Coaxials - Reality vs. Experience?
Should say "hype vs. reality" in the headline.
Coaxial speaker design has been around in one way or another for a long time. I often think I’ll be absolutely blown away by them, but in practice traditional vertical layout speakers often have sound as good, or have other features that make them sound better.
Thiel, KEF, Monitor Audio, Tekton, Seas are among the many players attempting such designs, but none has, by the coaxial drivers alone, dominated a segment of the market.
What are your listening experiences? Is it 1 coaxial speaker that won you over, or have you always preferred them?
I guess my experiences, limited as they were, also did not convince me that coaxial speakers, or hybrid coaxial (mid + tweet coaxial, with additional woofer) were by themselves a magical new direction that I had to have. Unlike say ESLs which clearly distinguish themselves, though not everyone loves them or has the space to use them well. |
It seems that the general consensus is that there is no consensus! What I mean is that co-axial speaker technology has not, by itself, won anyone over. Specific implementations though have. Another way to put this is, if you own a Tannoy for instance, and you could not buy Tannoy again, you would not focus on buying co-axial speakers. |
Again, I was speaking specifically of listening above the tweeter axis, to make a point about how distance changes the time alignment. |
@herbreichert PS - Your typical 2 or 3 way speaker is neither a point nor a line source. Vandersteen may be time and phase aligned but it’s not a point source. That perfect step response in the Stereophile measurements goes out the window when you stand up. :) A true point source maintains it's time alignment no matter where you measure it from. |
@herbreichert The point in space from which sound appears to originate in terms of time. Think of a woofer and tweeter mounted on a flat baffle. Look at it from the side. The tweeter's acoustic center is practically at the baffle, but the woofer's may be 1" or more behind the baffle. Speaker designers have to take this into consideration for either phase or time alignment.
Kind of depends how you mean "alignment." Phase aligned you can tell by an smooth transition from one driver to the other. Time aligned you can see using a step response. See figure 9 in these measurements for time aligned speaker step response.
A theoretical "ideal" (one of many ideals) in which the full range of sound appears to come from a single point in space. A single, full-range driver is by definition a point source. Some multi-way speakers may attempt to mimic this behavior in time and space. The Duntech Sovereign is a famous, early-ish example. Contrast to a line-source, like the famous Infinity RS.
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I absolutely disagree. In a brief reading of articles online you'll see that the horizontal dispersion control of D'Appolitos is in fact a good thing, as it is for tall ESL's. Generally speaking, the more controlled dispersion of a speaker the less acoustic treatments a room will require. Further, you literally can't have a point source if you are deliberately changing the dispersion on one or the other axis. |
@jacksky I think the prime benefit of the D'Appolito configuration is narrow vertical dispersion. with wide horizontal, so it is very different than a coaxial with equal dispersion in either direction. Because of the changing time alignments in a D'Appolito, he's gone away from low order filters and now recommends 4th order (combined electrical + acoustical) crossovers for best off-plane axis listening. |
Hi @mulveling Thank you so much for contributing. I'm surious, have you heard any other coaxials that you felt did some of the same things right? In your opinion, are they great because they are Tannoy or because they are coaxial? |
