple driver setup that did not need much in the way of electronics for the drivers included (in a channel). Seems like you could since you know where the listener is, given installation could be a disaster lol. These nice sounding tiny PC speakers make me think of that. It would be an experiment on the opposite of point source, but of the same goal. Then again I love the sound of headphones and the wide stage in my head...some don't.


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## pocket5s (Jan 6, 2012)

sqshoestring said:


> ... Then again I love the sound of headphones and the wide stage in my head...some don't.


I'm the same way here. I have a nice set of Klipsch ear buds and I have to tell myself that my vehicle will never sound like that. However I do like to use them on certain songs as you can really tell the separation so it helps to hear what my truck is lacking on.


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## sqshoestring (Jun 19, 2007)

pocket5s said:


> I'm the same way here. I have a nice set of Klipsch ear buds and I have to tell myself that my vehicle will never sound like that. However I do like to use them on certain songs as you can really tell the separation so it helps to hear what my truck is lacking on.


I run rears to help this, but they have to be just right and its work to get them right. But it can help widen the stage as well as bring the left more to the left instead of front. I would love an array to bring the L/R wide but it appears to take significant processing to pull off. I've tried a few things but they sound fake or are not possible/reasonable in a car install.


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## Wesayso (Jul 20, 2010)

This car: http://www.diymobileaudio.com/forum/build-logs-project-install-gallery/76199-bmw-e34-touring-mosconi-odr-norwegian-sq-car.html follows your shallow slope guidelines and seems to have the 'meat' to meet dynamic demands. 
As European Emma champion it seems it works well enough.


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## funkalicious (Oct 8, 2007)

Subscribed


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## SSSnake (Mar 8, 2007)

Patrick,

Not trying to threadjack but with all of the issues in car audio I think the content below is highly relevant to your discussion.

One thing to consider...

From the Rane website Linkwitz-Riley Crossovers: A Primer.

"A casual reading of the above list may suggest that this is, indeed, the perfect crossover. But such is not so. The wrinkle involves what is known as "linear phase." A Linkwitz-Riley crossover alignment is not linear phase: meaning that the amount of phase shift is a function of frequency. Or, put into time domain terms, the amount of time delay through the filter is not constant for all frequencies, which means that some frequencies are delayed more than others. (In technical terms, the network has a frequency-dependent group delay, but with a gradually changing characteristic.)

Is this a problem? Specifically, is this an audible "problem?" In a word, no.

Much research has been done on this question [6-9] with approximately the same conclusions: given a slowly changing non-linear phase system, the audible results are so minimal as to be nonexistent; especially in the face of all of the other system nonlinearities. And with real-world music sources (remember music?), it is not audible at all."

While very interesting IMO and IME - Given all of the other problems with car audio it seems unlikely the phase distortion associated with properly implemeted higher order xovers (like the Linkwitz Riley) is audible at all. As with anything else the kicker is the PROPER implementation.

Again IMO, what is of a LOT more interest is the phase distortion associated with multiple reflections in the car audio environment. Each delayed signal, within the integration period, that arrives at the listeners ears changes the perceived freq response. We measure this with RTAs and adjust by applying EQ typically with the goal of getting a flat freq response. What about phase? Not too many of us bother with trying to address phase (just too hard, I guess). But remember phase has a freq and time dependent component. So the phase difference, if large enough, will result in a perceived timing difference. 

Does this matter in listening? I guess it depends upon the person. For grins get your car tuned up pretty well (good FR and good imaging). Then run a signal sweep of 20hz to 20khz. I'm betting even with your best tune you will hear some funkiness going on. Hard to describe but there are usually notes that shift location and output level. These happen pretty quickly if you are lucky - indicating a narrow band issue - and are harder to hear IMO. These can happen anywhere (midbass always seems to be an issue in the car).

NOW BACK ON PATRICK'S TOPIC:

Now one of the ways I try to see if my xover is implemented properly, or at least pretty close, is to repeat the test paying particular attention to the crossover areas. If you are using low order filters, suggested in this thread, with widely spaced components (tweet on dash and mid in the kicks) I'm betting you will have issues at the crossover freq. That is why in Patrick's solution you are going with a "faux axial" mid & tweet - to eliminate the offset in the vertical axis of the two drivers which helps to reduce the issues with shallow filters. But if you have the system above, try this a couple of times with your head in different positions (each session will likely sound different). The solution seems to be going with higher order xover filters BUT you can, as indicated in an earlier post, run into issues like ringing. There also seem to be issues with the transient response as Patrick has noted. So far for me the best compromise I have seen with a kick mounted midbass and a dash tweet seems to be a 24db per octave acoustic implementation (takes into account the roll off of the driver). Is this the perfect solution? Far from it but read Werewolf's thread about kick panel speakers and his favorite implementation (kick mid with dash tweet).

Otherwise you really need to get the mid and tweet pretty close (all drivers really) or you will end up with a system where you have to have your head in a vice (vary narrow sweet spot) to listen to the system.

Patrick and everybody else, try it and let me know what happens. IME - drivers used well within their passband, with good crossover implementation, and some form of control on reflections will have FAR fewer issues than others. Makes you wonder if you really want to run that driver through the resonant freq 

One issue I have though... If you use a faux axial are we using them on the dash or in the kicks. Because even with the best implementation of xover and spacing, legs get in the way of the hi freq driver if in kicks. If using a dash mount you have realestate issues as well as those nasty windshield, dash, and side glass reflections. Either one of these issues could overwhelm the gain in performance associated with a low order xover and tight spacing (remember earlier discussion about reflections causing pahse distortion as well).

Having said all of this I had the chance to listen to Erin's car, which has dash mounted quasi faux axial mid/tweet setup. The results are pretty damn good. The issues I expected from diffraction associated with the tweeter in front of the mid weren't there and I didn't pick up on the nastiness you typicall get with all the reflective surfaces up there. I don't know what xover slopes he is running but I am willing to bet he could implement very low order xovers with the current setup. I wish he wasn't moving or I might try to use his car as a testbed


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## subwoofery (Nov 9, 2008)

Great thread... Took me some time to read through it (with all those vids lol) but was well worth it. 

Known all about shallow orders for Xover implementation - Just doesn't really work if drivers are far apart IMO. 

Can't really add much to the thread but it really was a good read. 

Thanks Patrick and to all that added some useful infos. 
Kelvin


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## Wesayso (Jul 20, 2010)

I immediatly thought of this thread after hearing these:


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## CrossFired (Jan 24, 2008)

I demo'd a pair of Thiel's in the mid 90's, some of the worse sounding speakers I ever heard. Hooked them up a my MFA pre and Classe DR-9 amp, and pukey bad! I never could find much that would out do my B&W 801's, but I did not look too hard.



Patrick Bateman said:


> Earlier today, I posted a video of a MECA winner using big compression drivers. In the video, there's a 'disconnect' between the lower midrange and the upper midrange. (these are my opinions, of course.)
> 
> This is one of the things that's really vexed me about horns; the only practical way to get them to 'sync up' with a midrange is to use on that's the same size. I seriously do not know of any other solution besides that. EQ can't fix it, DSP can't fix it. _They just have to match, physically._
> 
> ...


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

Patrick Bateman said:


> It's actually not a derailment at all.
> 
> When I was at the Consumer Electronics Show, I was shocked by how the Herron Audio ESP-1 got the midrange 'right.'
> 
> ...


Someone at the avsforum posted a youtube video of his Synergy horns. He made them for something like $50:

DIY Synergy horn test - YouTube

In the video, you might notice that the articulation is very good. Again, I think this is something that makes *everything* sound better. Not just audiophile recordings, but also crummy recordings, mp3s, podcasts, XM Radio, etc.


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## SSSnake (Mar 8, 2007)

I appreciate the posts and really love the unity. In listening to the clips though I can't pick out the details you mention. I have listened on multiple devices and the thiel actually sounds the most sibilant. Tough to really assess given they are playing different source material. All have different tonal characteristics but I was trying to focus on the sibilance since a lot of your comments are focused there but I'm just not getting it. I would love to see a set of clips with different speakers playing the same source material, at the same volume, in the same room so they could be assessed. 

Not a big fan of the Orions though.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

SSSnake said:


> I appreciate the posts and really love the unity. In listening to the clips though I can't pick out the details you mention. I have listened on multiple devices and the thiel actually sounds the most sibilant. Tough to really assess given they are playing different source material. All have different tonal characteristics but I was trying to focus on the sibilance since a lot of your comments are focused there but I'm just not getting it. I would love to see a set of clips with different speakers playing the same source material, at the same volume, in the same room so they could be assessed.
> 
> Not a big fan of the Orions though.


Try listening on headphones.

Conventional two-way speakers will generally screw up the phase response, which will mask the things that the unity is doing right.


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## Miniboom (Jul 15, 2010)

I'm sorry, but I don't get how comparing different speakers, using different amps, playing different music, in different rooms, recorded with different equipment (camcorders???) is gonna help prove anything here...

It's more like comparing blueberries and spaceships than apples and oranges.

Anyway, I agree that full-/wide range drivers and/or low order crossovers sound more correct and pleasing, allthough as mentioned by others earlier, this probably requires that the mid and tweeter is mounted close to each other. Which means a lot of people can't do this in their cars, at least not without mounting the drivers where the location introduces a lot of other issues, either due to reflection and/or phase (dash/pillars), or blocking the soundwaves with certain body parts (kicks/doors).

Maybe a larger full range mounted on axis in a pod near the sail panels might be the best solution, allthough not pretty. Keeping all crossover points out of the midrange area is probably the easiest way to nirvana-like sound?


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

Miniboom said:


> I'm sorry, but I don't get how comparing different speakers, using different amps, playing different music, in different rooms, recorded with different equipment (camcorders???) is gonna help prove anything here...
> 
> It's more like comparing blueberries and spaceships than apples and oranges.
> 
> ...


Before you dismiss the quality of recording done with iPhones, consider this -

an excellent measurement microphone costs under $1 (panasonic wm61at), and software allows us to calibrate it. (Andy from JBL references this fact in his MS-8 faq.)

True, there are better ways to record a speaker than an iPhone. At the same time, the quality is not as bad as you might assume. I generally find that the quality of these recordings is consistent with what I'm hearing in the room. It's very handy being able to pull up a project from one year or three years earlier, and immediately assess what it sounds like, or at least a half-decent facsimilie.

I think there are a ton of biases when we make projects, and we have a tendency to love whatever it is that we just finished. We're like proud parents, and unable to see the project 'warts and all.'


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## Mr.M (Apr 15, 2009)

I just would like to say Thanks! You've entertained me all night (read the thread beginning to now) and introduced me to a new realm


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## Wesayso (Jul 20, 2010)

Some more thoughts on crossovers:

Jenzen Speakers

I stumbled over this page from Troels Gravesen and figured it contained some interesting thoughts for this thread about crossover slopes and their related advantages/troubles.


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## Patrick Bateman (Sep 11, 2006)

Here's some data for you guys to ponder. I've argued that loudspeaker phase is important, and that it's one of those things which makes *everything* sound better. What I mean by this is that it improves both ****ty recordings and pristine recordings.

I think this is a big deal, because a lot of 'audiophiles' invest a pile of money chasing after improvements which are basically inaudible with 90% of the recordings out there. For instance, if you spend $10,000 on a set of speakers that image like a champ, it's a bit pointless once you realize that 90% of the recordings out there are basically monaural. But phase makes good AND bad recordings sound better. This is because good phase improves intelligibility, and this makes it easier to understand what the musicians are saying, it improves the 'texture' of instruments, good phase is basically a big band aid for a lot of audio problems.

Having said that, I thought I'd share a couple of measurements with you.









This is the cumulative spectral delay of a Pioneer SP-BS41-LR. This speaker caught my eye because it appears to be very well designed. For $1000 it would be a steal, for $100 it's just absurd. BUY NOW!!!









This is the CSD of a Focal Maestro Utopia III. Without a doubt, the Pioneer has superior CSD. The Pioneer is under $100 at Newegg. The Focal is $49,995. (http://www.stereophile.com/content/focal-maestro-utopia-iii-loudspeaker-specifications)

I know I'm a broken record on this stuff, but THIS is why a lot of your expensive stereos don't sound so hot. THIS is the reason I have Andy's quote in my sig. Great drivers do not make a great speaker; I'd argue that the engineer who designed the speaker is the most important factor. And the Pioneer speaker is VERY well engineered.


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## quietfly (Mar 23, 2011)

This was a great read, thanks again for sharing...


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## Wesayso (Jul 20, 2010)

cajunner said:


> how about this:
> 
> instead of faux-axials, a true full range driver?
> 
> ...


Wouldn't it be easier to just by a set of Manger drivers?








http://www.manger-audio.co.uk/PDFs/acoustical_reality.pdf


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