If you are using what’s in effect a filter what’s the point of using a full range speaker instead of a 2-way and use a crossover that use similar number of components?
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Single full range drivers
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Waxx
Major Contributor
Single point source that is time and phase aligned where the cone of the woofer is not the variable waveguide of the tweeter and so disturb the sound. (the problem with coaxial cone drivers). And no, this is no monitor style neutral speaker, it was not ment for that (not by me and not by Fane). It's something that works well outside or in big spaces. It goes loud on little what, and does that with decent bass, till subfrequencies on low power (<20w) what is not a problem with measured 98dB sensivity (advertised 101dB), even for in my garden (the purpose of my build). This is where they mostly are used (but stored inside), in my garden.
Nice house, man!
The speaker in question is a decent product, but as you say, decidedly not intended to be used beside your couch. I would argue that a small airport could upgrade its announcement system with these, so that the narrow dispersion is taken to its best advantage. The large cone area and so far extended frequency response would massively enhance speech intelligibility for male speakers. And once again, like with the Pererless TC9FD, how marvelous even such simple and darn cheap designs became in the recent years!
For my garden I use big DML panels plus subs because of their wider dispersion (100°x70° up to 14kHz), but only rarely for obvious reasons. Not? The wind's sound in the trees ...
Some years ago a customer called me with an unusual situation.
He has a special-needs son who likes to watch children's shows like Sesame Street, and he wanted to make that as enjoyable for his son as possible. So he tried using some nice two-way bookshelf speakers to improve the sound quality over the little TV speaker. The sound quality was much better to the father but was worse for the son, who could no longer clearly understand the words.
I figured the son was having trouble processing the voices because of the degraded time-domain response of the two-way speaker. David Griesinger talks about the perceptual benefit of having the overtones all arrive at the exact same instant as the fundamentals for maximum vocal clarity, and this is an area where the "one-way" speaker in the TV had better behavior than the two-way bookshelf speakers.
So I directed the customer to Louis Chochos of Omega Audio, who set him up with [wizzerless] single-driver ("fullrange") speakers, and the customer and his son are both very happy with the results.
So imo there is a place for what a good single-driver speaker does well, even if there are some inevitable compromises involved.
He has a special-needs son who likes to watch children's shows like Sesame Street, and he wanted to make that as enjoyable for his son as possible. So he tried using some nice two-way bookshelf speakers to improve the sound quality over the little TV speaker. The sound quality was much better to the father but was worse for the son, who could no longer clearly understand the words.
I figured the son was having trouble processing the voices because of the degraded time-domain response of the two-way speaker. David Griesinger talks about the perceptual benefit of having the overtones all arrive at the exact same instant as the fundamentals for maximum vocal clarity, and this is an area where the "one-way" speaker in the TV had better behavior than the two-way bookshelf speakers.
So I directed the customer to Louis Chochos of Omega Audio, who set him up with [wizzerless] single-driver ("fullrange") speakers, and the customer and his son are both very happy with the results.
So imo there is a place for what a good single-driver speaker does well, even if there are some inevitable compromises involved.
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Nope! A single driver used wide-band shows, necessarily, huge aberrations in what you call 'time domain'. Please, in case show some data, thank you!
jbattman1016
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Could someone even use what Omega Audio is selling with a modern AVR that's pumping out !140W/channel? I understand at normal runtime, it is much lower, but what about during room calibration? One would not want to damage the speaker on the first use.
A wizzerless wideband driver has no more time domain aberrations than any other cone which is driven into well-controlled breakup. I should have specified that this was a wizzerless driver, and have edited my post accordingly.
I don't have a library of relevant data on fullrange drivers, sorry.
Crossovers introduce a phase differential between the highpass and lowpass drivers, which often sums to one wavelength (360 degrees) in the crossover region. This places the lowpass driver "in phase with" the highpass driver in the phase domain, but delayed by one full cycle relative to the highpass driver in the time domain. A single-driver speaker does not have this type of issue.
Here is researcher David Griesinger on the importance of the harmonics lining up with the fundamentals for the sake of clarity and intelligibility (he uses the term "proximity"); the context is concert hall psychacoustics, but imo the underlying principle is relevant to home audio. To illustrate his point about speech intelligibility he uses a small single-driver speaker which has a linear phase response from about 100 Hz to 8 kHz. From where it's cued up he gets his point across in a little less than two minutes:
Imo the whole lecture is excellent, but most of it is outside the scope of this thread.
I don't know; you'd have to ask them. My instinct is that 140 watts is probably way too much power for a single-driver speaker, but on the other hand their efficiency tends to be fairly high so less power is needed for a given SPL. Use "small speaker" mode to protect them from bass excursions, which are not only potentially damaging but also introduce intermodulation distortion which degrades clarity at high SPLs.
That being said, I would not recommend single-driver speakers for an application that was demanding in terms of SPL.
Waxx
Major Contributor
Thanks, it's a ancient fortified Picardian "square farm" (ferme carrée) in the Hainaut region in Belgium, going back over 1000 years but rebuild several times in history. I only live in a part of it as it's huge. It's now converted/divided in 8 houses, all of decent size (arrround 150m² living space, wich is above average in Belgium) and updated to the 21st century on comfort and amenities.
These farms are all over the place in the ancient "Picard" region (Hainaut in Belgium and the french department of Picardia and the east side of the department Nord-Pas De Calais) and were where the lower lords in feodal times used to live. Higher lords lived in castles, that we also have here in abundance but are too expensive for my wallet...
... and that's the point with urban legends ...
Waxx
Major Contributor
Each multiway and single driver have their good and their bad side, and should be used in the right application. I get why "ASR people" are not fan of those in general, but i still love them even lf they are not neutral.
And there is also a big variation in kind of fullrange drivers and quality. Some high rated drivers are not good at all but are overhyped with snake oil, while others like the Mark Audio CHN110 are overlooked sleepers, that will change your view on fullrange drivers. It's fairly neutral and can do deep bass. It's main limitations are dispertion (good for a fullrange, but not like a dome/small woofer combo) and SPL, not neutrality or distortion. The 12" Fane is also not bad at all in reality.
And if you don't like them, there are plenty of other options...
I suppose the traditional response would be for me to counter with a demand that you present data to prove your position.
And thus would begin yet another internet forum death spiral, each of us asserting that the other has the burden of proof and/or dismissing whatever the other person says. We'd start with insinuations and if those fail to win the day, we'd escalate to accusations.
Thanks for the invitation, but no thanks.
That being said, I am interested in your opinion on the time-domain behavior of single-driver speakers versus multi-way speakers. No proof demanded. Maybe you know something I don't know, in which case I would rather learn from you than squabble with you.
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We'd have to have measurements of both speakers to settle the debate so agree this is a dead end. I would say the story sounds possible to me because we don't know how badly the crossover might have mangled the response of the 2-way. It's also worth emphasizing that the listener in this story was (I take it) not neurotypical and so could have had a different sensitivity to timing than other people. That was sort of the point. Enough variables that we can accept this as entirely possible IMO.
My recollection is that the man's son was either non-verbal (he did not speak) or he spoke very little, but he clearly enjoyed watching children's television shows, and his ability to clearly hear the dialogue in particular made a big difference in his enjoyment. So yes, he was "not neurotypical".
Nice to learn new terms, which politely set someone apart. As far as it is about the merits of wide-band versus multi-way speakers, many things might be scrutinized. As far as I'm concerned the 'phase' thing is described as -> group delay. Sure, an x-over will typicall introduce some, but for two-ways especially there's proven no problem with less than 1ms of g/d. The x-over as such just works fine.
On the other hand, there's no typical wide-band driver, as necessarily all will have to overcome technical problems. Resonances to begin with, while resonances introduce group delay. The bigger the driver, the lower the resonances and the group delay increases proportionally.
The notion that a single-driver, wide-band design is free from x-over introduced group delay is tautologically true, because there is no x-over. More power to you, but do not forget other sources of group delay.
A standard two-way will also have a completely different radiation pattern. It will mostly not be shouty in the mids; to the contrary by design. The wide-band often is shouty, emphasizing the frequency bands that are essential for human speech (all languages).
And so forth ...
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All this talk about no phase shift and point source being somehow more "natural" is kind of pointless as the human voice apparatus isn't a point source and introduce a lot of delays by itself. I mean the head radiates in all directions, chest too, there's some sound coming out of nose and it's delayed compared to mouth, which is delayed compared to chest or throat where the vocal cords are generating vibrations etc. The recording with one microphone pointed at mouth flattens the voice to a single phantom point, but that's just the beginning of a distortions introduced in every step of a sound reproduction. Phase coherent point source helps a lot when listening in a near field and that was the reason I choose Genelecs 8351B, but at 2 meters or more I wouldn't worry about it too much, as the room will destroy any resemblance of a flat phase anyway
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According to psychoacoustician David Griesinger, if you mess up the phase of the harmonics, speech becomes difficult to understand in the presence of noise. The clip below is cued up to where he makes this point. In other words, the ear/brain system relies on the harmonic sequence's phase as well as its spectral content to differentiate "signal" from "noise" (particularly above 1 kHz):
I've also read where an audio person's significant other, English wasn't their first language.
Using a full range driver was easier for her to understand what was being said watching shows and movies.
I've always (subjective) felt full range drivers and 6db time/phase aligned speakers were more intelligible.
Usually freq response, dispersion, distortion, etc., those are far mores audible.
Dunlavy I think said you have good sounding speakers, bad sounding speakers, and you have accurate speakers.
Short of a live violin compared in an anechoic room, I think we hear it as different, not necessarily better.
Using a full range driver was easier for her to understand what was being said watching shows and movies.
I've always (subjective) felt full range drivers and 6db time/phase aligned speakers were more intelligible.
Usually freq response, dispersion, distortion, etc., those are far mores audible.
Dunlavy I think said you have good sounding speakers, bad sounding speakers, and you have accurate speakers.
Short of a live violin compared in an anechoic room, I think we hear it as different, not necessarily better.
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Do you acknowledge how much the signal to the, as you put it, hopefully not speaking of me, ear/brain system is altered in his example? This won't ever be a remote case for speaker replay. It is beyond orders of magnitude, it is something entirely different.
Anecdote (I love it to pull in subjective experience): 've got large, pro/ DML speakers. These are characterized by utterly random phase in the acoustical output. More so, the designer of such a thing longs for the most chaotic phase he possibly could get, as the better the underlying principle it brought to work. Result: brilliant speech intelligibility due to effectivly avoiding descrete in-room reflections, because phase is not only frequency, but also direction dependent. No such effect that Griesinger refers to. Must be something different, right?
Back on topic, one should understand that Griesinger's explanation targets a scientific experiment asking for the very foundational mechanisms of human hearing. It is in no way, not even remotely connected to audio. People must understand that such basic science is most often beyond common comprehension, targeting at very tiny aspects of the hearing, elementary aspects that don't make any sense without the greater context of other tiny aspects, the audiophile doesn't know the least about. (Otherwise he wasn't an audiophile, I guarantee that.)
There's simply no beef in the notion that wide-band single is better with phase. To the contrary. But it's not me to prove the exceptional claim. you stated above. with "... degraded time-domain response of the two-way speaker. David Griesinger talks about ..."
Comprehension and retention of ideas are degraded when the effective "signal to noise ratio" is poor, whether due to phase issues or direct/reverberant sound ratios or reflection arrival times or whatever.
When the signal-to-noise ratio is poor, by the time our ear/brain system has deciphered the sounds and recognized the word, the person speaking has moved on to the next word. The amount of concentration needed just to understand the words is very tiring, and there is neither enough time nor enough brain power left to comprehend complex ideas and move them into long-term memory.
The classic example of this is the college kids who sit in the back of a big lecture hall. The reverberation is typically so bad back there that it is exhausting to try to understand the professor's words, much less comprehend the complex ideas presented and place them into long-term memory. So the students in the back of a big lecture hall typically either get a headache or fall asleep halfway through the lecture, with predictable effects on their grades. So tell your kids and grandkids to SIT UP FRONT!! There are very valid acoustic and psychoacoustic reasons for doing so!
Griesinger shows that phase degradation results in intelligibility degradation. Exactly where the audibility threshold is, I don't know.
I have no experience with DML systems, but "avoiding discrete in-room reflections" sounds like a very desirable attribute to me.
In my experience loudspeaker phase matters under some conditions. And in my experience loudspeaker directivity usually matters a whole lot more. Or to be more precise, ime the arrival time, arrival direction, strength, and spectral content of the reflections matter a whole lot more than loudspeaker phase response usually does, and these things are influenced by directivity.
I happen to think human hearing is very much connected to audio.
For instance earlier in the lecture Griesinger describes a critical distance from the orchestra beyond which clarity (he uses the word "proximity") is significantly degraded, and this observation apparently correlates with the ear's significantly degraded ability to understand speech once the phase degradation passes a certain threshold. I think of these as "effective signal-to-noise ratio" issues.
In the course of product development my company did controlled blind testing wherein the direct-to-reflection sound ratio was adjusted by ear to the point where a degradation of clarity first became detectable. The SPL of the direct sound was held constant and the SPL of the reflections was adjusted by increments of less than one decibel. The test subjects arrived at the exact same clarity-degradation threshold for the reflection energy SPL, to within less than one decibel.
So our finding was consistent with Griesinger's finding that the onset of clarity degradation (whether due to phase degradation or due to D/R ratio) is characterized by a definite threshold beyond which perception is shifted.
And imo this characteristic of human hearing has implications for audio, as it indicates that there are thresholds best not crossed.
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The original signal was transformed into another dimension. One may question if such alterations are at least related to the hearing! Hence no disclosure of any hypothetical mechanism that makes the change for the receiving device under test, the human namely. Science? Model, hypothesis, measurement. None of that here, I actually don't like to say that.
Sidenote only, DML have as chaotic phase response as humanly possible with a speaker. Doesn't degrade audio quality. A pratical case against your claim.
Human hearing is. Griesinger, whom you quote as to support your claims and musings, is talking about a scientific experiment, that remotely has to do with phase--maybe! It is only so that the common audiophile isn't educated in neuroscience, physiology, mathematics, so called psychoacoustics and stuff. From my perspective even it is sometimes hard to understand what some experiments and describing papers are after. Often the statistics is flawed, but more often the investigations are at best after elementary , let's say, correlations within the hearing to generate more, yet unsolved problems in understanding even the basic mechanisms. Do you think that investigating the primary visual cortex's internal signal processing helps with improving the quality of printed fotos of sculptures? Long way, isn't it?
Agreed, and I suggested to the board to investigate personal thresholds for e/g intermodulation distortion. Interest was nil, zero, nada. Utter silence, ignored. And then again some papers on psychoacoustics are thrown in as to support some wacky audio gosip, and the fellow didn't read it himself--no time to do so, but the title seemed to fit ...
Please just acknowledge that an x-over doesn't pose a problem in time domain, and that single wide-band drivers exhibit at least as much phase alterations to the original signals as non-pathological multy-way speakers do. In case you don't it is your turn to deduce a fully connected chain of arguments for your claim, as my stance is supported by all the literature.
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