Palmer Orbit 11 Monitor Review

[Tovarich007]

@illusonic
My expertise and experience are not sufficient to agree or disagree with your analysis, but this is pretty interesting indeed.
My intuition (maybe right or maybe wrong) is that you focus on something that I have often listened to.
No small speaker I've heard, whatever its extension in the low range, with or without sub, can fullfill a large room in a realistic way like a big one can do, but I can't pretend I've listened to all speakers on earth, far from it of course.

And your houghts on the Orbit (a small speaker tending to radiate as a big one) reinforces the great quality of this speaker, despite its inevitable limitations and little flaws, as i pointed out in my previous post..

 

[thewas]

I don't argue against limitations of the Orbits. Every speaker has its limits. But Spinorama score has only limited significance in that regard. Generally, I don't see that little wiggles in directivity are of higher importance than, for example, radiation into the whole rear hemisphere. Spinorama score only cares about the wiggles, not about total dispersion control. But the latter is imo more important for actual sound. In other words, I care less about transition regions between angular ranges that receive high btw. low sound level, than about the size of the respective angular ranges.

I agree that the Spinorama as a single metric is quite limited and like Toole recommends its preferable to see the whole angle plots. There the directivity issues can be clearly seen too which limit also its maximum score:

A sub cannot enlarge a small speaker. For example a Neumann KH 80 is not a good speaker for larger rooms despite 8.7 score (EQ+sub). And it's not only dynamic limitation. Also radiation pattern is not optimal for larger rooms. It becomes omnidirectional at fairly high frequency, which is to be expected from a small speaker. As a result, low direct-to-reflected sound-ratio causes a blurry sound image, when auditioned from typical livingroom distance. Small speakers are best for close listening distance.

If this wasn't the case, everyone could simply use a miniature speaker like the Audio Smile Little British Monitor, add subs and show all the big speakers how to make good sound. That's just not a realistic expectation. Also note how simple it is to get extremely high Spinorama scores with mini monitors. There is not even a waveguide on the tweeter. But with sub and EQ the score is 8.9 and even without EQ the sub alone gets it to 8.3. It beats the KH 80 score without any acoustic optimization. Radiation is omni below 800Hz, which is even wider than KH 80. And due to small drivers, vertical directivity is also very good for a non-coaxial speaker.

Now compare these small speakers to KH 420, which is somewhat directional down to 300Hz. Directivity plays an important role for small vs. big speaker sound. The Orbits take directivity control one step further by cancelling more rear sound than the KH 420 removes by acoustic shading from it's large enclosure. The Orbits are small speakers with radiation and low-frequency extension resembling very large speakers. Therefore, comparison of the Orbits against mini monitors based on Spinorama score makes no sense to me.

Of course a small loudspeaker cannot replace a large one neither in terms of SPL not directivity narrowness and control low, therefore the score should be used keeping that in mind and comparing similar size and directivity models.

 

[illusonic]

I agree that the Spinorama as a single metric is quite limited and like Toole recommends its preferable to see the whole angle plots. There the directivity issues can be clearly seen too which limit also its maximum score:

Directivity errors are easy to spot in Orbit plots and any improvement would be welcome also from an asthetic point of view. I like looking at clean graphs. Based on Palmers's comments in this forum, no updates are to be expected any time soon, as they are confident about the quality of their product. And I agree with them, because I value the larger picture higher than the details.

Once directivity is reasonably controlled over a wider frequency range, the transition region from high to low sound pressure can be smoothed. Assuming there are no extreme directivity errors in the treble region, the first step becomes more important to me. Spinorama score shows the effect of the second step.

If Spinorama score is quite good (e.g. >6-7), I don't expect further improvements to result in huge audible differences. General dispersion shape including vertical and low-frequency dispersion, low-frequency extension and dynamic range become more important. Therefore, I would choose the 8.3 EQ+sub score of the Orbits over the 8.7 score of the Little British Monitors at any time.

Below comparison to Genelec 8361A shows the size-class the Orbits are comfortably playing in when it comes to low-frequency directivity. Even the big Genelec spills more sound at the back than the Orbits.

Of course a small loudspeaker cannot replace a large one neither in terms of SPL not directivity narrowness and control low, therefore the score should be used keeping that in mind and comparing similar size and directivity models.

Absolutely. That's why I thought your long list wasn't a sensible comparison.

 

[illusonic]

@illusonic
My expertise and experience are not sufficient to agree or disagree with your analysis, but this is pretty interesting indeed.
My intuition (maybe right or maybe wrong) is that you focus on something that I have often listened to.
No small speaker I've heard, whatever its extension in the low range, with or without sub, can fullfill a large room in a realistic way like a big one can do, but I can't pretend I've listened to all speakers on earth, far from it of course.

And your houghts on the Orbit (a small speaker tending to radiate as a big one) reinforces the great quality of this speaker, despite its inevitable limitations and little flaws, as i pointed out in my previous post..

I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "fullfill a large room in a realistic way". But one thing I noticed with the Orbits is that they provide better sound image focus from larger distance (e.g. 4-5m) than slightly bigger non-cardioid speakers in the same room. Higher direct-to-reflected sound-ratio is most likely the reason for this improvement. If the front wall (behind the speakers) gets less sound, some direct and a lot of indirect reflections are reduced.