Question about speakers...

Hey there!

Thanks for the response! There sure is a lot to know about that stuff.

Dave

Don't believe everything you hear.

It's not possible to sit at an equal distance from all the tweeters of a line array.

Not only the distance between drivers, but also the size of the driver's radiating surface relative to wavelength will cause interference patterns. You'll get comb filtering and beaming with both line arrays and ribbons. (Think of a line array as a discontinuous line source and a ribbon as a continuous line source.) Beaming has the advantage of limiting dispersion and therefore reducing room interaction. Conversely, beaming limits the listening area that has full linear frequency response, and consequently causes the reverberant field in the room to be less linear, affecting the overall tonal balance.

I used to own a pair of ribbon hybrid speakers. The vertical listening area was extremely limited—less than 12" at listening position. I couldn't recline while listening without loosing significant amounts of treble. Panels have this problem to some degree with both vertical and horizontal dispersion.

My Daedalus DA-1.1's use two tweeters to very good effect. The Eton tweeters are offset by 10 degrees so this may have something to do with their superior performance. My understanding is that the idea is to provide more uniform frequency response off axis. The result is a very wide "sweet spot" and a speaker that still images very well.