Easy to drive, outstandingly natural sound from 40-50 Hz up.....AN-E, O/96, others?

Thank you very much, Ralph and exlibris.

I don't really have any speakers that meet mitch2's requirements.  My "fullrange" speakers go deeper than 40-50 Hz, and my "made to be used with subs" speakers cut off higher than that, in anticipation of the Swarm doing a better job than a pair of speakers can in the bass region. 

For instance the main speakers I showed at RMAF last year are designed to cross over to subs up in the mid-to-upper 60's.  I think they meet at  least some of the other criteria though (benign impedance curve, lower-90's efficiency, drivers with characteristics that imply good dynamics).  I won't make sound quality claims because who's gonna believe a manufacturer's opinion of his own products?    

Duke

Thank you both!  Is it okay if I publicly agree with your opinions???

Cheers,

Duke

"I’ve had Audio Notes for the past 7 years and haven’t found anything yet to replace them. Maybe I never will."

I always thought the big Audio Note’s had a delicious richness about them that really stood out from the crowd. One could easily get totally lost in the music listening to them. My impression was that they’d be totally non-fatiguing to listen to all day long. Don’t think I ever heard the small ones.

The only concern I might have is this:  They are so well-balanced as-is that adding subwoofers might tend to tip the tonal-balance teeter-totter too much towards the low end.  Not an insurmountable problem, just something to take into account when dialing in the subs.   For instance, one might be able to restore balance just by pulling the Audio Notes forward a bit and away from their recommended boundary-reinforcement-intensive placements. 

Duke

Exlibris wrote: "The reason I’m interested in making a change is not because adding subs threw off the balance, it’s because I find the speakers to be a bit "sleepy."

You might try a rear-firing tweeter to add a little bit more top-end energy to the reverberant field. This could theoretically "wake up" the tonal balance a bit WITHOUT screwing up the first-arrival sound and therefore the imaging.

The tweeter could actually sit on the floor behind the Audio Notes, facing upwards. You want to be sure the path lengths from the rear tweeters to your ears are at least a foot longer than the path lengths from the main tweeters to your ears, or else they could screw up the imaging. Probably just a first order crossover (series capacitor and maybe a level-adjusting series resistor),with the calculated F3 being fairly high. To avoid dropping the impedance curve very much, I suggest starting out with a high efficiency tweeter so that you need to add some series resistance to pad it down. Fostex comes to mind.

I'm sure there would be some trial-and-error involved in sorting out the component value(s) for the highpass filter, but ten or fifteen bucks worth of basic capacitors and resistors would get you started, and then you could opt for the more expensive parts once you have the values sorted out. 

Duke

Exlibris wrote: "Thanks Duke. I’ve been thinking of doing that, at your suggestion, and have been looking at the Townshend maximum supertweeters."

I’d look primarily at adding some rear-firing energy from about 12 kHz to about 20 kHz... the Fostex FT17H is imo a fairly low-cost way of exploring this idea.

"Sometimes it’s as if my system has even less jump after 2 or 3 hours of listening. I’ve often wondered if this a subjective thing or if it was something in my amplification chain. Reading a post on another forum, the poster said this could be caused by hot speaker voice coils."

That would be my guess.

A 50-watt peak is like touching a 50-watt soldering iron to your woofer’s voice coil. It heats up instantly but cools down slowly. The voice coil’s resistance goes up with temperature, and the motor structure is the primary "heat sink" that the voice coil radiates into (the air inside the box is also heated). As the motor gets pretty hot there is a reduction of magnetic strength, which comes back once the magnet cools off. This is one of the downsides of going with drivers that have relatively low thermal capacity.

Thermal compression is a big consideration in prosound, and imo it is relevant but under-appreciated in home audio. Floyd Toole told me of some of the rapid-onset thermal effects he observed during his tests, and said that this is an area which has not yet been adequately investigated.

As a ballpark rule of thumb, thermal compression is typically about 1 dB at 10% of a driver’s rated AES power handling, and typically 3-4 dB at its AES rated power handling (which in turn is 1/2 its "music program" or "continuous" rating, and typically 1/4 of its "peak" rating.) This refers to the long-term compression effect once the voice coil and motor temperature have stabilized, so it takes a while set in. There are also the short-term effects that I spoke with Toole about, and my assumption is that there’s some correlation.

Not surprisingly, prosound-type drivers tend to have negligible thermal compression at quite loud home audio levels because they have both high efficiency and high thermal capacity. The challenge is, beating prosound drivers into submission so that they don’t have any distracting colorations. That’s what I try to do, because imo they have enough inherent advantages that it’s worth the effort. Obviously most speaker designers feel otherwise!

Duke