MEH / Synergy Horns vs. direct radiators - deep dive w/ measurements

[Patrick Bateman]

Bill Waslo's had that aim. Did you have a chance to listen to his? Well documented too.

Mark

Listened?

I bought them

 

[mwmkravchenko]

Listened?

I bought them

I thought so. But you also sold them John.

You are one of the few people that has listened to a variety of these. I still have not.

I have a lot of horn and waveguide experience, both designing and listening. But MEH is something that I have not tackled yet.

As the OP mentioned there were distortion products in the measurements of the midrange drivers in the horn that were not present when you measured them at the same SPL out of the horn.

This leads me to a few connected dots. Cavity resonance possible. Cone resonance most likely because the pressure differential in the horn loading. That is not to difficult to test for Stoneeh. Designing a driver for normal acoustic loading and for a bandpass loading is a very different animal. You want a cone that can take the pressure and still not misbehave.

Mark

 

[Bwaslo]

Bill Waslo's had that aim. Did you have a chance to listen to his? Well documented too.

Mark

Well, hey, nice to see that those are still remembered. I'm assuming this is referring to the 'Cosynes' that Patrick later owned (I wonder who has them now?).

I'm not listening to synergy horns anymore (hate the term "MEH"!), no room for anything like that in my current listening situation, they are just too wide. I just got some ASciLab C6B which so far seem to serve the same function but much smoothly and much easier to place in small spaces. How do they get directivity down to 1kHz with a 7" waveguide?

I wonder if some of the impressiveness, to me at least, of the Cosynes could have been partly psychological -- the mostly point source nature in contrast to the huge size. For me, it was difficult to convince the brain that the sound was actually coming from those horns, even knowing that it was, and even when moving up closer to them. A nice trick.

With the later smaller synergy type speakers I made there wasn't the major disconnect of those big elephants-in-the-room not being sonically locate-able. The smaller ones weren't any less locate-able, but then they aren't the size of refrigerators! Ditto for the much smaller C6Bs, not obvious where sound is coming from, but then they don't look like they must have to be source. Does that maybe make any sense? (Of course, this is all subjective and operating from memory, so far from scientific).

[BTW, I still have the "SmallSyns" and the larger 3D printed waveguide speakers sitting down in the garage if anyone is interested.]

 

[gnarly]

Part of the reason I keep posting in my 'square pegs' thread is because I *really* want wide horizontal directivity and narrow vertical directivity.

Hi John, what vertical pattern are you hoping for? And of course, down to what frequency?