Dear @erik_squires : " to hear both and if they have a preference, or impression especially in regards to being able to hear the recording space and imaging. "
Your " curiosity " have several problems/obstacles for even Magico owners due that:
- each owner has his personal targets /preferences
- space and imagin mainly depends of each room/system and how well the speaker overall response is integrated to that room : this is the room acoustic treatment.
- Magico M5 design was way different to its today M7 ( more or less similar 4-way and 5 drivers as the M5. ) starting with its new technically optimized drivers as its new crossover design and crossover parts.
I think , but I can be wrong, that we can't mix " apples " with " bananas " or " oranges ".
Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.
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Well I just looked at the M Series on their site and these are certainly not traditional wide baffle speakers. To my eyes it looks like a superb cabinet design that is not wife baffle.
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When I was thinking of Magico as a wide-baffle, I was thinking of the M5 with the ring radiator. It has a baffle that is proud of the cabinet. For me this is still a wide-baffle speaker.
I’m also not trying to pick on Magico per se, just looking more for a company that has done both.
Sonus Faber may be a better brand to ask about since they have the Stradivari but not sure how many have heard the Strad and the narrow models to compare. The larger Focal Utopia line may also in a sense be like this, the mids and tweeters were much narrower than the baffle width. In start contrast to say Wilson or Vandersteen who minimize the baffle width per driver.
Again, not looking to argue about overall value of any brand, just want to know if others have noticed distint differences we could attribute to baffle width.
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@erik_squires : " just want to know if others have noticed distint differences we could attribute to baffle width "
No one could do that with different kind of speakers. The only way is two similar speakers ( same everything. ) with difference only if wide or narrow.
Sense to you?
R.
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Hey @rauliruegas ---- Not really. I get what you mean about apples to orange comparisons but I think it's possible to hear trends, especially in regards to the acoustic effects I'm asking about. :)
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In my experience most wide baffle speakers do have somewhat of a distinct sound. This may also be due to the fact that many wide baffle manufacturers also subscribe to old fashioned design ideas like lossy cabinets, flat baffle fronts, etc.
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Imo, all else being equal, the edge diffraction of a wide cabinet is more likely to degrade image precision because its false azimuth cues arrive at a worse time. But imo cabinet shape matters more than cabinet width.
It is not clear to me that baffle width has a major effect on perception of the acoustic space on the recording, but if it does, I think the advantage would lie with the wide baffle.
Duke
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The big baffle is a two dimensional horn… complete with coloration and distortion… you can test this at home with a square of cardboard, cut a hole and speak thru it w observer or recorder… compare…
To the OP the Magico you speak of used renown Scanspeak ring radiator… sort of a large two dimensional moving baffle… ha.
my preference, expressed as $ and emotional investment are for minimum baffle designs.. TAD and Vandersteen… my Apogee keep me quasi… honest..
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cracks me up when people obsess over treating first reflection points MANY m-seconds distinct from ear brain confusion point…then ignore that big hard suface baffle…reflector…
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@audition__audio a very astute observation…. especially the lossy cabinet and drivers with non pistonic behavior….
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Duke may be onto something. Snell A/III was wide, but also attempted to get close to hemispherical. The SF Stradivari isn’t just wide but it’s curved as well. Another wide baffle speaker with curves would also be the mid-tweeter towers on the Infinity Reference Standards. The wings on the IRS were pure facade with nothing behind them.
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You can test your theory by curving that sheet of cardboard… using math, ear / brain or both…
Peter was a gifted dude… RIP…
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@tomic601
Cardboard is not a good speaker baffle material. Cardboard is very noisy in and of itself. Just putting my mouth near a piece of cardboard and humming lowly makes the cardboard vibrate like crazy, adding all kinds of resonances.
Just a side note, I was trying to replicate an experiment where you stretch a balloon tight over the top of a glass to make a trampoline surface that a ball will bounce on for a long time. That didn’t work out very well. But what it did do well was add a lot of reverb to my voice if I talked in to it. The kids were highly amused. So stretched balloons also do not make good speaker baffles.
Maybe something more dead, like a piece of carpet tile or mass loaded vinyl would be better for the experiment.
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carpet is a lousy broad band absorber… but run your experiment, i’ve just got a blackbelt in design of experiments…
Ive also got a bunch of Panzerholtz
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The wings on the infinity had rear firing tweeters and they did that as well on the genesis 200 model.my new fr 30 has a rear firing tweeter.happy holidays and stay healthy
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@mark200mph wrote:
"The wings on the infinity had rear firing tweeters and they did that as well on the genesis 200 model.my new fr 30 has a rear firing tweeter."
Ime a well-integrated rear-firing tweeter can contribute to "being able hear the recording space".
Incidentally, the superb Snell Type A-III mentioned by @erik_squires also had a rear-firing tweeter, if I recall correctly.
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Incidentally, the superb Snell Type A-III mentioned by @erik_squires also had a rear-firing tweeter, if I recall correctly.
@audiokinesis is correct, of course. As I recall it could be switched on and off. In my case my audition occurred with the speakers flat against the wall though.
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Also, incidentally, the tweeter and mids on the Snells were among what we'd consider "high value" (i.e. inexpensive) devices today. They did not achieve their performance with supreme high-end drivers.
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Dear @audiokinesis : Yes Snell came with rear tweeters and as a fact I paste/copy from Snell and in m my ADS L2030 I mounted a rear firing 1" silk dome with same efficiency and FR than the fabolous ADS tweeters in the speakers front firing.
Yes, you enhance the recording space.
R.
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@erik_squires , imo the width of the Snell Type A helps the rear-firing tweeter to work well even when the speaker is up against the wall, assuming the wall is not absorptive.
Imo rear-firing tweeters need some reflection path length, but not nearly as much as a fullrange dipole because the rear-firing tweeter’s output is limited to short wavelengths. As the wavelengths get shorter, the reflection path length we can get away with also becomes shorter.
The sheer width of the Type A’s cabinet gives us good path length for the rear-firing tweeter, and the geometry becomes that of a slot all around the tweeter which tends to direct its output up and to the sides. So the rear-firing tweeter’s output arrives late enough that it doesn’t degrade the clarity, but it does improve the spectral balance of the reflection field, which (among other things) contributes to "being able to hear the recorded space", in my opinion.
I don’t think there was anything about Peter Snell’s Type A that wasn’t incredibly well thought-out.
Duke
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@audiokinesis - That's an interesting POV. I would have thought that the slot would act like a severe low pass filter.
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Great discussion.great minds of decades of audio experiences.thanks all for your contribution and continue to build equipment that makes us smile.enjoy the music.it actually helps stroke patients to rehab.
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I owned & really enjoyed the Snell A- III’s back in the earlier 80’s & they were excellent in many ways. Amongst many other things, they used only average quality ( for the day) drivers that they carefully individually tested to ensure very close tolerances to their specs & matched them in each speaker pair. They tossed the ones that didn’t cut it. I woulnd up selling them for Proac EBS’s which was their top of the line then. The Proac’s had considerably better midrange & high end & utilized very good quality drivers ( famous ATC dome midrange still considered excellent today) & a good Scanspeak tweeter. The woofer was a 10 inch ATC & the bass was good but the Snells bested them in this area. The Proac’s imaged better & had relatively narrow cabinets that in often typical British fashion for the day, did not have the most stout cabinets.
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@jonwolfpell - Very interesting perspective. I'm curious about one thing though. Did you find a difference in imaging? Would you say either speaker had a wider sweet spot?
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If I recall correctly, the Snells had an overall bigger soundstage w/ a wider sweet spot but the Proacs had better image specificity & depth. To be fare though, the room I had the Snells in before I switched to the Proac did not allow me to pull them away from the front wall sufficiently, only about 2 feet & & they probably would have liked a bit more. Also I had a Conrad Johnson Premier Four power amp that put out a real 100 watts / side w/ 4 EL 34 power tubes / side & w/ the low sensitivity of the Snells, they probably could have used more as I liked to play them loudly.
i once had the opportunity to borrow a friends amazing Jadis preamp which at the time was amongst the very best available. The combo of it , the CJ & the Proacs taught what real imaging was all about w/ space & air around & in between different instruments & voices in a beautiful unified whole. Not many systems that I’ve heard since could do this as well.
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The American peer group of speakers at that time Thiel, Vandersteen, Snell, Dunlavey all delivered excellent sound w value drivers and certainly different design principles… A wide sweet spot is by definition lossy. Probably should widen out my list of RIP for the various genius no longer with us.
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oopppps.. left out Jon D and the DQ-10
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A wide sweet spot is by definition lossy.
l think a lot more goes into that, and even if lossy, often highly desirable by most music lovers, if not necessarily by audiophiles entranced by imaging.
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I have the magico q7 the only weight 750 lbs each after thier ozempic diet.i dont think in this economy they can afford to make 750 lbs speakers out of metal.they have many internal bracing.read they review it has pictures. When loud you can put your hand and the cabinet and zero vibration.i would love to hear thier 750k speakers.made in America like Squires products. I would have to win the powerball for that magico.enjoy the music.
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No insult was intended, really. Just being realistic that audiophile level imaging is not what most consumers buy for. Engaging, rhythm, and a wide sweet spot however are on most buyer's short list.
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This thread has some incredibly horrible misinformation in it. It is full of speculation and simply wrong assertions.
I happened to have a pair of M5’s loaned to me directly by Alon for an event we did for him relations to his personal art endeavors.
For starters they are NOT simply boxes or “Lossy” boxes as someone speculated. They are all aluminum with the aluminum machined cross bracing seen in all of the Magico designs. The drivers are sandwich cones and yes the ring radiator is the Scan Speak 9900. The baffle is machined from a solid aluminum slab and is wood veneered over aluminium.
Regarding baffle width there is so much misinformation here. The rectangular baffle mostly affects 2 things, 1 the frequency where edge diffraction begins and 2 the corner frequency where radiation goes for 1pi to 2pi.( unidirectional forward facing radiation to Omni directional radiation.) Technically the 2 factors work against each other as you want the edge diffraction out of the critical upper frequencies that interfere with localization which means big baffles and yet the opposite is true in that we want wide dispersion that a narrow baffle gives.
It is always a compromise where 1 approach is supplemented with techniques to overcome the the shortcomings of either approach. Narrow baffles need a lot of baffle step compensation and a loss of efficiency is a result as well as diffraction effects in the critical upper mid band. Wilson, Vandersteen and several other narrow baffle advocates add heavy wool felt to absorb the HF front radiation that would impact imaging and diffraction.
Wide baffles move diffraction down in frequency to ranges that have far less impact on imaging and have less loss of sensitivity from baffle step compensation which typically gives a more dynamically responsive speaker. They unfortunately need rear firing drivers to help rear / side radiation in the typical living room although for near field listening they have great precision since there is less room interactions.
The 2 design approaches yield designs that have radically different room interactions and wife acceptance factors. The wife acceptance factor and typical living room treatments are what hurts type wide baffle speakers today.
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I don’t believe anyone suggested the Magico cabinet is lossy.
it like many competitors is largely inert and typically exceeds the s/n of the room it resides in.
A rear firing tweeter hopefully with both an on/off switch is 100% distortion and can be found on some minimal baffle designs ( the Vandersteen 7 for example ) principally to compensate for “ overdamped rooms “… which i think, if i understand the OP point about music lovers vs audiophile are mostly the domain of the latter.
Enjoy the music
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@tomic601 said, "A rear firing tweeter... is 100% distortion..."
I disagree.
Implemented correctly, one beneficial thing a rear-firing tweeter does is this: It corrects the spectral balance of the reflection field.
Duke
rear-firing tweeter advocate
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While destroying the timing information that the ear brain is much more sensitive to.
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i should add that my decision references are unamplified acoustic instruments in reverberant spaces captured w simple microphones, so the temporal data is in the recording.
I understand the allure of the rear firing tweeter as i have them. It’s possible Vandersteen didn’t implement them correctly. They include both a level control, on off, zobel and i can verify step correction ( there is certainly step correction on the front facing drivers.
i do respect your work Duke.
Best in musical happiness
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What I think @tomic601 is missing is that the right kind of reflections are euphonic AND increase our sense of spacial perception.
The idea of an anechoic cave in which the speakers sit, one approach of which was called Live-End, Dead-End (mid 1980s?) , has long ago given way to a more nuanced understanding of the importance of diffuse early-ish reflections in improving the illusions of a sound field.
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Quoting @tomic601 (replying to my post that rear-firing tweeters can correct the spectral balance of the reflection field) :
"While destroying the timing information that the ear brain is much more sensitive to. "
There are conditions under which a rear-firing tweeter can can be detrimental. Imo we do not want the output of the rear-firing tweeters to arrive too early nor be too loud, and we want its power response to be correct for the application. These characteristics are perceptually intertwined. Hence the "implemented correctly" stipulation in my previous post.
@tomic601’s follow-up post:
"my decision references are unamplified acoustic instruments in reverberant spaces captured w simple microphones, so the temporal data is in the recording."
Imo effectively presenting "the temporal data in the recording" is precisely the scenario in which a correctly-implemented rear-firing tweeter is most beneficial.
You see, in the playback room there is a "competition" between two sets of spatial cues: The venue spatial cues on the recording, and the "small room signature" inherent to the playback room. It is desirable for the venue spatial cues on the recording to be perceptually dominant if the goal is a "you are there" presentation.
Painting with broad strokes, the ear judges the size of an acoustic space by three characteristics: The time delay between the first-arrival sound and the first reflections; the temporal "center of gravity" of the reflections; and the decay of the reverberation tails.
It is in the effective presentation of the reverberation tails on the recording that a well-implemented rear-firing tweeter is most beneficial. Briefly, the in-room reflections act as "carriers" which deliver the reverberation tails on the recording from all around.
The ear looks at the spectral balance of incoming sounds to judge whether they are reflections or new sounds, and the overtones are especially critical to the ear making this determination. If the overtones are not loud enough for the ear to correctly identify the reflections as such when delivered by the in-room reflection field, that energy ceases to be "signal" and becomes "noise". But if the overtones are still loud enough, the ear will hear the reverberation tails arriving from all around as they decay, delivered by the spectrally-correct in-room reflections. This spectrally-correct delivery of the reverberation tails by the in-room reflections effectively presents the natural decay characteristics of the reverberation tails on the recording, which in turn are a significant contributor to a "you are there" playback experience.
And a well-implemented rear-firing tweeter corrects the spectral balance of the reflection field, restoring its typically-too-weak overtone levels, without introducing other problems.
That being said, this is a complex topic and this post is an incomplete look at just one aspect of it.
Imo and ime.
Duke
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But do we really want an increase in our sense of space? Is this illusion correct or an aberration?
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@tomic601: To your list of RIP geniuses I would ad Siegfried Linkwitz. By the way, Linkwitz himself "believed" in narrow front baffles, and in his open baffle models used electronic means of compensating for the dipole cancellation that is inherent in open baffle loudspeakers.
Danny Richie of GR Research is also a proponent of both open baffle loudspeakers and narrow front baffles, but uses a different method to deal with dipole cancellation: He makes his front baffles just wide enough to house the driver(s) being used, but then uses side wings to manipulate the frequency at which dipole cancellation begins. The greater the distance between the front and rear of the driver(s) in an open baffle design, the lower the frequency at which dipole cancellation occurs. Danny’s use of side wings provides the front-to-back separation dipoles require (in the GR Research OB models), while at the same time allowing him to use a narrow front baffle.
And by the way, in the Infinity IRS and RS models, Arnie Nudell used curved wings on either side of the EMIT and EMIM drivers those models used for the same reason Danny Richie does: 1- To prevent front baffle diffraction, and 2- To lower the frequency at which dipole cancellation begins to effect the frequency response of the loudspeaker.
In his Eminent Technology LFT-4 planar-magnetic dipole loudspeaker (out of production for many years), Bruce Thigpen did as Danny Richie does: he incorporated a sloped wing on either side of the panel the LFT drivers are mounted on, the two wings facing each other. The wing is only 2" wide at it’s top (and 41" off the floor), gradually increasing to 12" at it’s bottom. I assume the shape of the wings was chosen to create the desired frequency response.
There are several GR Research YouTube videos in which Danny Richie discusses and explains this topic in great detail, showing in measurements the effects different wing sizes and shapes have on the response of different drivers. Well worth searching for.
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@erik_squires wrote: "That’s an interesting POV. I would have thought that the slot [the area between back of a speaker with a rear-firing tweeter and the well immediately behind it] would act like a severe low pass filter."
Sorry I over looked responding to this earlier.
I manufacture a bass guitar speaker cabinet which uses a 3" cone unit for the top end. It’s gently highpassed around 1.5 kHz or so. Behind the cone is a wide, shallow isolation chamber which extends laterally the full width of the cabinet, with generous openings on the top and sides. So, it’s a slot of sorts. The openings allow enough of the 3" cone’s backwave energy to escape out the top and sides that the bass player can clearly hear his overtones even if he is virtually atop the cab, and I’ve gotten feedback that the other musicians can better hear what the bass player is doing as well.
I’m sure there are some losses in the slot behind the 3" cone, but it’s still making a worthwhile contribution, so I don’t think the net effect is a particularly severe lowpass filter.
Duke
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@audiokinesis Thanks for that input. See I keep thinking about Snell’s downward firing cone and the behavior that the 3-4" high slot would have. Not that I can replicate it in my current listening environment, but still find very few speakers with that sense of the speaker dominating the air pressure in a room like that.
I had thought that the slot loading was a kind of low pass filter, and when you mentioned the tweeter and close wall placement I had to rethink what I knew.
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I’ve been away in wine country for a week..looking for reverberation trails in casks and later on in the right glass…
I think a quick look at any of my rooms on virtual systems or of hundreds i’ve setup over 45 years of doing this will reveal zero, ZERO in the live end dead end school… in my reference room which as ive said includes if desired a rear tweeter, you will find a great affinity for diffusion. When in Seattle, stop by for a listen.
@bdp24 i sold a lot of Infinity gear back in the golden age of that brand, we stocked everything but the IRS. Regrets we never had the ET which ive heard in many excellent systems. We carried ADS, Apogee, Infinity, KEF, Vandersteen, Quad, Gale, Soundlab, Acoustat, Beveridge….probably a few i’ve forgot.. oh and kits …I think we had one of the first FFT for speaker design in the usa… a retail store … fun…
one learning is people love certain distortions….that is ok
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left out Wilson… The WATT Puppy…. heard a significantly modified pair of mk7 two days ago…. in a perfectly balanced room…. you are there…with no rear tweeter… Essentially a fantastic balance of a modified quadratic residue and some very high tech diffuser / absorbers…
Core Audio … Novato
@bdp24 Eric - i’ve heard Apogee and the big Quad in same room… stunning…..
Best in music…..
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I am trying to integrate my newly rebuilt Quad 63s in my room and am having a tough go of it. Alot of sacrifices that go along with the magic.
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