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Diapason Emera Italian Speaker Review

Rick Sykora

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This thread is starting to derail.

If you are not posting about this review, please start another thread (its free) :D.
 

chych7

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What is the thinking behind spending the time to review old discontinued speakers like this from obscure manufacturers? Aren't there a lot more speakers in Amir's backlog that have more current interest and relevance?
 

Soniclife

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The Element P has a built in streamer so once I had the results of the measurement I don't see how I could modify the output of the Element P. Wrong?
Roon does the correction before it's streamed to the end device.
 

KaiserSoze

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(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).

:)

I'm glad to see this post because I have also suggested to Amir that it would be interesting to see measurements of the old EPI 100, which is a speaker I once owned. I hope that you get this speaker to him by whatever means and that he takes measurements of it. Note, though, that you need to be entirely certain that this is the original, unmodified woofer. If there is any chance that it has been "re-foamed", then the measurements will be for some different speaker, not the EPI 100. The foam surround on the speaker in your picture looks to be original, but also looks to be exceptionally well-preserved, which means that if it is what it appears to be, this particular unit will be an ideal unit for taking measurements.

A comment about the diaphragm material. Certainly it is true that highly stiff, brittle materials are not suitable for a woofer intended to be run without any low-pass filter, owing to the cone breakup, just as you say. However there are drivers with paper cones that are nearly as brittle and nearly as prone to breakup as a typical aluminum woofer. It probably depends on the binder used to make the paper. And though they aren't common, there are some aluminum woofers that are as well-behaved in this respect as paper often is. It probably depends on the tempering/annealing of the aluminum. Tempering makes metal less ductile; annealing reverses this. Annealed aluminum seems to be nearly as ductile as tin. As such annealed aluminum would seem to be an excellent material for speaker diaphragms, and yet the people who design drivers almost always prefer to make the aluminum as stiff as they can possibly make it. Their theory may be that if you can make the diaphragm stiff enough it won't break up, in which case the intrinsic damping will be moot. Or it may be that they regard the breakup as an acceptable price to pay in exchange for a more uniform frequency response and lower distortion within the band in which they intend the driver to operate.
 

KaiserSoze

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What is the thinking behind spending the time to review old discontinued speakers like this from obscure manufacturers? Aren't there a lot more speakers in Amir's backlog that have more current interest and relevance?

That's a valid point of view, and personally I wouldn't have bothered with this particular speaker, however in my individual opinion it is useful to see measurements of a few of the older speakers that had cult status back in the '70s and '80s in the U.S. The EPI 100 that has been suggested here is certainly one such speaker, and it is relevant for the further reason that it is an ideal example of the "simple crossover is better" school of thinking. Its crossover consisted of a single capacitor in series with the the tweeter.

Maybe this is something that only old fuddy-duddies care about, but I for one would be very pleased to see measurements of the EPI 100, and of the last Advent made in the very early '80s just prior to the woofer having been replaced by one of Jensen's commodity woofers, and maybe that JBL that was very popular in the late 70s, for comparison. This kind of measuring was not available to us back then, and we are left with lots of unanswered questions. The Advent, for example, was touted for having unusually low distortion in bass, which was attributed to the superior linearity of the restoring force, a supposed property of the acoustic suspension enclosure.
 

mhardy6647

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Note, though, that you need to be entirely certain that this is the original, unmodified woofer. If there is any chance that it has been "re-foamed", then the measurements will be for some different speaker, not the EPI 100. The foam surround on the speaker in your picture looks to be original, but also looks to be exceptionally well-preserved, which means that if it is what it appears to be, this particular unit will be an ideal unit for taking measurements.
Sorry to report that they are, in fact refoamed, by me, using the "correct" (nominally) foam from Rick Cobb.
That said, and as you probably know, there were EPI/Epicure loudspeakers that used woofers with rubber surrounds. I do not have any of those at this time (although some have passed through). I made a conscious, deliberate effort to reduce my EPI collection some years back (for better or worse)! They were nice little loudspeakers. ...or nice, big loudspeakers, in the case of the flagship EPI 1000. :)

1601064635846.png
 
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Sonny1

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Great review. I have always been fascinated with the looks of many Italian made speakers. These have a cool shape, high quality cabinetry but the performance is not good, at least without EQ. The EQ’d performance is better than I expected. Thanks for taking the time to review these.
 

carlob

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The Diapason model that was known everywhere at the time was the Adamantes, I think that the first series were launched in 1989 and now we are at the fifth iteration: http://www.diapason-italia.com/en/adamantesV.html

At the time, beginning of 90s, I was in the market for a pair of bookshelf and was considering to get the Adamantes but at the end I went with Sonus Faber (the Concerto, I still have them)
 
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HerbertWest

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The Diapason model that was known everywhere at the time was the Adamantes, I think that the first series were launched in 1989 and now we are at the fifth iteration: http://www.diapason-italia.com/en/adamantesV.html

At the time, beginning of 90s, I was in the market for a pair of bookshelf and was considering to get the Adamantes but at the end I went with Sonus Faber (the Concerto, I still have them)

This is John Atkinson's tech review of the Adamantes II in 1997: https://www.stereophile.com/content/diapason-adamantes-ii-loudspeaker-measurements

Lot of things could have changed in the last 23 years, though ^^
 

Nomad

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I am aware that this review is 'old' and but just wanted to offer my gratitude for the reviews of these 'boutique' speaker companies.

Sort of off topic:
My father owns the Diapason Neos tower speakers, and yesterday we've been listening to the Adamentes V in a hifi store. My personal opinion of the latter is that they lack bass, are too dominant in higher frequencies, and were pretty sensitive in the horizontal plane. I don't know whether this is a typical Diapason monitor preference, but the discription of this review would (in my non-proven subjective experience) be applicable to the adamantes.
 
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