New Dayton Audio Orion Kit

[phrog]

Dayton Audio is now offering a 3-way coaxial kit with an open-back midrange. These look interesting.

Orion

In the manual, they suggest two different alignments for the midrange, one where it is left open-back, and one where the rear chamber is filled with acousta-stuf. It would be cool to see the directivity pattern...

 

[Rick Sykora]

Actually, the main Orian driver is a co-axial mid-tweeter combo. It is interesting, but...

Unless a member buys and send to Amir, have no plans to do so. Erin supposedly has some PE connections, so maybe he will be able to do.

 

[biniek]

Super interesting project

 

[mhardy6647]

4 ohm and 83 dB sensitivity.

Next!

 

[Wolf]

You'll find that is par for the course in most 8" or less woofer designs due to baffle step losses removing 6dB from the inherent sensitivity specifications. You want low bass? In a small cabinet? The number only goes down from there. Most designs I've seen with single woofers rarely breach 88dB, unless they are more of the pro-audio variety, with 81-86dB being the norm. Doubling 8 ohm woofers in parallel will also likely be 4 ohms, but conteract the initial 6dB loss.

 

[dwkdnvr]

the open-back midrange is the hallmark of the Holtz/Campbell designs so I wonder whether they had any input or whether it was just a 'borrowed' idea.

It is interesting to see a kit in this format. As an owner of Kef R3s and someone that has long noodled various project ideas involving a Q150 coax driver, I'm a fan of the coax-plus-woofer idea. I have to admit though I'm not quite seeing the value in a world where a pair of Kali IN-8's are available for only slightly more, or a pair of Q150s are available for $300. The Kali's won't go as deep on their own I suppose, so you avoid the complexity of adding a sub.

Will be interesting to see whether it gathers enough of a following for broad feedback to become available.

 

[Rick Sykora]

PE only posted on-axis response measurement for the speaker so not much to go on. They did post a rather messy spin of the new coax driver and note that it is not currently available for sale separately.

The crossover is fairly complex with 3rd order filters on the midrange and tweeter. The woofer is 2nd order electrical filter. There is also some additional filtering on the mid and tweeter. The high parts count clearly adding to the cost of the kit.

Yes, the sensitivity is on the low side but plenty of cheap amp power available is less of an issue. Also could be helped somewhat with active crossover as less need for padding on the coax. The woofer has decent sensitivity so a hybrid crossover would likely allow better performance overall. So perhaps some untapped potential? Would be able to better judge if some distortion profiles were done for the coax driver.

 

[LouB]

the open-back midrange is the hallmark of the Holtz/Campbell designs so I wonder whether they had any input or whether it was just a 'borrowed' idea.

It is interesting to see a kit in this format. As an owner of Kef R3s and someone that has long noodled various project ideas involving a Q150 coax driver, I'm a fan of the coax-plus-woofer idea. I have to admit though I'm not quite seeing the value in a world where a pair of Kali IN-8's are available for only slightly more, or a pair of Q150s are available for $300. The Kali's won't go as deep on their own I suppose, so you avoid the complexity of adding a sub.

Will be interesting to see whether it gathers enough of a following for broad feedback to become available.

Would you say the Orion kit is designed as a studio monitor ? I totally agree that Kali IN-8's would be a much better deal if looking for a studio monitor. I was looking for a bookshelf kit build, 3 way 8" woofer for a music only 2 way system (no sub) along the lines of the JBL L82 classics but just couldn't find anything that might compare to the JBL's. I know nothing about speaker designing but have great building skill.
So I decided to buy the JBL's (haven't done it yet). I've had expensive studio monitors I used for mixing multi track recordings just never liked them for listing to pre recorded music. The Orions look interesting to me but not if there a super flat monitor.
Thanks

 

[ooheadsoo]

Should note that it's spelled Orian. I clicked thinking PE had made some weird deal to sell the old Linkwitz Orion kit.

 

[dwkdnvr]

Should note that it's spelled Orian. I clicked thinking PE had made some weird deal to sell the old Linkwitz Orion kit.

Ha. They must have changed it after folks let them know how bad it looked. The original was most certainly 'Orion'.

 

[AudiOhm]

The original link does not work...

The originol link does not work...

Ohms

 

[dwkdnvr]

updated link

Home

Orian 3-way High Output Bookshelf Speaker Kit Pair With Knock Down EnclosuresOrian 3-Way High-Output Bookshelf Speaker Kit Pair With Knock Down EnclosuresThe Orian High Output Bookshelf Speaker Kit’s unique design delivers SPL levels you would normally only expect from larger tower speakers...

www.parts-express.com

 

[AudiOhm]

Thanks.

Ohms

 

[mhardy6647]

too funny. (the name thing)
It happened to Yamaha and their HP-n headphones in the 1970s. Supposedly, hewlett/packard wasn't crazy about the nomenclature, and Yamaha changed the HP-1, HP-2, and HP-3 headphones to YH-1, YH-2, YH-3.


Of course, not sure what Linkwitz Labs are gonna do about that constellation...?

As an aside, I still have the HP-2 I bought ca. 1977. They still sound good, although they're in bad physical shape (deterioration of the 'head band', which was endemic in these after a few decades).

 

[Rick Sykora]

Naming is tough in the information age. Finding out whether your name is trademarked is not…

Orion is a great name. I wanted to use it too. Did not look as though Linkwitz trademarked it, but had some definite commercial use and certainly mind share. Orion (car) speakers has trademarked it though. And unless you want a potential lawsuit, you don’t use a name that has been trademarked for a product in the same product space. PE has been around long enough that they cannot be unaware of trademarking, but clearly looks like they were asleep at the wheel on this one.

Orian looks like a play on Orion and is a naming approach often applied today (Flickr, Reddit, Tumblr and the like). It also appears to pass initial search engine and basic trademarking. Orian it is.

 

[mhardy6647]

Speaking of Orion... I am reminded of an image caption I remember from my (not entirely mis-spent) youth, and the august pages of National Geographic.
I cannot find the photo (yet!) but I did find a reference to it:

This was a good memory test! Look at National Geographic, April, 1966, page 548, in the article "Space Rendezvous" by Kenneth Weaver, about Geminis 6 and 7. There is a colour photo of a urine dump, vented by Gemini 7, with the caption: "Constellation Urion", astronaut Schirra jokingly labelled this photograph at the postflight press conference. Droplets of urine, vented from G-7 at twilight and instantly frozen in space, follow as miniature satellites. They eventually sublimate and vanish, like dry ice."

source: http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000804.html

 

[dwkdnvr]

Speaking of Orion... I am reminded of an image caption I remember from my (not entirely mis-spent) youth, and the august pages of National Geographic.
I cannot find the photo (yet!) but I did find a reference to it:



source: http://www.collectspace.com/ubb/Forum3/HTML/000804.html

So, uh, you're suggesting it's a piss-poor kit?

 

[mhardy6647]

So, uh, you're suggesting it's a piss-poor kit?

no, just musing on the ubiquity of Orion

Come to think of it, there are two Orion telescopes here at our house...

 

[dwkdnvr]

Yeah, I don't think there is any legal problem with them using the name. It's just the the Orion project by SL was a very significant and very well known project in the DIY community. So, it's rather tacky to try to re-use the name for another design.

And I think PE is generally a good company, so once it was pointed out they did what they could to fix the problem.

Still a bit curious as to how well executed the kit is. I've eyed the smaller CX120 as a potential cheap co-axial experiment platform, but haven't ever had the time to actually get any farther than that.

 

[D!sco]

I was pretty excited about this kit, skipped directly to the writeup and specs. Crossover seems pretty thorough, and a well designed coax should give good DI. The idea of a budget, build-it-yourself KEF R3 seems too good to pass up. But the price. Oof. You might as well be buying a small set of genelecs or the Kali, or start saving for a set of Neumanns. There's no way the concentric will work as well as the KEF's anyways, so the value is even worse. I'd rather build a Dayton powered bass tower and an actual Q100/Q150. eBay/Craigslist is a treasure trove for this. Open back is pretty cool, but PVC pipe is cheap. Again, no value here. Hopefully someone will put it in front of a mic and prove us all wrong.