Andrew Jones’s new speaker brand - Jones and Cerreta

[PGansz]

If this speaker is well executed and some of AJ's experiments turn out successfully I could see these speakers performing better than the vast majority of speakers being sold.

I don't suspect AJ would turn up to AXPONA to show them off if they didn't perform!

 

[Paul7777x]

I’m certain it will be considered a very good speaker.

Ten times more certain of that when reviewed by any and all big eared subjective ‘reviewers’.

I’m at least as certain the speakers are aimed entirely at the market which thinks the 60’s/70’s/80’s (take your pick) we’re the pinnacle of hifi magnificence, and everything since is mere snivelling frippery.

I’m also sure that, despite any claims otherwise, they will not, at all, sound like any speakers from those decades.

Instead they will be modern sounding, happy with tons of power, and quite simply leagues ahead of anything from the buyers or reviewers halcyon days of time misted, confabulations.

And not one will acknowledge it. Most will not be able to conceive it.

 

[JustJones]

Fortunately, "Lambo" does offer options when towing is a consideration.

1965 lamborghini model 1r tractor by j, on Flickr

My other Tractor is a Porsche

 

[Pearljam5000]

He should have added DSP to it, it's already connected to an outlet

 

[mhardy6647]

He should have added DSP to it, it's already connected to an outlet

and/or he shoulda powered the electrodynamic driver's (or drivers') magnets by USB.

 

[mhardy6647]

The Eico HF 81 was basically just a pair of Eico mono HF 12's in a single chassis.

... right down to its pair of EZ81 HV rectifiers
... but only one power transformer, which is something of an Achilles' heel, actually. Even the HF12 (a pair of which I quite literally grew up with), like many EICO products, asked almost as much out of its little PT as the poor thing was capable of. Indeed, one of my father's HF12's self-immolated one Sunday afternoon.
Fortunately, Heyboer, who made the original PTs for the HF12 and the HF81 is still around and is happy to build a judiciously uprated PT for those of us still rockin' these fine (if unattractive) little amplifiers to keep 'em singing in perpetuity.
I bought one as a spare for my HF-81 long, long ago.

EICO scrimped where they could, but these amps do have very fine output iron, as did virtually all of EICO's amplifiers. I do not know if Heyboer did the OPTs in them -- they may well have. The big EICO amps used premium Chicago, Peerless, and other OPTs.

It is too bad that EICO used the Centralab ceramic passive network (PEC) modules in, e.g., their tone controls. They also used ceramic coupling caps, but that's easy to rectify (no pun intended).

note the frequency response spec @ 2 watts (1 watt/channel, apparently, according to the footnote).

The "FOCUS" (balance) control is a bit... idiosyncratic, too.
But these are fine hifi amps that will quite literally last a lifetime. The one I currently have is my age, e.g.

 

[MattHooper]

Looking like AJ’s room it’s going to be pretty busy for this AXPONA!

 

[Newman]

I don't suspect AJ would turn up to AXPONA to show them off if they didn't perform!

Come off it. Some very dubious-performing products at high price and exclusivity get demoed at audio shows to great acclaim...often from listeners in far-from-ideal listening circumstances even for sighted listening: off-centre, near to back walls, standing, chatter, demonstrators giving subtle facial cues and foot-tapping engagement, curated unchallenging program material. None of this hampers the audiophile from forming his firm opinions on sonic excellence. It's a performance-free zone where 95% of the perceived sound quality comes from the non-sonic context-setting, sales patter, exclusivity factors, size, cost, quality finishing touches, brand and back story, guru factor, queues outside the door, etc etc. The industry knows this perfectly well. Audiophiles, not so much.

If we had one single controlled listening experiment in the whole world, where a field coil provided a listener preference over a high quality magnet setup, then we might have at least one fragment of valid evidence that this is anything other than engineering for its own sake and marketing to the gullible (who tend to believe in the many audio myths that arose from sighted listening errors in perception) or exclusivity-obsessed. Any takers?

If not, then scepticism is well warranted.

cheers

 

[MattHooper]

Come off it. Some very dubious-performing products at high price and exclusivity get demoed at audio shows to great acclaim...often from listeners in far-from-ideal listening circumstances even for sighted listening: off-centre, near to back walls, standing, chatter, demonstrators giving subtle facial cues and foot-tapping engagement, curated unchallenging program material. None of this hampers the audiophile from forming his firm opinions on sonic excellence. It's a performance-free zone where 95% of the perceived sound quality comes from the non-sonic context-setting, sales patter, exclusivity factors, size, cost, quality finishing touches, brand and back story, guru factor, queues outside the door, etc etc. The industry knows this perfectly well. Audiophiles, not so much.

If we had one single controlled listening experiment in the whole world, where a field coil provided a listener preference over a high quality magnet setup, then we might have at least one fragment of valid evidence that this is anything other than engineering for its own sake and marketing to the gullible (who tend to believe in the many audio myths that arose from sighted listening errors in perception) or exclusivity-obsessed. Any takers?

If not, then scepticism is well warranted.

cheers

Or….

Cynicism may be clouding judgement to not think it likely that AJ was satisfied with the performance of the prototype he will be bringing, and that would mean that they probably perform fairly well.

AJ has been a successful loudspeaker designer, seems to know what he’s talking about, especially lately producing designs that measure pretty well and that have been quite successful. And doesn’t seem to be any particular reason that he suddenly lost his design chops such that this will be a bad loudspeaker.

One never knows until the loudspeaker actually comes out (and also is measured).
But it seems a reasonable expectation that the speaker won’t be a total dud and may have some compelling attributes.

(And the proposition that “ 95%” comes from all those non-Sonic factors seems teeny bit exaggerated. If all that stuff truly overwhelmed the actual sound of speakers to that degree, I think we would expect a larger percentage of positive comments across many rooms since they are all doing it. But every show we see plenty of critical comments from attending audiophiles - usually on forums - about the Sonic content of the show. It’s very common to see only a few rooms cited as having great sound).

 

[MattHooper]

Out of curiosity: does anyone looking at the design and perhaps having watched the video have any guesses as to how it will perform, how it will measure, what likely positive or negative attributes we will see in this loudspeaker?

 

[DaaDaa]

Out of curiosity: does anyone looking at the design and perhaps having watched the video have any guesses as to how it will perform, how it will measure, what likely positive or negative attributes we will see in this loudspeaker?

yes i have a very good guess, but i prefer not to share.

 

[Duke]

Out of curiosity: does anyone looking at the design and perhaps having watched the video have any guesses as to how it will perform, how it will measure, what likely positive or negative attributes we will see in this loudspeaker?

If I was tasked with critiquing Andrew Jones' previous designs, I'd say that imo they do not seem to have the dynamic capability and/or dynamic contrast of some of their competition.

A field-coil motor has the theoretical advantage of essentially zero modulation of its magnetic flux due to interaction with the magnetic field induced by the current passing through the voice coil wire, unlike even high-quality permanent-magnet motors wherein there is still some flux modulation. In English, the field-coil motor should theoretically enable better dynamic contrast.

Whether it will be "audibly better" I don't know, but I expect that it will be.

I don't see anything that makes me think good measurements are not possible, but the devils are in the details. I think Andrew is probably on a first-name basis with those devils.

 

[tineared]

Out of curiosity: does anyone looking at the design and perhaps having watched the video have any guesses as to how it will perform, how it will measure, what likely positive or negative attributes we will see in this loudspeaker?

I am confident that they will be heavy and they will be expensive.
Normally, I would be confident in their ability to recreate deep powerful bass accurately, but utilizing the four ports with one in each corner which Andy says can be filled as needed to compensate for room boundary issues has me a bit concerned. They don't seem to be a fine-tuned through measurements kind of project.
I hope he has a functioning prototype ready in time for the show and I hope it performs as he intends

 

[levimax]

Out of curiosity: does anyone looking at the design and perhaps having watched the video have any guesses as to how it will perform, how it will measure, what likely positive or negative attributes we will see in this loudspeaker?

I think these speaker are very interesting. They have enough size and design elements (coaxial mid / tweeter, 2-12" bass drivers in a ported enclosure) to be very good performers. For me there are two wildcards which are how well the new field coil coaxial driver actually performs and how the bass roll off is tuned balancing extension vs effeciency.

 

[Duke]

... utilizing the four ports with one in each corner which Andy says can be filled as needed to compensate for room boundary issues has me a bit concerned. They don't seem to be a fine-tuned through measurements kind of project.

Well, I like this aspect of the design. Let me explain:

No matter how perfect the theoretical frequency response is with the theoretically perfect port tuning, that perfect frequency response goes completely out the window once the speaker starts interacting with the room. Hopefully the designer has done a good job of taking "typical" boundary reinforcement into account, but the room-to-room variations from "typical", and even the variations with changes in speaker and/or listener location with a given room, mean that it's extremely unlikely the designer's choice of tuning frequency results in the best-possible speaker/room interaction in the bass region in any given room/setup situation.

Having multiple pluggable ports gives the end user another degree of freedom in optimizing for his particular situation. The designer can choose his multiple port tuning frequencies to give a RANGE within which one of those tuning frequencies is likely to be pretty darn close to ideal for a wide range of rooms and locations within those rooms.

For instance, you might have a big room and/or want to pull the speakers fairly far out into the room for best imaging, in which case you might want a bit higher tuning frequency to offset the relatively sparse boundary reinforcement. I might have a small room and/or a spouse who insists on the speakers being up against the wall, where they would sound too boomy without being able to lower the tuning frequency, which just might synergize really well with the increased boundary reinforcement. Then later you might decide to add subwoofers, in which case you might want to plug all four ports and have the speakers become low-Q sealed boxes.

 

[Mnyb]

Out of curiosity: does anyone looking at the design and perhaps having watched the video have any guesses as to how it will perform, how it will measure, what likely positive or negative attributes we will see in this loudspeaker?

To little information and no measurements, I’ll await more info .

One guess he could have built almost the same thing neodymium magnets .

Another guess, fr response will be decent unless AJ got senile, he can design speakers so he would not have bodged basic things to much with this budget.

 

[RexrothPigeon]

They’re probably performant, but I’m definitely not going to make any judgments based on that ad

 

[Mnyb]

Well, I like this aspect of the design. Let me explain:

No matter how perfect the theoretical frequency response is with the theoretically perfect port tuning, that perfect frequency response goes completely out the window once the speaker starts interacting with the room. Hopefully the designer has done a good job of taking "typical" boundary reinforcement into account, but the room-to-room variations from "typical", and even the variations with changes in speaker and/or listener location with a given room, mean that it's extremely unlikely the designer's choice of tuning frequency results in the best-possible speaker/room interaction in the bass region in any given room/setup situation.

Having multiple pluggable ports gives the end user another degree of freedom in optimizing for his particular situation. The designer can choose his multiple port tuning frequencies to give a RANGE within which one of those tuning frequencies is likely to be pretty darn close to ideal for a wide range of rooms and locations within those rooms.

For instance, you might have a big room and/or want to pull the speakers fairly far out into the room for best imaging, in which case you might want a bit higher tuning frequency to offset the relatively sparse boundary reinforcement. I might have a small room and/or a spouse who insists on the speakers being up against the wall, where they would sound too boomy without being able to lower the tuning frequency, which just might synergize really well with the increased boundary reinforcement. Then later you might decide to add subwoofers, in which case you might want to plug all four ports and have the speakers become low-Q sealed boxes.

Similar to some KEF floorstanders , who even have a bit to low tuning and dual ports with bungs delivered .

I had a rhythmic sub with this feature.

 

[amirm]

I don't suspect AJ would turn up to AXPONA to show them off if they didn't perform!

AJ can make a clock radio sound good with his expertly picked music tracks! So no, that is not a sign of anything. Ultimately we need measurements to find out if it is any good.

 

[sigbergaudio]

Well, I like this aspect of the design. Let me explain:

I like this concept too. But if I understood the video correctly and remember correctly, you can only plug a maximum of two ports (one at the bottom and one at the top), as the ports are also needed to ventilate heat out of the cabinet due to the field coil.