I don’t hate Wilsons, but maybe one of their dealers... 😂
Seriously though, conventional speakers with high end drivers in very heavy boxes at a serious markup. I don’t mind markups, but damn, Wilson really makes a lot of money on the badge and cabinets.
So you look at these big speakers with big price tags and shake your head going "no one else could charge so much." And then you run into Gobel high end... ooooh boy.
On the other hand Arion Audio, Legacy may be expensive but offer pretty high value.
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To sub or not to sub, that is the question.
Whether it is nobler on the ear to suffer the rise and fall of room modes or by equalizing, end them.....
The further down the octaves you go the more problems you need to solve. 2-way speakers aren't better, they are simpler. It is usually much easier to get very good sound out of a limited bandwidth speaker than a true full-range and/or speaker plus sub.
Where the trade-offs are ideal is up to the listener, the human being who has to trade off living space, decorations, and even friends and a chance of finding true-love in exchange for unlimited bottom end in their music.
Two advantages subs have is placement, and equalization. You can hunt for the best place to put a subwoofer, but your main speakers are usually limited by where you want to sit. Also, by using an EQ that only sits in the way of the subwoofer you eliminate a lot of contamination in the mains.
I think $200K for a subwoofer is absolutely ridiculous. IMHO what makes a subwoofer great for most consumers is how good it's integration features are. Right now JL leads the pack. However with skill and experience you can use a far less expensive sub with outboard EQ's and get as good of a performance.
I don't think there's any 1 right answer about what any given listener should do. I just wanted to point out, there's challenges either way.
Best,
E
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Subs when well integrated are breathtaking.
At all other times they are miserable failures that make you wonder why you ever got into Hi Fi at all, and whether you will ever be happy again.
Best,
E
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I want to add:
No one buys "accuracy." We buy music pleasure, or we should.
Some car drivers like having a slippery rear end. It’s part of the fun. Many speakers in this day and age are like that. Life is short, and money limited. You should not go to your grave adhering to some intellectual principle that doesn’t serve your enjoyment of music and culture.
I also discourage anyone from focusing on technology being superior. Be tweeters are a good example. My gods, there is a VERY broad range of quality and construction and cost and performance between all Be tweeters, and there are some very good dome and ring radiators which challenge all of them. Having a Be tweeter nor not should not be what motivates you.
There is also the matter of ACTUAL listening styles. A lot of us buy speakers like we buy SUV’s. Preparing for the apocalypse, when we mostly drive to the store.
Pay attention to your actual listening style and pick gear according to that. Do you listen on a throne? Do you work and move around? Are you on the phone? Do you do half movies/ half music? Concert levels, really?
Best,
E
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@ricred1 Eff no!!
The last thing I would call them are accurate.
Definitely preferred by some.
High-end I would think are objectively close to very accurate include Crystal Cables, Monitor Audio, Gryphon, Magico. Whether they are preferred, that’s another thing entirely.
I think if anything, you should look at some of the articles about how Wilson chooses his tweeters. He’s definitely going by subjective preference above all, which puts him in the category of "trendy" and in many ways, helping to set the Stereophile "house curve" to which other speaker makers sometimes gravitate to.
E
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@shadorne
Your writing confuses "beaming" with "lobing" and "compression."
Until you do some reading on this I'm afraid we'll be unable to discuss things on common ground.
Best,
E
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@shadorne You say "problems’ as a speaker designer I say "possibilities."
The directivity of an AMT is different than a dome or ring, but if you are going to attack it, you will attack all line or planar sources, including ESL speakers from Martin Logan or Sanders, Quad, blah blah. not to mention most horns as well.
You are conflating compression with directivity and lobing. Three different things.
Let’s get compression out of the way first. When you add X dB to the input but the output is not uniformly X dB louder. About the only reviews that have this routinely are the one’s from
speakermeasurements.com
So I stand by my original statement, the best AMT's can compete with the best of any other type of tweeters in terms of compression.
Let’s discuss the rest. Lobing isn’t really caused by a single driver but how it interacts with another. It is caused by one driver interfering with another at different angles over the frequencies at which they are both working. This can be pretty complicated as the acoustic distances between 2 drivers varies in three-dimensional space. This is why lobing is a 3D problem, and why many manufacturers align their drivers in a vertical line, to minimize the complex and unpredictable (but not impossible to simulate) nature.
A single driver can not lobe. Single driver and single panel ESL speakers are immune from this behavior but any 2 drivers can lobe, it is not an issue of planar vs. dome at all. It’s an issue of the acoustic centers not being aligned and crossover design choices.
Any time you have 2 or more drivers which overlap in the frequency domain and are not coincident in 3D space lobing can occur. With a theoretically perfect crossover, lobing disappears, but no one has made this yet. Admittedly the Joseph Audio 100 dB/octave crossovers come close. Co-axials are another nearly perfect solution to this problem.
Lobing is sometimes deliberately caused. For instance, the super-expensive, super-ugly B&O Beolab 90 takes advantage of this, and uses DSP to stagger the delays between similar drivers. Also a technique used in professional arrays. In the Beolab only dome’s and cones are used, but it’s been demonstrated many times they can "lobe" very well.
So with that out of the way, neither very broad nor very narrow drivers are "best."
Narrowing the angle of radiation can be VERY beneficial. Time domain problems, and therefore frequency response, at the listening location are greatly reduced by using larger diaphragms and have the perception of transparency and neutrality in spades. Anyone who has spent time listening to a good AMT or larger ribbon driver will attest to this.
Sure, if you are designing a speaker that needs extremely broad radiation in the vertical and horizontal plane, a broad frequency, planar driver is not going to be for you. That’s a reasonable trade-off, but neither should be judged by the Audiophile Gods of All That is Good as an absolute measure of "better."
Unfortunately, I find your prejudices unjustified. You should of course buy and live with whatever drivers you want to but AMTs in general deserve a better treatment than you are giving them.
For the top end, I really encourage anyone who can listen to the Gryphons to spend some time with them and compare to some of the low-end "giant killers" being touted as superb.
Best,
E
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@shadorne
I take exception to your claims about AMT’s compressing.
The real problem is, like many technologies, there are AMT’s and then there are AMT’s! Just like any speaker technology, no 1 aspect of a tweeter can tell you if it’s good or not. There are very very good Be tweeters but most are mediocre, as is the case for ANY other type of tweeter.
I have measured AMT’s from a top-end manufacturer and they are among the very best drivers in the world, ESPECIALLY when it comes to compression and time domain problems. They are also very flat and well behaved electrically.
Now, I am a fan of Monitor Audio for their engineering and price, but I have never heard or measured their latest. What I am most impressed with in the PL200 however is their step response. Absolutely outstanding for a non-time coincident 3-way.
Also, Monitor Audio doesn’t play the same frequency games Wilson/B&W/Focal/GE do. No dip at 2.4k and they use a very smooth instead of ragged tweeter which is in vogue and touted by some reviewers as most revealing. Kill me, they sound horrid to me.
Now, which of these should YOU buy?? I have no opinion, but I would not discount AMT’s at all. The very best AMT's hold their own against the very best of any other tweeter technology in time domain, frequency domain, distortion and lack of compression.
Best,
E
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Hahahahah.
Hahahhaa.
Hahahahah.
I don't believe those magazines would exist without advertising, but to believe in such piety and purity in these days. Oh, sweet innocence. How I miss you.
Erik
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I wouldn't call it a conspiracy so much as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Place full page ads every month and who knows what other benefits you give the reviewers and it's easy to imagine that all the reviews turn one way.
The last time I picked up a TAS it had a review for the Wilson bookshelf and it looked and read like a glossy brochure. Multilple full-page, full-color pictures did not come cheaply.
But like anything else, buy what you like. If you like Wilson then that's the place you should spend your money.
Best,
E
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OK guys, since we’re talking "3-D" sound. One thing to point out is that it’s a known trick that suppressing speakers around 2.4kHz helps greatly enhance this. It’s not natural. I personally don’t hear live music or acoustic instruments this way.
But again, buy what you like to hear! Not what is natural or measures well or what others like. :)
Best,
- E
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<< sigh >> So it’s a little over 1 millisecond. That’s absolutely typical behavior for a 3 way system. If your claim is that it’s impossible to make realistic speakers without being time co-incident, then I’m afraid there are thousands of examples that say otherwise, and very little proof that it is subjectively superior. It’s fine if you like it, or feel you must have it but kind of a ridiculous claim to make that this should have the universal appeal that it has to you, or that we should all bow down to your pet spec. Like it or not, the single most important and perceptible difference between speakers is frequency domain. I’m not saying it’s the only one, but it is big for everyone. In that dimension a lot of the top speakers have really terrible, but oddly similar, responses. Current media has tried to train the audophile into believing these ragged sounding speakers are the cream of the crop, and Wilson seems to be going along with them.
Having said that, here is the Monitor Audio Platinum. Look at how much smoother it's time domain performance is. By better I mean smoother, not narrower. http://www.stereophile.com/content/monitor-audio-platinum-pl300-ii-loudspeaker-measurements#bRxtFG4H...Their tweet sucks above 10kHz though, severe let down for otherwise superbly designed speaker.
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@stevecham
I’m going to call on a couple of your claims. Several milliseconds would be equivalent to several feet offset. Very hard for any crossover designer to do. Do you have a link to a particular measurement that shows this?
You may mean to say that they are not time co-incident. That is true, few speakers besides Thiel or Vandersteen or Dunlavy are or were. That loudspeaker design has not stopped and all become time co-incident is an indicator of the cost/value proposition and market acceptance. As a consumer and speaker builder, I’m not really interested in this feature, though I could make my own speakers like this. Certainly it is relatively straightforward to achieve this digitally. But even then, several milliseconds?
I’ve never seen any Wilson measure with poor phase matching either.
If I was going to criticize the crossovers and speakers it would b in the tonal balance, and treble smoothness.
Best,
Erik
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I don't hate the Wilson's per se, it's their price vs. performance.
I think they are just fine. Maybe not the smoothest or airy-est (two different things) on the top end, but certainly have good dynamic range.
I do find them over-bearing. Their largest speakers are certainly only meant for royalty with listening rooms that can do them justice.
Best,
Erik
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