As he promised, Guttenberg reviews the Eminent Technology LFT-8c.

There are many paths up the mountain of good sound. If I had an 8B I would upgrade all the jacks and xover parts and wires with the best stuff (including 12 gauge wax foil coils that are cryoed and used in the best sounding direction.....going into the inside of the coil and out the outside). This would take them to a level that practically no one has ever heard. Then I would disconnect the woofer and on a separate flat open well braced baffle would mount either two Lii Audio or Acoustic Elegance 12 inch woofers and use a separate amp that has full eq to extend the woofs down to 20 hz and also get rid of all room nodes. I had the GR research servo woofs and they do not play above 150 hz even with the highest xover point. I always had a hole between the woofs and my planar speaker (heard and measured). Also you cannot equalize the bass with the servo system. I would use something like a Crown XTi 2002 to biamp. You run the mids and highs from your great normal amp and the woofs get their own amp with eq.....so they are driven directly with no coils.

You could also wait till next year when ET might bring out a speaker using the new 90db panels (not the two boxer he showed in Florida). This would need to have new woofers and bigger box on bottom to match. Also, I suggested to Bruce that he sell the new 90db drivers on the panel by itself.....with no woofers....so us DIY people can make our own super xover and bi-amp as described above. We will see what he does.

Here are some more ways to get tricked out planar sound:

Put two 12 inch woofs on an open baffle and above it mount 4 of the 8 inch planar drivers from Parts Express ($60 each...or optionally, use the way more expnsive Radian Planars)......now you have a 32 inch line source of planar drivers running from 300hz on up (high 90s sensitivity). You get the Minidsp Flex pure digital version...xover ($500) and make a super power supply for it.....and get two modified pure digital amps (VTV D300 or Peachtree GaN1) and use a stereo amp per channel mounted right behind the speaker. All xover and eq and delays done via the minidsp. This system would have no preamp, no DAC and no analog interconnects.....just some coax digital cables and very short speaker wires that are connected from the amps directly to the speaker drivers......this whole system with out streamer would be around $8-9K.....for everything including the wood for the baffle. Would be killer. Think about it.....No DAC, Preamp, analog cables, no long speaker wires. Xover and eq done totally in the digital domain......pure digital amps.....two state of the art 12 inch woofers per side and 4 highly efficient planars per side.....all perfectly equalized and time aligned for your listening position........

If you want to stay with analog class D or class A or whatever then you can get the new Danville dspNexus xover and bi or tri amp with it. Check out what Richard is doing at Hollis Audio Lab. He just showed a stack of 3 servo woofs and the mid/highs were a single planar 10 inch driver from Radian mounted on a small open baffle. He is now experimenting with adding a small tweeter to give better dispersion (tri-amping). Please check out his forum on Audio Circle. He has helped one person with ET speakers to use the Danville xover with it.

There is no death......there is nothing to fear.

Here is a SUPER SIMPLE serious speaker. Buy a pair of the Lii Audio Platinum 10 inch full range drivers ($2200) and mount them on a four foot by 2 foot piece of multiply damped baffle and have four foot by 2 foot wings on the sides going back. Now you have a full range open baffle speaker that costs around $2500 for the drivers and wood and is 100 db efficient and when properly burned in and wired directly from your amp to the voice coil wires.....will sound incredible....You should get close to 40 hz in room with no eq. You could build a test baffle in one afternoon and start enjoying them while they burn in. My friend has the Silver 10s mounted on the above mentioned open baffle and he gets 40 hz flat in his room. He did mount an AMT on top with a copper foil cap to make it even better. His drivers are $1200. He goes to shows and the only thing he likes better at a show than what he has are the expensive silver Supreme Borresen speakers driven with 100K worth of stuff. He uses a tube amp he built himself. Plenty ways up the mountain of great sound.

You might want to check out the wild horn loaded cabinet that Decware designed for the Platinum speaker driver. There are sound bites on You tube. He does not wire directly to the voice coil wires.....he uses the junk binding posts on the speaker and probably another binding post on the front of the speaker (not good...he is not much of a tweaker). But his cabinet is way cool.

My friend has the Lii Audio silver 10s ($1200 the pair) and he says they measure and sound very flat (no lowther shout). You need to seriously burn these drivers in and you CANNOT listen to their binding posts.....remove the binding posts and hardwire your speaker wire to the voice coil wire....its like a completely different speaker.

Of course, the latest 8b would sound and measure way better than the original 8......but modding the heck out of them brings them to another whole level.

Here is another variety of what I described above about getting planar sound on the cheap.  You get a Minidsp Flex (analog version)......use a Fossi amp for the woofs and an Aegir or other inxpensive tube amp or class D amp (another $100 Fossi, for instance)......You use 2 12 inch Beyma 12BR70 woofs ($160 each) on an open baffle and above it you mount 4 Parts express $60 planar drivers in series parallel (woofs in parallel).  WE are talking 94db woofs and 94db line source here!!!  The mini dsp is the xover, the preamp and the DAC all in one.  With both 12 inch woofs being directly driven by an amp and with no inductors in series and with equalization, the bass would kill, (I mean slaughter) the ET speaker.  You cross over around 400 hz to the mini line array planars and you will have sound so good you would die.  You run your wires directly from the two amps to the drivers (voice coil wires on woofs).  The minidsp ($500), wood ($300), wire ($300), 4 woofs ($700) and 8 planars ($550) would be around.$2500 with shipping....plus whatever amps you want (you probably already have an amp for the highs.....some or you have another amp laying around for the bass.  I would lake this anyday over a stock 83db sensitive 8B.  Of course, as I mentioned above a fully tweaked 8b with open baffle bi-amped speaker would be probably better (better planars?).  Alternatively, you could use one 10 inch planar driver from Radian ($660 a pair).....these might be more transparent than the Parts express planars but probably have less horizontal dispersion and way less vertical dispersion.  (If you sit in one spot then the Radians might be the ticket).

What do you mean "if you get the filters right"  Using a DSP is easy....a 10 year old can do it.  You decide what slope you want and what frequency (I would start with 400hz and 24db per octave with the mentioned drivers) and then you measure the speaker....you adjust the amp levels and equalize and time align.....can be done in an hour by anyone with a measurement mic and a brain.  Of course, you can play with different xover frequencies and slopes (and fine tune the tweeter delay...mostly by ear).  Always fun to play.  But hard?....no way.   

Which Lii driver did you have?  They are all different.  As I said, my friend measured his Silver 10 (burned in for hundreds of hours and wired directly to voice coil wire) and it measured flat and sounded that way.....measured way flatter than the spec measurement from Lii.

The stock ETs have poor sounding speaker posts, wire, resistors, caps and coils.....you change all those few things to seriously transparent parts and you will never stop listening.  Coils need to be connected so the signal goes into the inside of the coil and out the outside.

Stay tuned....will have info available tomorrow night or Monday on my website.  You can buy a cheap inductance meter on Amazon for $33 to measure the inductors.