Newer Scan speak driver 15W8534-T 5.5 inch reviews and sound?

[Jeff M.]

Good Morning. So am looking at a new scan speak driver the 15W/8534-T 5.5 inch Phenoms. multi layer cone. Is there anything unique about this driver besides a new cone material? How about the sound of it? Is it worth the price of $194.00 dollars each? Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Be safe. Jeff

 

[Arindal]

Is there anything unique about this driver besides a new cone material?

Maybe not, but the specs are telling a story of a very capable and versatile 5" midbass, ideal for a rather voluminous, vented 2-way design.

The cone material seems to be interesting, reminding me of some of Focal´s earlier efforts with sandwich cones, yet being a 5-layer design. Cannot render anything from the rather weird behavior above 3K, but something tells me designs with a higher x-over to the tweeter might run into problems. As with the Focals, no-one could tell you anything useful before integrating them in a reasonable speaker concept and listening to it.

 

[Jeff M.]

Arindal You brought up some good points in this drivers cone material and design. I totally forgot about Focals earlier cone material designs. Am haven’t bought them yet and will wait and do more research on them. Thanks for the information. Jeff

 

[AnalogSteph]

Test Bench: Scan-Speak 15W/8534T00 Classic Line 5.5" Woofer

This Test Bench characterizes the new Scan-Speak 15W/8534T00 woofer, which fills the gap in the Classic family for a compact high-performance 5.5” (15cm) midbass driver. It is based on the design principles of the popular 18W/8545 continuing the tradition with a slim frame aluminum chassis...

audioxpress.com

Bl(x) looks pretty good, Xmax is decent. L(x) isn't Purifi level but still fairly good, roughly like the "old" KEF LS50 driver. Electrically, 1.5*Zmin is reached at a bit over 4 kHz - you don't want to cross it that high anyway in the face of the breakup below 5 kHz. In the face of L(x), I wouldn't run it super high and subject it to lots of bass at the same time. A 2.5ish-kHz XO with a waveguided tweeter seems sensible.

Tuning is quite deep for a driver this size while Qts remains low (and efficiency actually isn't half-bad considering that, given how much it tends to scale with fs). The review used a simulated 0.61 ft³ (about 17 l) vented enclosure tuned to 36 Hz, and going by the results you could go a bit bigger still.

 

[Arindal]

Xmax is decent.

Just looking at the spec sheet, xmax and Vd appear not that great. In practice, I fully agree that most of people will probably use it in a bigger vented enclosure for a 2-way design. Something like 25l would be ideal, allowing a tuning freq slightly south of 40Hz with the vent taking over a lot of work. So the driver will actually not use a lot of xmax, or solely in a narrow band. In the xpress sim, this band is a bit broader, between 55 and 80Hz.

a bit over 4 kHz - you don't want to cross it that high anyway in the face of the breakup below 5 kHz.

It is not just the breakup. If you compare on-axis and 45deg FR, you notice something unusual is happening already at 2.5K: dispersion at first stays wide with increasing frequency, subsequently narrowing down quickly (starting at 3.2K). If the diaphragm is anyhow sounding similar to the discontinued Focals, your x-over recommendation around 2.5K (or lower) is ideal.