The New Advent Loudspeaker Review (Vintage Speaker)

[beagleman]

Any box speaker in a normal room will generally excite resonances in the room between 40 Hz and about 120 Hz, add to this the overhang of bass energy released by the speaker / cabinet after the initial driving current has fallen away and you get a particular sound, which can be boomy. EQ schemes like Dirac can reduce the initial resonance but can do nothing about the stored energy that is smearing the sound. We have become used to this sound as far as bass reproduction goes, and to many this can sound "right" with good "midbass slam" if the bass is not too peaker in the ~80 Hz realm.

As noted by Linkwitz ( see https://www.linkwitzlab.com/rooms.htm ) dipole speakers - open-baffle woofers and panel speakers of any kind - excite these room resonances far less, and also don't exhibit the slow release of stored energy from enclosures like box speakers do.

Will never forget, when I worked at one audio store in the 80s, a guy brought in a cassette tape of his favorite test tracks...


First song was Emerson Lake Palmer "Lucky man" and he cranked up the volume, hit the loudness and we ran it through some large JBL towers.....
OMG the boomy bass notes are etched into my mind to this day. I remember stuff vibrating in the room and trying not to laugh at how boomy and crazy it sounded.

After the song was over, he says to me "NOW THAT IS BASS!"

 

[gino1961]

Hi thank you very much for this very interesting review of a famous and very popular model

Distortion was reasonable at 86 dBSPL but then went to hell at 96:

This is to be expected of the drivers of the era. The large woofer doesn't have to move much at lower amplitudes so does well. But when asked to moved, it can't do so with the precision of current drivers. Tweeter also falls apart.

I think that back then there were indeed some notable exceptions like Acoustic Research best models and JBL for instance
I love your distortion graphs a lot
Thank you very much again