Whizzer cone drivers

....while drilling about for details and examples of omni approaches of the past and present to put some sense into my Walsh project, I ran into this:

http://www.roger-russell.com/omni/omni.htm#onea

If you shortcut to the Hegeman 1a and the Eico portions, these ’whizzer variants’ were simple enough for me to half-tush a pair diy out of curiosity.

Surprisingly enough for something so simple to accomplish, it’s interesting to make a whizzer cone respond in an omni fashion, albeit vaguely directional.
If the slant of the cone is handled in ’sweet spot’ fashion, it works.

The hardest part is ’rolling’ a cone with a 45 deg. angle in a lightweight enough material to not hinder the drivers employed, but...

No static 'over driver' cones. either.....and not as effective as a full Walsh omni driver. but cheap thrills on the quick. *G*

It’s (imho) the only application of a whizzer cone that actually makes a difference.
That, and the patent filed for the method predates the original Ohm/Walsh patent, which makes one wonder....🤷‍♂️

Forward, into the past....*L*

Oh, btw...toss some cotton 'fluff' into the cones, it tames the 'cone honk' I notice from an open cone....the 'Rudy Vallee/megaphone' quality that's the main drawback....

That, and the cone really needs to be flipped vertically as it radiates more at your knees, but that's why the old Ohms work so well... ;)

Try listening to Cube Nenuphar V2's with a tube amp (low damping factor) and let your ears decide how this particular whizzer cone driver sounds. 

For SS amp, Enleum AMP23R does very well with the Cube driver. 

Indeed, there are both good and bad FR drivers, yet I don;t think we should toss out the lot in the bin because there are some bad apples, and a myriad of poor applications. Then I guess the entire loudspeaker industry would end up in the garbage disposer, as this situation applies for all kinds... the optics favors multi-way simply because there's 1000-10.000 band-limited driver to 1 FR in the market, so we have vastly higher chance to run into a good multi-way system compared to a good FR.

I have played around heavily with FR for 20+ years (and non-FR as well). Also, I have a lot of friends who played heavily with FR, and I have helped design and build quite a few of them. Of all, two were only relatively full range (capable of rendering authentic timpani and church organ), the rest of the lot frequency limited with limited appeal. (Beautiful in my opinion, yet many audiophiles think that's time to demand a sub.)

Yeah I know "full range" nomenclature pisses loads of folks off, as it's not reproducing 1mHz to 200kHz, which is the actual full range for human experience (which goes well beyond the canonical auditory 20Hz-20kHz). The full range nomenclature applies to the fact that all you hear is generated by a single voice coil, and the source is a point source without horizontal/vertical misaligned axes of multiple drivers. 

The vast majority of FR speakers, especially commercial applications suffer gravely from frequency limitations, especially in the bass region, and as OP emphasized, badly integrated whizzer cones.

Yet, not every whizzer cone is badly integrated.

There is one FR driver that seems to break away from the freq limitation curse, AND has a wonderfully integrated whizzer (although not-paper). The Cube Audio Fc8 driver, in my Voigt pipe cabinet is delivering a very wide frequency range - not just in theory, but fully energized sound. How about the top end? I have not measured it. Yet, my hearing extends to 20kHz, and I can report that the top end / air is among the best, and certainly most authentic and most coherent I've heard comparing to any multi-tweeter solutions. How's the low end? It energizes the room down to 25Hz. Yes, not just reproduced frequency, but you feel the energy coming alive - immediate raw power. How's the whizzer cone? It's completely disappearing. Sounds as if there's no whizzer cone at all, no auditory clues to its existence. Not even a slightest hint to a Lowther-shout (Lowther being the poster-child for the wost-possible whizzer integration).

How's the imaging? Cannot pinpoint the drivers location with closed eyes. I can sit, stand, walk around in the room and the 3D soundstage stays, and I have still no clue as to their location. I'm not a beginner in this driver-pointing game.. after spending 10 min with any speaker I can spot out each individual driver, no matter how well they do the disappearing act. Not with the Fc8, and they have been breaking in for about a month, so I had plenty of time to study.

So, in summary I think the whizzer technology is not dead yet. The Fc8 in VP has frequency range coverage that violently shames most multi-way speakers. I can count on one hand the multi-driver systems that play on that level that the Fc8/VP does. The rest does a lot more poorly. The covered frequency range is not just the biggest benefit. No crossovers means no sudden phase shifts, no major changes in how each band reacts to the amplifier, etc... as they say, total game changer, to hear uniform sound instead of pieced-together pieces. No matter how well pieced together, the brain will recognize the seams after you've been living with a multi-way speaker (or added sub) for a while....

So, while an well-intergated whizzer is rarer than a golden goose's egg, it does exist. Took me 20+ years of digging to find. ;