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The best speaker you ever heard?

In my opinion, the speaker is by far the most important part of the audio system. After all, it is the only part you hear. OK, the other stuff really matters a lot, but without a great speaker... No go.

I am a bit 'speaker-obsessed' I guess, and now I am wondering: What are the best speakers you have ever heard, and what made them the best?
njonker

Showing 3 responses by theaudiotweak

theaudiotweak
2,801 posts
 
Norm

I think Jon Dahlquist was a mechanical engineer and may have been aware of the swamp of vibrations you refer to. The fact that part of his crossover though mounted on the top of the cabinet was a step ahead by not being hammered inside of the main cabinet. The fact that 4 of the 5 drivers were mounted on their own baffle boards would effectively reduce noise and clutter and cross pollination of resonance.

Jon once sent me a box speaker to audition and called me for an opinion. It was just okay. Months later I received the same oak speaker now finished in Nextel and with some flocking material on the front baffle..they sounded like a totally different design. He said everything was the same except for the 2 features I just wrote of. I think Jon was way out ahead of this peers. Tom
theaudiotweak
2,801 posts
 
Norm

The Nextel paint finish and the flocking material on the entire front speaker baffle are control materials. Both materials seal a bad sounding mdf cabinet from venting its form of bad sound into a listening room. These 2 materials sonically made these same speakers disappear. I thought highly of Jon looking for something different than the standard solution. This was circa 1984. Tom
theaudiotweak
2,801 posts
 
Norm

In my first post about this subject the first paragraph referred to the DQ10's which were a break thru in in time aligned and phase aligned speakers. When Jon used separate baffles he may have only by chance hit upon a way to reduce unwanted vibration "drowning" the music. He partially achieved this again by taking the crossover out board. The DQ10's had wooden feet or an optional wooden stand.

The second reference speaker was the DQ9 when Jon applied the Nextel to block the bad sound of MDF and then putting a flocking material on the front baffle he succeeded in remaking this speaker. Maybe these were all accidental and with no clear cut understanding of why but the outcome of vibration reduction was made more apparent by Jon Dahlquist. I can write about these speakers and materials because they made an impression upon me and gave me direction to pursue and better understand resonance control methods. Tom
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