Anyone familiar with the Manger driver?

Hi Sphere,

Yes it would be nice to have the income stream of Wilson Audio!
I wonder if Dave ever imagined in the 80's when he was selling cheap cones and domes in an MDF box (watt, no puppy!) for $2,000 a pair that 20 years later he'd get away with selling them for $200,000 in a phenolic resin box! Wow that marketing, er sorry, inflation thing must really be kick'n in!!!

All the best

Derek.

Dear Derek,
I would say good for him, as he is doing something in his products that seems to have many in the audio world admiring them. I will put it like this, let Overkill do what it is doing best,i.e making a radical product at an approachable price point if possible. Clearly Overkill cannot be sold via the traditional High End supply chain. It can only succeed if you manage to find extremely dedicated resellers and clients who believe in the technical approach, which you will find.Therefore none of the traditional brands are your competition and hence do not matter.
Sphere.

Hello Sphere,

Yes I agree, we need to do things differently in our marketing and distribution.
Hopefully we will find the right people to work with in the USA and then it will be up to the customers to decide!

"Time Will Tell"
All the best

Derek.

I hope the following new perspective helps clarify a couple of points on the THD driver distortion front.
If we look at the whole audio chain from source to drivers and look at the audio signal as one continous signal does it really matter where the distortion occurs?
If the true and total accumulative THD of the signal was measured from source through to the output of the loudspeaker drivers, could we measure or hear if the distortion was all in the source, all in the amps or all in the speakers?
If the total system THD figure was say 3% could we tell if each component in the chain added 1% or was the source "perfect" and the amp a super clean 0.0007% so it had to be the fault of the speakers?
Why are some of the worst measuring digital sources (Zanden and most NOS DAC players) reviewed and acclaimed by buyers as the most natural and life-like sounding?
Ditto SET amplifiers and valve pre amps, many exhibit over 1% distortion in real load measurements yet they are again bought and treasured as the most natural sounding. How can they be even close to in performance terms, never mind the prefered choice over many of the "so low its basically zero" distortion amps?
My last question is do we actualy believe that if we replay the most perfect high resolution recording of a powerfull piece of music on a $Million system made up of a THD 0.5 % source, a THD 0.5% amplifiers and a THD 0.5% pair of speakers that our ears will agree and tell us "yes that is 98.5% indistinguishable and a 98.5% perfect reproduction of the live event?
No way on gods green earth!
With current technology, we are obviously a million miles away from being able to reproduce the power and complexity of real music.
My point is this; Our current obsessive "tunnel vision" with THD is focused on the wrong distortion. THD is Total HARMONIC Distortion we need to measure
Total Signal Integrity Distortion (TSID).
This is what I have been focussing on for the last 6 years.
I will make a seperate posting for more on the importance of Time coherence in the audio signal.

In summary current THD only measures amplitude and frequency errors ie THD is two dimensional!
Despite the smoke and mirrors marketing of conventional speaker manufacturers, the very pretty 3 D waterfall plots from speaker measurement software are still only 3D representations of a two dimensional event.
I hope this is of interest and helps further the debate.

"Time Will Tell"

All the best

Derek Wilson
Overkill Audio

As the US distributor of Manger, I would like to thank Derek for his wonderful explanation of the advantages of the Manger driver. At the upcoming CES, we are introducing a special version of the Zerobox 109 - the AG Silver Edition driven by an ultra fast amplifier (Delta Sigma) from Italy that is flat to 3Mhz.