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Mega D'Appolito Speakers - The Holy Grail?

The engineer, scientist and author Dr. Joseph D'Appolito has a speaker arrangement named after him, a vertical array of mid-Woofer, Tweeter and mid-woofer. There is more to it than this, as the good Dr. has written quite a bit about crossover design needed to achieve good results.

I'm not necessarily talking about a true D'Appolito speaker though. I'm rather thinking of large speakers which have a central tweeter in between increasingly larger drivers. MBL, Dunlavy, Von Schweikert, Legacy, Gryphon all have built some version of this idea.

What do you listeners think? Is the dynamic range, detail, transparency, distortion and imaging consistently better than other type of designs?

Best,

E

erik_squires

Showing 2 responses by erik_squires

erik_squires OP
15,870 posts
 
Hi @timlub
Thanks for your contributions, here and elsewhere.

I _really_ did a poor job of explaining myself. I'm really not thinking of D'Appolito 2-ways.

I'm thinking more of large expensive towers with drivers arranged vertically around a tweeter which are at least 3-way designs.

So it sounds generally that you agree, midrange surface area/dynamic range is a big deal, more so than the lobing and arrangement of the drivers?

Best,

E
erik_squires OP
15,870 posts
 
Now we are getting into the weeds of a slightly different topic. When I started this thread I was thinking more of the W M T M W type of design, or W W w m t m w WW like the mega speakers use. I borrowed the good Dr.’s name to kind of illustrate a design for which I have no better name for than "mega D’Appolito." Maybe I should have said "Multi way, vertically symmetrical around the tweeter."

But this is not a bad path either.

The original Focal-JmLab Utopia series had a couple of M T M W designs which kind of qualify too. I also very much liked the idea of having the mids tilted inwards a little to improve the phase alignment. Wilson also seems to like the idea and uses it in the Alex among other designs.

So you like lots of midrange surface area to improve dynamic range?

I like the Scanspeak 6.5" mid-woofers a LOT. They measure much better than on paper. Not sure if they ahve been improved since original, but they are much easier to deal with and cross over well around 2 kHz. Also love the rich warm sound.
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