Top end monitors "box sound" vs OB

[jmf11]

Sure there are important considerations between ported and sealed designs.

My wondering on this thread was if both of them would always come with an audible "box sound" signature compared to a design without box as an OB.

Seems that it is not the case for well designed boxes.

 

[tuga]

Sure there are important considerations between ported and sealed designs.

My wondering on this thread was if both of them would always come with an audible "box sound" signature compared to a design without box as an OB.

Seems that it is not the case for well designed boxes.

Linkwitz had this to say about the TAD Model 1 (incidentally the evolution of this model, the Reference 1, was one of the best commercial speakers I've listened to:

It has become a useful learning experience for me to see and hear the latest loudspeakers, that aspire to the absolute best in sound performance. For this I drive to Las Vegas with my spouse for the International Consumer Electronics Show and T.H.E. SHOW. Usually these are large and expensive speakers. I pay little attention to 2-way systems since they cannot reproduce the full spectrum at adequate volume levels. This year the outstanding leader in the conventional box speaker category was the $40,000 TAD Model-1. A superbly executed design under the leadership of Andrew Jones (KEF, Infinity, Pioneer), it exemplifies what can be achieved within the box paradigm. All the drivers and the cabinet design are very much from ground up and testify to years of learning and experience. I can only hope that customers for this type of speaker finally recognize that what had been offered to them as a statement product by the market leader in this price and status category is rather crude in comparison.

https://www.linkwitzlab.com/design_of_loudspeakers.htm#B

 

[Adi777]

There are good reasons that open baffle speakers are not common.

Which reasons? Maybe not common, but increasingly popular, at least in the DIY world.

 

[anmpr1]

I had to ask myself though, what even is the box sound? Can I hear the box sound or the cabinets of my current speakers?

Perhaps it's best viewed within an historical context--at least for us 'old timers'. I grew up in the era that transitioned from large theater types, to smaller form factor 'acoustic suspension' loudspeakers. The latter were touted as the beez kneez by the popular press, and even iconoclast Gordon Holt, because of their 'smoothness' and general LF response. I get/got that, and it was certainly true, as far as it went. But to me (and for a lot of other listeners) those designs never sounded 'right'; instead, muffled and compressed. As if the sound was somehow 'hidden' inside the box, trying to escape. Never seeming immediate and real.

One day (I guess it was 1973 or so) I did an A/B between the 'gold standard' AR 3a, and the JBL L100, which I had not heard, hitherto. For all it's recognized faults, the JBL sounded more like 'live' music, because it sounded like the sound was coming from 'outside' of the box. I remember it to this day, frankly being quite shocked. Then and there I bought a pair (which I still own).

I hope I am not misinterpreting, or otherwise misrepresenting him, because he is on par with SL in his own right, but somewhere in his book Dr. Toole comments on how the L100 sold well, and how this surprised him, given it's sonic signature. The reason it sold as well as it did, is because of a lack of 'boxyness', IMO.

Now, even as it was, one can easily hear box resonances in the L100. It was not really constructed that well (lack of bracing and such). However, from living with it I learned that boxes are boxes, no matter how much designers attempt to remove the 'sonic signature'.

Related to the SL design, I think we can mention the Saul Marantz/Jon Dahlquist DQ-10. More or less an open baffle design. Neutral in a sense, and unboxy. But FWIW I never cared for its overall sound. Many disagreed, and it became a 'darling' of the high-end for a while. For my part, there were better options. I gravitated to electrostatics.

Quad was an 'all around' winner, but at the same time, very weak overall. Quite an irony. Acoustat was probably the best of the 'practical' electrostatics. But with its own limitations--it's too bad the company dissolved, because it was on an optimistic path.

FWIW, I finally settled on horns as the 'anti-box'. The design everyone likes to hate. LOL

The thing is, all designs have their own peculiar sonic signatures. Electrostatics, horns, omnis, and so forth. But of the bunch, the least appealing to me is the forward firing small (or intermediate/large) box.

In any case, the box was what SL was trying to get away from.

 

[fpitas]

FWIW, I finally settled on horns as the 'anti-box'. The design everyone likes to hate. LOL

Not quite everyone...

 

[LTig]

A well engineered ported design doesn't necessarily need to have them as accentuated, for example from the same measurement set:

View attachment 280799
Source of above: https://dt7v1i9vyp3mf.cloudfront.net/assetlibrary/n/ns10m.pdf

The O198 is a sealed box.

 

[fpitas]

Are we saying the "box sound" that audiophiles b*tch about is just the ported group delay?

 

[LTig]

That illustrates that a 4-way beats a 3-way (believable), but I wonder how big the woofer in the 3-way was.

I'd guess an 8" (K&H O198 or O300D). And indeed adding a sub to my O300D improved the mids as well.

 

[fpitas]

I'd guess an 8" (K&H O198 or O300D). And indeed adding a sub to my O300D improved the mids as well.

Sure. The poor 8" was trying to make bass.

 

[mhardy6647]

Open baffleism, from my perspective (and, yes, I've been known to partake) is a cult.
If you want to peruse far, far more than you'd ever want to think about vis-a-vis OBs, here's a fun thread.

Open Baffle Epiphany!

So its -25 Celcius and the car wont start so of course I started messing around with my gear and came up with what I can only call an epiphany! I took a pair of Foster (Fostex) FE103 alnicos with Planet-10-HIFI phase plugs that I had lying around and decided to cut up a left over cardboard...

audiokarma.org

(all 256 pages of it)

I think it's fair to say that I remain somewhat baffled.

 

[fpitas]

Open baffleism, from my perspective (and, yes, I've been known to partake) is a cult.
If you want to peruse far, far more than you'd ever want to think about vis-a-vis OBs, here's a fun thread.

Open Baffle Epiphany!

So its -25 Celcius and the car wont start so of course I started messing around with my gear and came up with what I can only call an epiphany! I took a pair of Foster (Fostex) FE103 alnicos with Planet-10-HIFI phase plugs that I had lying around and decided to cut up a left over cardboard...

audiokarma.org

(all 256 pages of it)

I think it's fair to say that I remain somewhat baffled.

The huge baffles and tremendous cone movement necessary for bass appeal to my Rube Goldberg side, though.

 

[mhardy6647]

The huge baffles and tremendous cone movement necessary for bass appeal to my Rube Goldberg side, though.

One hot summer day, I built a pair of 1 x 8 OB arrays of PartsExpress' '69 cent wonders' (which I've mentioned before). Figuring out (practically speaking) how to wire eight drivers to get a reasonable load was a challenge for a mathematically challenged guy like me -- not to mention building the wiring harnesses*. Horrible nearfield (comb filter). Horrible in a room. Pretty dandy outdoors, though. One just needed to get far enough away from 'em.





For (apparent) bass -- High Qts woofer is the way to go.
___________
* Which I still have (I wasn't born a Yankee... but I definitely have Yankee sensibilities)

 

[badspeakerdesigner]

Linkwitz had this to say about the TAD Model 1 (incidentally the evolution of this model, the Reference 1, was one of the best commercial speakers I've listened to:

It has become a useful learning experience for me to see and hear the latest loudspeakers, that aspire to the absolute best in sound performance. For this I drive to Las Vegas with my spouse for the International Consumer Electronics Show and T.H.E. SHOW. Usually these are large and expensive speakers. I pay little attention to 2-way systems since they cannot reproduce the full spectrum at adequate volume levels. This year the outstanding leader in the conventional box speaker category was the $40,000 TAD Model-1. A superbly executed design under the leadership of Andrew Jones (KEF, Infinity, Pioneer), it exemplifies what can be achieved within the box paradigm. All the drivers and the cabinet design are very much from ground up and testify to years of learning and experience. I can only hope that customers for this type of speaker finally recognize that what had been offered to them as a statement product by the market leader in this price and status category is rather crude in comparison.

https://www.linkwitzlab.com/design_of_loudspeakers.htm#B

Kinda interesting since in the video OP shared SL said he didn't like what coax does.

 

[anmpr1]

Kinda interesting since in the video OP shared SL said he didn't like what coax does.

SL said that many folks like the coax sound, but to him, in a living room, aural results were almost 'headphone' like. He shows how designers do that in order to better integrate the overall directional response of the tweeter/woofer combination, each which radiate into the room differently. He said that doing so can sound 'very nice and smooth', albeit in his opinion, unnatural.

However, his main complaint is the idea of the 'box' in general. No matter how acoustically 'inert' or dense one makes the box, for 'in the living room' practical purposes a box is going to resonate, which colors sound unacceptably. At about 40 minutes in, he talks about his experiments the other way, making the box limp--his discussion of roofing tar as a damping compound is pretty funny.

In his writing he mentioned his goal was to create a loudspeaker that matches a live acoustic instrument, but I think he'd admit (and certainly knows) that what is happening is that a loudspeaker is reproducing a recording, which at best reproduces whatever the microphone(s) picks up. Thus is the listening experience actually 'removed' from any instrument playing in a given space. It's more like a painter with a canvas, working out a portrait or still life.

I also think it's important to understand his point on preference testing: that loudspeaker listener preference scores done without a reference/comparison in order to judge what is being heard from the loudspeaker, are simply on the level of 'which burger do most people like'. That is, from his perspective, it is not as important to find out what most people enjoy, as it is to find out whether the loudspeaker 'sounds' like the instrument being reproduced. The former might be good from a marketing/sales standpoint, but not from an accuracy one. And the only way you can determine accuracy is to A/B the speaker against a musical instrument, and then judge. But as I mentioned in an earlier post, it's certainly not as simple as it sounds.

To highlight SL's point, there was a thread about (I think microphone placement) somewhere on ASR, which linked to a video of a recording of an acoustic guitar. Then played back on a loudspeaker. An audience compared the recorded/loudspeaker sound to the musician actually playing the guitar. Turned out that a good portion of the listeners preferred the loudspeaker/recording over the real acoustic guitar.

 

[fpitas]

SL is a great engineer, but it's just not that tough to get a reasonably inert cabinet.

 

[anmpr1]

SL is a great engineer, but it's just not that tough to get a reasonably inert cabinet.

For sure. Yet he mentioned the great length he went to in his attempts at cabinet bracing, which led him to reject the entire idea of the cabinet. Because no matter how stiff (or limp) he made the box, to him it still sounded like a box, and that was his main complaint. Leading him to the LX type of 'baffleless' design.

From a practical standpoint, and for a lot of reasons, the box is here to stay.

 

[fpitas]

For sure. Yet he mentioned the great length he went to in his attempts at cabinet bracing, which led him to reject the entire idea of the cabinet. Because no matter how stiff (or limp) he made the box, to him it still sounded like a box, and that was his main complaint. Leading him to the LX type of 'baffleless' design.

From a practical standpoint, and for a lot of reasons, the box is here to stay.

I think he was hearing the polar pattern. He doesn't like it, and that's fine. He doesn't like the group delay from a ported cab, and I agree on that.

 

[anmpr1]

I think he was hearing the polar pattern. He doesn't like it, and that's fine. He doesn't like the group delay from a ported cab, and I agree on that.

My speakers are not very good. But to me they are so much better than what else I've heard.

To me, it just depends upon what trade off you want to live with.

I feel for the consumer, these days. When I was in the hobby, everyone and their brother had a hi-fi store, and it was easy to compare. Now, it's quite difficult to compare. And forget about comparing anything like the SL LX speakers with anything. They exist on another level, compared to most loudspeakers sold by mail order.

The best most folks can do is take a review you trust, and then hope for the best. I knew a guy who wanted Sound Lab electrostatics. He bought a plane ticket and flew across the country to demo. The speakers were great, but then the dealer upsold him on a bunch of thick cables and cable risers. And a through the roof expensive tube amp. But he was happy. How can you put a price on happiness?

 

[anmpr1]

I've watched the video posted above and I agree with some of things SL said, like how moving left or right with traditional speakers causes one side to just kinda disappear.

First, let me preference this by saying how, historically, what we now call 'image' was never a thing. That is, in the sense that it was something the consumer ever wanted in his listening space. In the heyday of hi-fi, I'm talking the '50s through perhaps the late '60s, most folks used hi-fi simply to 'fill a room' with music. Also, we recall how this was the era of transition from mono to stereo. Mono was simple. Paul Klipsch (or Jim Lansing, or any of the others) could put a horn in your corner, and fill your room with sound.

Stereo in its own way 'messed things up', horribly. Before stereo, the recording was less of an issue, because everything was coming from one point. With stereo, you had (in the words of ZZ Top's Jesus Just left Chicago) not only the Windy City and New Orleans, but 'all points in between'. It was the all points in between that became the problem: often a gaping hole in the middle, or ping ponging instruments, and all the other goofy artifacts. Only then, with stereo, did audio cognoscenti discover 'imaging'.

[Historical aside: three channels (left, right, and a center) would have been best, but how could you have fit that on a record? You couldn't, that's how.]

Stereo dispersion between two points now became a big problem. It remains a problem. It is why we still discuss it. Take, for instance, electrostatics, which represent the best and the worst. Nice sound, wonderful sound, but specific beaming. Quad 57 was arguably (within its SPL and FR limitations) one of the best loudspeakers, to this day. It was designed for mono (because that's all there was). With stereo, if you moved to one side, everything was lost.

Harold Beveridge attempted to 'solve' the 'beaming' issue with his tall line source and clever acoustic lens. It more or less overcame beaming, and created a pretty unique soundfield--one where you could walk around the room and not lose a stereo (two channel) perspective; but did it sound 'natural'? I'll leave that answer for those who heard it. My impression was, "No, it sounded weird, but was certainly unique and interesting, in a weird way!"

It's almost as if we are back to the future. Like LP records. And tubes. After all these years, still going around and round. Just like the forward firing box is still around, awaiting the next big 'breakthrough' in its development. However, we understand that the forward firing box is all most people know. For sure it is the cheapest design to implement, and no doubt the most money has been spent in R/D on overcoming its limitations.

Nevertheless, given its limitations, you can get a pretty good illusion of music out of it. So it's got that going for it.

But it's not a design others might appreciate, and if we realize or admit that we'll never have anything like 'live' music in our living rooms, then, at the end of the day, the forward firing box is simply one out of many competing for our aural sensibility.

Get what you like and be happy.

 

[anmpr1]

What are those reasons?

The first Bowers & Wilkins 801(F/Series 80) was a sealed cabinet design. The following model, the 801 Matrix, switched to reflex allegedly at request of studios which wanted higher-SPL capabilities and increased low end extension.

801 and its descendants are something, to themselves. Wonderful, if your ears are attuned. Different, under different ears. I recall an operation out of Japan. In typical Japanese artisan way, refurbed vintage JBL monitors. Not 4311 variety, but the larger wall to wall monitors of that era. Great skill in cabinetry and lacquer work. Don't ask about price.

Anyhow, they ran a demo between one of the larger '70s JBL monitors and the 801 (don't recall which iteration). Comments were insightful, or confusing, depending. Some said the B&Ws sounded like 'plastic'. Others thought the JBLs sounded 'all over the place' and out of focus.

Personally, I'd like a set of each, in different rooms. I'm not dogmatic.