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Ascend Sierra Luna Mini-Monitor Review

Roen

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There's also the idea of using the BMR + Horizon or 3 BMR's as well.

Would be nice to see some ASR BMR reviews, but there are others I can look at in the meantime.
 

pjug

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The old straw trick will reduce the organ pipe resonance with a slight reduction in tuning frequency, but has a couple other drawbacks: increase in acoustic resistance which lowers port gain and broadens its response, and the added flow resistance can also limit the maximum output before it becomes non laminar (chuffs earlier). All in all maybe not a bad tradeoff for a badly resonant port.

Paper straws will be good so they flex, similar in idea to KEFs lossy rubber section in their ports (strategically placed at resonance points vs distributed like a straw).

Another trick I've heard of but not tried is using a mylar sheet bent into an s and inserted in the port (attribution: Jon Risch).
@DDF @Dennis Murphy These ideas are interesting. I messed around with straws a little bit and they made a difference but overall did not make things better with my speaker. Have you (anyone) experimented with inserts into the port to create low-pass or notch filters? Here is a link to a patent which shows some ideas, and a sketch of one implementation:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/21/30/22/685d970162e45a/EP2321975B1.pdf

1605364424165.png
 

More Dynamics Please

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Due to the ASR reviews of the Sierra Luna and Luna Duo, Dave from Ascend Acoustics has purchased a Klippel NFS and has used it to develop the Luna V2 and Luna Duo V2. Dave has posted his 5 part development story complete with spins from the Klippel here: http://forum.ascendacoustics.com/sh...h-center-Luna-S2-or-Horizon&p=66344#post66344

A long read but well worth it. Credit to Dave at Ascend for taking ASR's Klippel measurements seriously. This major advancement at Ascend Acoustics may never have happened if @amirm hadn't made his original investment in a Klippel and begun freely sharing results from many different speakers.
 

echopraxia

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A long read but well worth it. Credit to Dave at Ascend for taking ASR's Klippel measurements seriously. This major advancement at Ascend Acoustics may never have happened if @amirm hadn't made his original investment in a Klippel and begun freely sharing results from many different speakers.
WOW, amazing results. Lots of respect to Dave from Ascend for making this big investment (buying a Klippel NFS) as a small indie speaker company, while many larger speaker companies still refuse to even publish any measurements, let alone NFS measurements.

TLDR for others who don’t want to dive into that thread; Ascend Acoustics has purchased an NFS and is using it to design much improved speakers coming soon. Here is the plot they posted of the upcoming Luna V2:

1630549707925.jpeg


Horizontal plot:

1630549726401.jpeg
 

echopraxia

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Yikes. Another data point for, "If you are planning to spend a decent amount of money, just buy Revels."

No, not always. Proof: Blind Listening Test - KEF R3 vs Ascend Sierra 2EX

Ascend’s preference for ultra wide beam speakers isn’t for everyone, but neither is KEF’s medium/narrow beam for everyone (as the results linked above show, where Ascend easily beats KEF in a blind test).

I do think Revel is a great default choice for most, however even Revel’s speakers below their flagship lines (PerformaBe, Ultima2) don’t necessarily beat Ascend (depending on which compromises are more or less important to you). Proof: Blind Listening Test - Revel F206 vs Ascend Sierra RAAL Towers

Ascend speakers aren’t perfect, but they competently achieve a very wide beam that you don’t get anywhere else at the price point. The Luna’s may not be Ascend’s best performing product, but now that Ascend owns a Klippel, I expect some amazing products coming up from them. And the Luna V2 (charts shown above) is one of the first examples of this.
 
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spacevector

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WOW, amazing results. Lots of respect to Dave from Ascend for making this big investment (buying a Klippel NFS) as a small indie speaker company, while many larger speaker companies still refuse to even publish any measurements, let alone NFS measurements.

TLDR for others who don’t want to dive into that thread; Ascend Acoustics has purchased an NFS and is using it to design much improved speakers coming soon. Here is the plot they posted of the upcoming Luna V2:

View attachment 151040

Horizontal plot:

View attachment 151041
Bravo!

@amirm you must be beaming with pride this evening and rightly so.

Congratulations to Ascend on their new toy and I can't wait for their next product. I bet it will kick butt.
 

dshreter

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No, not always. Proof: Blind Listening Test - KEF R3 vs Ascend Sierra 2EX

Ascend’s preference for ultra wide beam speakers isn’t for everyone, but neither is KEF’s medium/narrow beam for everyone (as the results linked above show, where Ascend easily beats KEF in a blind test).

I do think Revel is a great default choice for most, however even Revel’s speakers below their flagship lines (PerformaBe, Ultima2) don’t necessarily beat Ascend (depending on which compromises are more or less important to you). Proof: Blind Listening Test - Revel F206 vs Ascend Sierra RAAL Towers

Ascend speakers aren’t perfect, but they competently achieve a very wide beam that you don’t get anywhere else at the price point. The Luna’s may not be Ascend’s best performing product, but now that Ascend owns a Klippel, I expect some amazing products coming up from them. And the Luna V2 (charts shown above) is one of the first examples of this.
I’m totally with you. I was more joining in to the point that you can pick any revel or any kef and not really screw up.

The Sierra 2EX looks like a killer speaker, and should be on most short lists from what I can tell too.
 

BN1

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Absolutely! What he has done is quite admirable. Jim
True, a very interesting saga and well documented by Ascend. But, Dave is a very experienced speaker designer and, I assume, listener who knows what to listen for in an audio system. The fact remains, he didn't hear the port issue originally so does it really matter, especially so to an "average" music/HT user ?
 

napilopez

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True, a very interesting saga and well documented by Ascend. But, Dave is a very experienced speaker designer and, I assume, listener who knows what to listen for in an audio system. The fact remains, he didn't hear the port issue originally so does it really matter, especially so to an "average" music/HT user ?

Yes, because it doesn't matter until you do hear it. Same with any narrow resonance. You might not ever notice it until you play a track that has a note at a specific frequency and then you can't ignore it. It's not that having some of these issues will automatically make a speaker bad, but it increases the likelyhood of creating an audible problem. It's similar to Toole's comments on distortion. It may not be an audible problem most of the time... Until it is.

Due to the ASR reviews of the Sierra Luna and Luna Duo, Dave from Ascend Acoustics has purchased a Klippel NFS and has used it to develop the Luna V2 and Luna Duo V2. Dave has posted his 5 part development story complete with spins from the Klippel here: http://forum.ascendacoustics.com/sh...h-center-Luna-S2-or-Horizon&p=66344#post66344

What an amazing read, thanks for sharing. Not only for the new data, but for seeing the process behind the scenes and how such a flaw might have been missed.

This gives me the utmost respect for Dave. Most manufacturer would have just ignored such issues or made silent adjustments. With an NFS, I'm going to trust ascends measurements to a whole new level. With that ridiculously wide directivity these could end up being my ideal speakers...
 

BN1

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Yes, because it doesn't matter until you do hear it. Same with any narrow resonance. You might not ever notice it until you play a track that has a note at a specific frequency and then you can't ignore it. It's not that having some of these issues will automatically make a speaker bad, but it increases the likelyhood of creating an audible problem. It's similar to Toole's comments on distortion. It may not be an audible problem most of the time... Until it is.



What an amazing read, thanks for sharing. Not only for the new data, but for seeing the process behind the scenes and how such a flaw might have been missed.

This gives me the utmost respect for Dave. Most manufacturer would have just ignored such issues or made silent adjustments. With an NFS, I'm going to trust ascends measurements to a whole new level. With that ridiculously wide directivity these could end up being my ideal speakers...
While I agree that the science of speaker design has been advanced by Ascend Audio's investigation into the port resonance, I'm not so sure that the customer community has directly benefited in the short-term. Yes, Ascend will come out with a 2.0 version of their Luna line but likely will expect a price increase due to the R/D expenditures. And to what end, only if I play a track that has a note ... ? Full disclosure - I had written off the Ascend Luna as a possible upgrade (based upon the ASR review) to my HT but will now reconsider the 2.0v but only if the expected price increase isn't objectionable.
 

Chromatischism

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Yes, because it doesn't matter until you do hear it. Same with any narrow resonance. You might not ever notice it until you play a track that has a note at a specific frequency and then you can't ignore it.
And it's even more than that - it was only from certain angles, apparently. The likelihood that it would be heard seems really low.
 

Chromatischism

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With that ridiculously wide directivity these could end up being my ideal speakers...
My working thesis is that the ideal dispersion width depends on the room's dimensions and the placement of the speakers. Wider room, further from walls = you want wider. Smaller room or closer to walls = you want narrower. The goal would be to maintain the same ratio of reflected sound in each case. Constant reflectivity? At least that makes sense to me. I would love to see more research done on this.
 

thewas

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I don't understand why a experienced loudspeaker designer would really need a Klippel NFS to suddenly make well measuring loudspeakers. The NFS just makes measurements more fast and efficient but as @napilopez has shown here and several decades of loudspeaker engineering, theory, books and designs have tought us, it is not a prerequisite. Of course it is a good investment for a big loudspeaker manufacturer but especially for smaller ones the $100k investment must be financed and in many cases could be possibly better invested in other directions.
 

echopraxia

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I don't understand why a experienced loudspeaker designer would really need a Klippel NFS to suddenly make well measuring loudspeakers. The NFS just makes measurements more fast and efficient but as @napilopez has shown here and several decades of loudspeaker engineering, theory, books and designs have tought us, it is not a prerequisite. Of course it is a good investment for a big loudspeaker manufacturer but especially for smaller ones the $100k investment must be financed and in many cases could be possibly better invested in other directions.
I don’t know where you are getting this idea that Ascend made bad speakers and suddenly now is making good ones with the NFS. I’ve owned all of Ascend’s speakers, and their Sierra 2EX and Sierra RAAL Towers are still IMO the best speakers available in their price range (for people who like wide dispersion), period.

Only my Revel Salon2’s (and maybe F328Be) could match the spacious sound I got from my Ascend Sierra RAAL Towers, and the Salon2 MSRP is $22,000 instead of the Ascend Towers $3000 or Sierra 2EX ~$1500. To emphasize this, I will reiterate: No other speaker I have owned at any price matches the Ascend RAAL speakers spacious sound, aside from a very select few like the Salon2’s. Yes, Ascend speakers do in fact beat even my Genelec 8351B’s in some (obviously not all) important ways. So yeah, Ascend makes good speakers even prior to owning the NFS. Now with the NFS, I only expect even greater results from their future products.

Granted, there is a reason to pay more for Revel flagships — they achieve spacious wide sound while also being capable of extremely powerful SPL without distortion, while Ascend cannot be played too loud. But it’s not fair to expect zero compromises from a high performing “affordable” speaker, either. Ascend makes design trade-offs like anyone else, and clearly good ones for a large group of people who enjoy the wide beam sound (myself included). Revel also makes design compromises with their lower tier speakers, like the Revel’s F206 (which did not beat the Ascend Sierra Towers in my blind test, as the F206 has better bass but worse treble).

IMO it’s really unfair to take one bad review of an underperforming speaker and generalize that across the entire brand. JBL makes plenty of nasty sounding and measuring speakers, but for some reason that doesn’t prevent people from singing praises about the JBL M2 — nor should it, when the JBL M2 is objectively excellent! Likewise, I was also not super impressed with the tonal character of my Ascend Lunas, but that doesn’t make Ascend a bad brand, unless you wajt to argue that the existence far more crappy products from JBL makes JBL a bad brand (invalidating the existence of speakers like the JBL M2).
 
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abdo123

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I don't understand why a experienced loudspeaker designer would really need a Klippel NFS to suddenly make well measuring loudspeakers. The NFS just makes measurements more fast and efficient but as @napilopez has shown here and several decades of loudspeaker engineering, theory, books and designs have tought us, it is not a prerequisite. Of course it is a good investment for a big loudspeaker manufacturer but especially for smaller ones the $100k investment must be financed and in many cases could be possibly better invested in other directions.

sorry but this is a really ridiculous response.

the NFS makes it so people don't have to spend a day measuring the speaker, or spend a day measuring the speaker every time they changed something about the crossover.

now even if the saved labor and time is not of interest to you, better measurements make better speakers and better speakers not only sell better but they can also sold at a higher markup without relying on brand power and marketing.

Just look at how ridiculously expensive Revel speakers are, and they're not really super linear in the day and age of the NFS.
 

Shazb0t

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Granted, there is a reason to pay more for Revel flagships — they achieve spacious wide sound while also being capable of extremely powerful SPL without distortion, while Ascend cannot be played too loud.
I wonder what the maximum SPL without compression the Sierra Towers with the larger 70-20xr ribbon tweeter could do when properly crossed over to subs? It's ~90dB sensitivity and the larger RAAL supposedly has much higher power handling than the 64-10 in the bookshelves.
 
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