How is your dream speaker like?

[richard12511]

My dream speakers are good headphones with a hrtf that works perfectly... And that I could share with other people!

Interesting. I've got Sennheiser HD 800, 600, 650, and a couple AKG and Planar headphones. I love the clarity, but for some reason I just enjoy loudspeakers so much more. Maybe it's because I can both hear and feel the bass? or maybe because of the soundstaging?

 

[napilopez]

Interesting. I've got Sennheiser HD 800, 600, 650, and a couple AKG and Planar headphones. I love the clarity, but for some reason I just enjoy loudspeakers so much more. Maybe it's because I can both hear and feel the bass? or maybe because of the soundstaging?

Those things are all probably part of it! But the reason I mentioned HRTF specifically is that to me there is still no speaker system in the world that comes close to the realism of a good binaural sound on good headphones, should the binaural dummy head used for the recording work well with your own ear-brain. Aside from being able to create perfect surround sound effect, it can also give you a sense of depth and proximity I'm not sure is possible with speakers -- at least traditional speakers.

Unfortunately, the amount of good binaural recordings are vanishingly few, and even then they may not all work with your particular HRTF.

 

[Laserjock]

Revel Ultima Salon3

 

[Igor Kirkwood]

My dream is a complete ionic plasma loudspeaker .

On photo you see only the plasma tweeter (Magnat): the weight of the movable membrane is zero and dispersion 360 degres

 

[gene_stl]

I have a pair of duKane Ionovacs in the basement. I am afraid of them and I don't like ozone. If anyone wants to buy them I'll sell them.
They are reciprocating flare horns (I think)

the trouble with all these ionization tweeters is that they are like having a tesla coil in your stereo . Tesla coils are a bad idea around non tube electronics.

 

[Ilkless]

My dream is a complete ionic plasma loudspeaker .

On photo you see only the plasma tweeter (Magnat): the weight of the movable membrane is zero and dispersion 360 degres

Heard the Lansche plasma tweeter before, what a revelation.

I have a pair of duKane Ionovacs in the basement. I am afraid of them and I don't like ozone. If anyone wants to buy them I'll sell them.
They are reciprocating flare horns (I think)

the trouble with all these ionization tweeters is that they are like having a tesla coil in your stereo . Tesla coils are a bad idea around non tube electronics.

Vaughn Loudspeakers, a boutique tune-by-ear oudspeaker from iirc Canada have refurbished/modified duKanes in their flagship speaker. You might want to hit them up.

Wow, I guess we think alike! Are we perhaps twins? If no and you're a beautiful girl I'll marry you right now! ❤

Unfortunately not. I did go on a date with a lady audiophile once. Her self-professed religious fundamentalism made for a heated argument, however.

Her asking price for a Marantz PM5005 was also way too high as well.

 

[Senior NEET Engineer]

My dream speaker is one that is good enough that I can stop dreaming about speakers and focus on the system integration.

Nowadays with music being mastered for earbuds and movies mastered for sound bars, the bar is not that high for speaker imo.

 

[Absolute]

Unfortunately not. I did go on a date with a lady audiophile once. Her self-professed religious fundamentalism made for a heated argument, however.

Her asking price for a Marantz PM5005 was also way too high as well.

You certainly dodged a bullet there!

 

[mhardy6647]

I have a pair of duKane Ionovacs in the basement. I am afraid of them and I don't like ozone. If anyone wants to buy them I'll sell them.
They are reciprocating flare horns (I think)

the trouble with all these ionization tweeters is that they are like having a tesla coil in your stereo . Tesla coils are a bad idea around non tube electronics.

EV also sold the duKane Ionovac as the EV T3500. The big problem with these (besides the ozone, of course) was (is) very low sensitivity, even with horn loading. I believe (??) that the horn on the Ionovacs (duKane or EV-branded) is a diffraction horn not unlike that used on the EV T35 family.

EV, bless their hearts, still has the docs for the T3500 on their website
That part of the EV website is down as I type this but here's an archive copy, if anyone's interested.

I will also mention in the context of plasma drivers/tweeters.
1) The Hill Plasmatronics Type 1 was an (almost) full range plasma loudspeaker -- Hill used helium rather than air to generate the plasma, thus eliminating (or minimizing) the ozone issue.

2) Nelson Pass, famously, injured himself via ozone exposure/inhalation working on an extended range plasma loudspeaker.

 

[Blumlein 88]

My dream speaker(s) would be able to recreate the actual soundfield around my ears from a remote location. One stable enough I could move around with in it. I don't know how you could do that. I also don't know what method would be used to record it. But that would be my dream.

My guess is we'll be able to record the brain wave patterns to cause that experience and inject into our brain or at least the aural nerves to get that experience before we'll be able to actually re-create the soundfield remotely. So I guess my dream speakers will be a cap that I can wear which will be able to recreate the brain activity of the real thing.

 

[maverickronin]

My dream speaker(s) would be able to recreate the actual soundfield around my ears from a remote location. One stable enough I could move around with in it. I don't know how you could do that. I also don't know what method would be used to record it. But that would be my dream.

Giant array of individually aimed highly directional ultrasonic super tweeters producing audible sound via interference beats?

 

[mhardy6647]

Giant array of individually aimed highly directional ultrasonic super tweeters producing audible sound via interference beats?

That sounds like fun -- sort of like analog tape recording with high frequency bias

 

[thewas]

More than 2700 drivers driven by 832 separate audio channels
https://www.ak.tu-berlin.de/menue/research/projects/wellenfeldsynthese/parameter/en/

More general information about such wave field synthesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_field_synthesis
http://www.ifaa-akustik.de/files/TMT-2008-Goertz-Makarski-Weinzierl-Moldrzyk.pdf

 

[KeithPhantom]

So how would your dream speaker be like?

Easy, the lower the distortion and the better behaved it is, it is closer to me to perfection. Also, I wouldn't use them in another environment than a perfectly treated room.

 

[Matias]

Giant array of individually aimed highly directional ultrasonic super tweeters producing audible sound via interference beats?

Wow and I thought my dream speaker was too much, this is like "hold my beer" level!

 

[maverickronin]

Wow and I thought my dream speaker was too much, this is like "hold my beer" level!

The real question is, "How do you upmix to that from stereo?"

 

[Igor Kirkwood]

My dream speaker(s) would be able to recreate the actual soundfield around my ears from a remote location. One stable enough I could move around with in it. I don't know how you could do that. I also don't know what method would be used to record it. But that would be my dream.
.

You can olso sleep and have a very nice dream

 

[gene_stl]

It is my opinion that "massless tweeters" are one of the audiophile dream myths.(right next to full range "co-ax" drivers) While massless transduction may well be a good thing, what has to be done to the audio to step it up probably is not pretty in almost all implementations. This is something it shares with electrostatic loudspeakers.

Theory great, practice not so much.

The electronics of the Ionovacs could be redone now with more modern ones. Your amplflier doesn't even drive them it is a a single tube (two sections iirc) radio transmitter which your amp AM modulates. You could get much better performance with more modern circuitry. If I were going to run these that is what I would do. I still have enough ham friends to cook up a driver. But as Nelson Pass discovered ozone is not something you want in your living room. (I remember from Chemistry class, the electronegativity chart which goes in the following order. Fluorine which is one of the few things Gene won't play with, then Oxygen especially in the O3 form of ozone, then nitrogen then chlorine. The astute reader will recognize that these are the elemental components of rocket fuels and mineral acids and the only thing more reactive than ozone is fluorine which is very dangerous. So is ozone really. It will instantly eat anything made of rubber and turn it into crumblies. including things like PVC wire insulation.)

You are quite right it's a diffraction horn.

I remember the Hill plasmatronic. Helium is now much more expensive and by law, requires scavenging in many applications. The scientific community is worried about running out. Lots of big medical magnets out there, full of liquid He. Of course there is unlimited hydrogen for free. Just make everything near the speaker fire resistant. Ceramics and stainless steel. Even less dense than Helium. This slows the speed of sound down and would effect the design of the horns if any.

 

[Blumlein 88]

More than 2700 drivers driven by 832 separate audio channels
https://www.ak.tu-berlin.de/menue/research/projects/wellenfeldsynthese/parameter/en/

More general information about such wave field synthesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_field_synthesis
http://www.ifaa-akustik.de/files/TMT-2008-Goertz-Makarski-Weinzierl-Moldrzyk.pdf

That will probably be in an AVR in about 12 years. 832 channel Atmos. Of course that implementation had no height channels. Well maybe they'll just round up to an even 1000 channels with 168 of them height channels. The Atmos 1000 system.

 

[thewas]

I know you are of course meaning that ironically, but still I would like to emphasise that typical multichannel audio like we have now with Atmos etc (even if it had xyz channels) has unfortunately nothing to do with wave field synthesis where we can recreate three dimensional sound fields which don't collapse or change when you move yourself in them.