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?

erik_squires

Showing 4 responses by herbreichert

more dumb, not rhetorical, questions:

what is the definition of "acoustic center" ?

 

how do we know when they are aligned? A tone burst? 

 

what is the definition of a point source? 

 

I am completely confused. 

Is there a book on this stuff?

 

herb

 

 

Hello everybody, please help me with a dumb question that I do not know the answer to.

closenplay stated, 

"To add clarity, concentric is a subset of coaxial. In other words, all concentric drivers are coaxial but not all coaxial drivers are concentric. @erik_squires Pardon the presumption; you are probably referencing most designs intended for the hifi home user, of which most (if not all) are concentric."

 

I know what "coaxial" means but how are you defining "concentric"? Are you suggesting that two coaxial drivers (i.e. their voice coils) may me mounted  at an angle to each other? That they are centered but not perpendicular? Or? 

sincerely

herb

That being said I've heard the SourcePoint 10s and am listening to the Heretic AD614s right now.

 

hr

hello closenplay,

I promise I am not being modest. I really and truly do not understand. I asked these exact same questions of Andrew Jones when he was setting up the SourcePoint 10s in Steve Guttenberg's listening room, and his answers plus all your answers and I still don't know what is and WHERE ARE the 'acoustic centers' of the cone and either a dome or a horn-loaded-compression driver tweeter? To the best of my understanding it is a time-domain thing that is not a physical alignment of of the voice coils; but something that must be determined experimentally using some type of wide-band pulses.

As for point sources, I have never encountered one.

As for my Heretic AD614 experiences: they seem extremely coherent and musical.  

They are notable because they use a series-connected Linkwitz-Rielly crossover that is very low-power SET-friendly.  John Atkinson told me that in all his years he had only tested three speakers with series crossovers. 

As for my lifetime of coaxial experiments, I believe coaxial drivers project voices into the room with greater presence. 

That really is all I know.

 

herb