Speakers w/Full-range Drivers

[Jaxjax]

The Altec 420-8B BIFLEX does make me think. I've had the PIM-8 in 2way before & it was my forever remembered best track in audio I've ever listened to. I broke 1 & stopped using vintage drivers hence my going for modern pro coaxial build but....That Altec 420 is tempting, especially after reading till my brain exploded on someone who heavily corrected a pair in DSP & run them on their own. I suspect they sound excellent, especially for us way past 50 that have hearing loss past 10k

 

[xanalog]

The only 'quantifiable' advantage of an extended range single driver is simplicity.

But "extended" is not necessarily 'full range'.
Would a concentric design, a la MoFi SourcePoint10, split the differences between full-ish, single-ish and simple-ish?

 

[mhardy6647]

But "extended" is not necessarily 'full range'.
Would a concentric design, a la MoFi SourcePoint10, split the differences between full-ish, single-ish and simple-ish?

The extended vs. full is the whole point -- 20 Hz to 20 kHz is a big ask for one transducer. It can be done, but requires tricks (e.g., augmentation of bass with a horn or corner loading; some sort of trickery to extend the treble response and dispersion, and/or electrical contouring - i.e., EQ). Thus, some of the bizarre Lowther enclosures of the golden age, whizzer cones, metal dustcaps, and the Bose 901 EQ box (e.g.).

As to coaxial designs -- well, yes and no. The Altec Duplex was introduced in the 1940s (around the same time as Paul W. Klipsch's Klipschorn) and was, and is, superb in sound quality and almost full range. But it's still got a crossover, two voicecoils and two driven diaphragms.
Loudspeakers are all about the art of compromise.

 

[Poultrygeist]

I built a pair of these Lowther DX3 MLTL speakers from 3/4" MDF during the covid shutdown. They are so large and heavy I use hand trucks to move them around. Their size and design gives me bass that I never thought possible from a single 8 inch wide band driver. Here are some of the designer's measurements and listening impressions. They were not difficult to build and the plans are in this article. Home Depot did the straight cuts for free as I bought their MDF.

http://www.quarter-wave.com/Project04/Correction_Filter.html

 

[theaudiopath]

Mmm Interesting stuff. First post here BTW. Played W a few fullrangers in my time. Coral Beta 8's, Jordan X92's which were both quite horrible. In fact those Jordans in particular were unusable. 15 Hz variance in Fs for a "matched" set of 8 For a 4 aside line array. Promptly sent back to whence they came for a refund! The corals lasted about 3 months before being resold. The ragged peak in high end response just put a nasty hurt on my ears! The winner out of that fullrange misadventure was 100 litre cab Philips 12 inch fullrangers I bought for $25!
Built by a radar technician. With a correction levelling circuit I plagerised & modded to a bit milder in levelling off Troel Graveson's website. Swapping out the Philips tweeters for Fostex bullets crossed over @ 7 Khz and the original owner had already removed the troublesome whizzer central cones. Turned out to be truly AMAZING! I absolutely LOVED em! These could @ least subjectively, hold their own against my Tannoy Canterbury SE's. @ a total cost complete with with mods of exactly 1/100th that of my Tannoy's. Playing the Cruel Sea The honeymoon is over. Tex & the band were THERE in my lounge room. Like with the Tannoys. That reach out and touch illusion of realism. Like the Tannoys. They made the ones & zeros of digital come ALIVE. & they cost me next to NOTHING!
In one of my DUMBEST audio moves ever! I stupidly sold them! Playing with CHN110 Mark Audio's ATM for some new PC nearfield toys for my tube amp. There Definitely is something special with the right driver in the right cab ASSISTED fullrange. With a little bit of help @ the frequency extremes. Advertised QTS is .41 so it should work ok in a sealed enclosure of around 12 litres. I simply don't see the point of pushing the little buggers into nasty intermodulation & high THD territory by trying to make em go too low with a reflex or TL enclosure. When my quite decent PC sub can do it WAY better. Seeing both are sealed. Should match nicely. Besides my PC room space simply doesnt allow large cabs anyway.
These will be intimately close nearfield. So will see how they behave themselves raw in their teardrop moddded blanda mat cabs. 4 @ 28 cm diameter &

Bunnings 4 L fibre cement garden pot wave traps tacked on the back. Sounds cheezy I know. But hey, I"m a cheezy kinda guy! Hahahahaha! And I'll filter or eq as needed from there.
I also think fullrange is false advertising. As 20 to 20 KHz fullrange single driver with high resolution simply does not exist. Even the Geman Physiks unicorn. Basically an ohm walsh teutonically improved design omni driver in a horn enclosure barely makes it to 40Hz but truly might be the only one that covers that close to full range with any kind of resolution approaching true high end fidelity. But they cost around $35K Au, OUCH! Also that audience looks quite pricey for what it is. $8.5K Au

Nicersised frequency plots & CSD on that white paper don't mean much. I prefer RAW unsmoothed UGLY data. IE the TRUTH. That "white paper" looks more like advertising BS. That can be made to make ANYTHING look good. But it does have quite a few good reviews. But from my experience that only means the company paid a few professional audio prostitutes to lie to everyone about how fantastic it is. Oooh baby you're so BIG. Ooh! you're SO good! Write it up = EASY money! Then again I'm a cynical bastard. And it could be a great speaker system. But unless you audition it yourself. Its all mental masturbation. But if you audition it. & decide $8.5K is a price you're happily willing to pay to live with it long term. THEN & ONLY then does it qualify as REALLY good! Like what happend when I had more dollars than sense. And laid down $25K nearly 2 decades ago to buy my "dream speaker" Only to find out a decade later I could have had 90% of the same thrill for 1/100th the cost!

Yup, An audiofool!

 

[xanalog]

Welcome aboard, @theaudiopath,

....Only to find out a decade later I could have had 90% of the same thrill for 1/100th the cost!
Yup, An audiofool!

But take joy as a recovering audiophool!

 

[hex168]

Mmm Interesting stuff. First post here BTW. Played W a few fullrangers in my time. Coral Beta 8's, Jordan X92's which were both quite horrible. In fact those Jordans in particular were unusable. 15 Hz variance in Fs for a "matched" set of 8 For a 4 aside line array. Promptly sent back to whence they came for a refund! The corals lasted about 3 months before being resold. The ragged peak in high end response just put a nasty hurt on my ears! The winner out of that fullrange misadventure was 100 litre cab Philips 12 inch fullrangers I bought for $25! Built by a radar technician. With a correction levelling circuit I plagerised & modded to a bit milder in levelling off Troel Graveson's website. Swapping out the Philips tweeters for Fostex bullets crossed over @ 7 Khz and the original owner had already removed the troublesome whizzer central cones. Turned out to be truly AMAZING! I absolutely LOVED em! These could @ least subjectively, hold their own against my Tannoy Canterbury SE's. @ a total cost complete with with mods of exactly 1/100th that of my Tannoy's. Playing the Cruel Sea The honeymoon is over. Tex & the band were THERE in my lounge room. Like with the Tannoys. That reach out and touch illusion of realism. Like the Tannoys. They made the ones & zeros of digital come ALIVE. & they cost me next to NOTHING! In one of my DUMBEST audio moves ever! I stupidly sold them! Playing with CHN110 Mark Audio's ATM for some new PC nearfield toys for my tube amp. There Definitely is something special with the right driver in the right cab ASSISTED fullrange. With a little bit of help @ the frequency extremes. Advertised QTS is .41 so it should work ok in a sealed enclosure of around 12 litres. I simply don't see the point of pushing the little buggers into nasty intermodulation & high THD territory by trying to make em go too low with a reflex or TL enclosure. When my quite decent PC sub can do it WAY better. Seeing both are sealed. Should match nicely. Besides my PC room space simply doesnt allow large cabs anyway. These will be intimately close nearfield. So will see how they behave themselves raw in their teardrop moddded blanda mat cabs. 4 @ 28 cm diameter &t Bunnings 4 L fibre cement garden pot wave traps tacked on the back. Sounds cheezy I know. But hey, I"m a cheezy kinda guy! Hahahahaha! And I'll filter or eq as needed from there. I also think fullrange is false advertising. As 20 to 20 KHz fullrange single driver with high resolution simply does not exist. Even the Geman Physiks unicorn. Basically an ohm walsh teutonically improved design omni driver in a horn enclosure barely makes it to 40Hz but truly might be the only one that covers that close to full range with any kind of resolution approaching true high end fidelity. But they cost around $35K Au, OUCH! Also that audience looks quite pricey for what it is. $8.5K Au Also nicersised frequency plots & CSD on that white paper don't mean much. I prefer RAW unsmoothed UGLY data. IE the TRUTH. That "white paper" looks more like advertising BS. That can be made to make ANYTHING look good. But it does have quite a few good reviews. But from my experience that only means the company paid a few professional audio prostitutes to lie to everyone about how fantastic it is. Oooh baby you're so BIG. Ooh! you're SO good! Write it up = EASY money! Then again I'm a cynical bastard. And it could be a great speaker system. But unless you audition it yourself. Its all mental masturbation. But if you audition it. & decide $8.5K is a price you're happily willing to pay to live with it long term. THEN & ONLY then does it qualify as REALLY good! Like what happend when I had more dollars than sense. And laid down $25K nearly 2 decades ago to buy my "dream speaker" Only to find out a decade later I could have had 90% of the same thrill for 1/100th the cost! Yup, An audiofool!

Indeed, welcome aboard! One request please - please consider paragraphs, that block of text is hard to read, which is a shame since you have some interesting things to say.

 

[theaudiopath]

Cheers for the encouragement xanalog & the advice Hex.
Unfortunately I cannot find any pictures of the Philips full rangers ATM. Which is kinda sad. As they are one of my all time favourites. But I'm of two minds weather to mention them further. Too many scalpers and predators out there charging WAY too much for this stuff. And that takes a lot of the fun out of a fun hobby. But I got lucky Both the seller of the Philips and me @ that time didnt know what they had.
Before anyone says anything. I DO know NOW!. That front baffle for the Jordans was WAY wrong. Part of the learning process. Screw up & DON'T DO IT AGAIN! Its called aversion therapy. Comb filtering issues aside. It wasnt as bad as you might first think. The front baffle inserts that flush mounted the drivers were ultra low density cork. So it absorbed more than it reflected. But that was NOT the problem. Baffles can be altered & fixed. The problem was ZERO quality control and absolutely no consistency between those drivers when measured.
That cannot be fixed.
Perhaps I got really unlucky. As I never found any other mention of such issues on line. But I seriously doubt that. Because if it was fine. Why did Jordan move their production from China over to Scanspeak Europe? Bugs me, because I really, REALLY wanted those mini me's to work. But they simply didn't. Denying reality is NEVER a good option!
Glad some find my rant interesting & hope the pictures make it a little more interesting.
Cheers

 

[ampguy]

The Foster/Fostex FE-103 4" "fullrange" driver has been in production in various morphs since the early 1960s, with only minor "improvements" (changes). The biggest one was perhaps going from a large AlNiCo magnet to a nominally equivalent ceramic magnet many years ago.
It is an OK driver within its passband, although suffering from a bit of the typical (but not universal) Fostex "fullrange" driver "shouty-ness".
Gazillions of these have been sold under numerous brand names and catalog numbers. In the US, they Radio Shack 40-1197 was/is probably the best known.

I mention this mostly due to this well-known Electronics Illustrated article from Nov. 1965 with a design for an implementation of this driver in a small box including - for better or worse - a somewhat rudimentary contour filter (meant as a BSC, at least I presume). The plans were included with the purchase of a 40-1197 from R/S for at least several years.

https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Electronics-Illustrated/Electronics-Illustrated-1965-11.pdf

View attachment 419480

I actually have a mismatched "pair" of these, found (separately) at the good ol' Harvard, MA town "transfer station" ("dump", although not actually a dump per se) decades ago now. One of them is missing its back, and thus its coil and capacitor network, too.
View attachment 419481

I've got the same Kanspeas with the FF105 Foextex drivers. Great setup for a desk!

 

[Waxx]

I have quiet a bit experience with those, and also with other types like the here popular dsp based multiway studio monitors.

The single driver speaker will never be a neutral monitor like speaker with a flat response and even dispertion, but i still love them, especially for close listening where a multiway get phase errors (because the different drivers don't sum that close). There for me for personal enjoyment nothing beats my Mark Audio Alpair 10.3 based speakers (own design).

But the limitations are true, the DI rises a lot, distortion goes faster up when the volume goes up and bass is often an issue. So they don't work well on high volume, and often even not on medium volume

High engineered modern drivers like Mark Audio (and the originator of that style, E.J. Jordan and other spinoffs like EAD, or the Scanspeak 10M series) do minimise those issues quiet good, older (Lowther or Philips) style fullrange drivers are way more affected by that.

I also have an own design waw with the same fullrange driver and a scanspeak 10" woofer, that works on higher volume and is eq'd to the room to reasonable flat at the seeting position. But it will never be as neutral as a pair of Genelec or Neuman speakers, that is true. But i don't like (especially Genelec) for listening for pleasure, they to much draw me in technical details of the music, so i forget to look at the total piece. They are to analytical for me and are exellent in a studio, but not for my enjoyment.

I'm building speakers like that for others also in the past, but now i'm getting a bit bored by building those so i'm more back at multiway. But i won't dismiss my to main speaker sets with the Mark Audio drivers because i'm not bored by listening to those. But there is no challenge for me anymore in working with those.

But again, if you are after neutral even dispertion low distortion speakers, these drivers and the speakers arround it are not your cup of tea, their magic is in the absolute point source with a perfect phase alignment, something that is very hard to archive with a multiway setup. A waw is close, and the phase issues are (if there are) in the register where it does not matter that much (below 300hz idealy) for good sound. I cross my waw with a steep (dsp) filter at 250Hz now.