(Really) nice to see some data on an off-the-beaten path, (semi)
boutique loudspeaker; thanks!
Couple-three comments.
1. Hard to see for sure, but that looks (to me) like the absolute
wrong kind of woofer to run "wide open" (fullrange). Looks like some sort of synthetic cone material. Most of those strong/light/stiff cones have
horrible out-of-band breakup modes (IME or IMO, as it were) and require steep XOs to make sure they're well behaved.
2. Good old fashioned paper cones (again IME/IMO) are the best substrate for "fullrange" use -- a classic example was Winslow Burhoe's "EPI" (Epicure) loudspeaker line. In Burhoe's case, the woofers were purpose built to be well behaved, enabling their use
sans XO. Indeed, my
ears (sorry!) told me - and still do tell me - that the classic EPIs (which used a concave dome tweeter and a simple 1st order XO on the tweeter only) sounded quite good. They were also quite popular -- at least on the East Coast (EPI was in Newburyport, MA).
I mean, I have a nice pair of EPI 100V here
-- if shipping costs ever return to anything like normal, I
could send one out West for the test. Or, if things ever get back to normal, maybe I could send it out
via Mrs. H if she ever gets to go back to her birding junkets on the west coast (she was supposed to be co-leading a trip in Washington state two weeks ago... but needless to say that trip didn't happen).
102 by
Mark Hardy, on Flickr
3. There's a cult
of fans of moderately esoteric Italian loudspeakers that are utterly unfamiliar to me: names like Rosso Fiorentino Elba and Fiesole. Folks seem to love 'em -- but I wonder whether it's their aesthetics, or what I like to call "the cult of the arcane", or if they've really got it goin' on.
They're fairly expensive
but it would be
very cool to see how they compare to, e.g., the titular Diapasons and/or to other loudspeakers head-to-head (apples to apples, so to speak).