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

Jeff M.

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Dec 30, 2023
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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
 

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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.
 
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
 
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.
 
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.
 
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