yes a constant rick roll in here 24/7 for a couple of years then you can have Aqua "barbie girl" intermittently so really cant filter out rick mentally
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Unusual Speaker Designs
- Thread starter pozz
- Start date
yes a constant rick roll in here 24/7 for a couple of years then you can have Aqua "barbie girl" intermittently so really cant filter out rick mentally
AverageJoeAudiophile
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tuga
Major Contributor
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- Thread Starter
- #445
These remind me of mnmlst modern architecture and gourmet food.
Yes, ugly, but many (most even?) speakers are. I only listen to music seriously, by which I mean never in the background and never when I am doing something important, so my vertical listening height is always the same.
I can see why narrow and smooth vertical response may perhaps be worthwhile in a room with modern, sparse rooms with hard floors. I have never heard good sound in one.
Magnum Innominandum
Member
Hi,
It seems that the only qualification for speakers to appear in this thread is to look wired and use the most boring conventional technology, with one or two minor exceptions. Worse most often they seem to be featuring multiple spheres, which are the second worst shape for speakers, acoustically speaking, behind cubes (with interesting exceptions), while having less volume.
What seems missing are speakers that have interesting technical solution, that deal with real problems and offer technology that was ridiculously ahead of their time...
But first the one notabene exception, Tom's Bass-Tech 7. I had the chance to use these in a touring/rental PA system in Germany in the late 80's/early 90's. The rest of the system were Community SLS980... We used 4 BT7 & 4 SLS980 per side.
They were driven by bunch of crown/amcron macrotech amp's, including macrotech 10k's on the subs and SLS980 LF, meaning each cabinet got 1.25kW unclipped audio for sub and lf.
The SLS980: http://www.loudspeakers.net/sites/default/files/SLS980_spec.pdf
This translates into 1m maximum SPL's of 140dB+ max from ~30Hz to 100Hz (BT-7's), 150dB+ max across ~ 100Hz - 450Hz for the SLS980 LF and "more than enough" SPL above 450Hz. On top of that, the system was pretty decently "time-coherent" due to the woofers and midrange drivers being at the same depth inside their horns.
I'm sure the frequency response would make Amir's pink panthers look very unhappy, mind you, it could also be they got blown to smithereens by the sheer SPL. At 110kg per SLS980 and seeing how few have survived I feel they are pretty save from Amir's tests.
Honestly, looking at modern installed and touring sound, I do not feel this system has actually ever been equalled or exceeded, while systems are a lot better on average - compared to the 1980's average (disclosure - I still occasionally do live sound engineering, installing or tuning up club sound systems or recordings in my little studio) - but very little to match older top-end sound reinforcement gear. We got more flexibility, more control, line array, but not as much pure performance, excluding some of Tom Danley's latest designs. Funktion One systems seem closest these days (I worked with a few) but are club "only", conceptually quite old as well and you need more than 4 of their dual 21" subs to match 4 Bass Tech 7's...
I think all this qualifies as "unusual speaker design" across the board, plus perhaps the addition of "certifiably insane performance".
I'm sure if the Mythbusters had used this kind of system they could have easily confirmed the reality of the legendary "brown note" using an e-bass lower e-string (41.2Hz) and a tiny bit of castor oil added to the water cooler...
I remember doing one gig at the then biggest club in europe (in Köln Wesseling, 7k capacity), which had a huge JBL system for the dancefloor. We were supporting a special event with live bands and a public appearance by a new and upcoming german Formula One driver driving for Jordan. At first the club's manager seeing our small stacks of speakers suggested perhaps we would also want to feed into the club system? We politely declined and turned the system up to 11 with a music track.
At the event's end the normal "disco" took over. 16 Huge JBL tops (15" X 2, Cinema Sized Midrange horns) flown over the dance floor with massive numbers of dual 18" JBL Bass bins (at least 24) where clearly being overloaded (amplifiers clipping) and still were very audibly quieter than our system and could not build that physical pressure in the bass the bass tech 7's did. I'm sure everyone in the venue - myself included - had some temporary (??) hearing damage form that gig.
Anyway, is there something even more out of this world?
Allow me to introduce to "System Eckmiller"...
The first version is described in the german Funkschau some time from 1944.
At first blush, it's a generic "Rice Kellogs" dynamic speaker. The devil (here the WW2 german Hugo Boss wearing Obersturmbandführer devil) is in the detail.
First, on the outside, we see the perforated basket - that is actually an acoustic flow resistance, that introduces a very predictable mechanical damping of the driver's main resonance. This is further helped with a seamless alu voice coil former and (would you adam'n'eve it!?) with grease dampers connected to the spider!
Why? This driver was intended to be driven with current source amplifiers, not your usual voltage source. Which has some interesting results - including to cancel out eddy current distortion. And removes the usually quite non-linear electrical "damping" of the cone. The newly invented pentode tubes with very high output impedance and very low distortion were specified for the amplification.
Next is the "funky" looking phase plug - actually there is a 2" Alu Dome under this "Verdränger", forming a compression driver.
It gets more interesting in the cutaway. The pole pieces are shaped in the way we see on many recent FEM designed magnet systems to give an even and symmetrical magnet field
The voice coils of woofer and tweeter are concentric. In the same magnet gap. Both drivers were designed for flat frequency response with well controlled out of band rolloff. The crossover is a series crossover (first order), which again has some interesting effects, like minimal phase-shift / good time-coherence if correctly implemented, with the crossover point at around 2kHz.
There are also interesting further details, such as the use of a NAWI cone shape using a felt-like soft paper that allowed pistonic behaviour up 300Hz and controlled breakup above that. The alu dome is pistonic up to 10kHz. Realistic usable bandwidth is 30Hz-15kHz, in 1943!.
The Driver was designed to offer monitors that allowed the quality of the then new Neumann Kondensor Microphones (still studio recording standard eight decades later) to be equalled.
Now, remember, this was a speaker designed in the late 1930's to early 1940's. It was the Monitor Speaker used for the first High Fidelity Stereo Music recordings on magnetic Tape, using Neumann Microphones and AEG Magnetophone HF-Bias Stereo Tape Machines in Berlin. It was also manufactured by Konskie & Krueger Berlin, who also made the Enigma coding machine.
The Eckmiller was an intentionally low distortion, point source, time-coherent, controlled dispersion monitor driver. In the early 1940's in WW2! It addressed design goals that only really have become recognised for hifi and monitor speakers in the last decade or so!
So, how was this marvellous, even in today's world, monitor speaker tested? An AP2 was not available. In addition to measuring frequency response, extensive listening tests were performed, with noises like keys jingling and paper being torn, noises that could not be reproduced clearly recognisably by earlier "reference" speakers.
Later version of this speaker after the war refined the concept and used inductive coupling between woofer voice coil and HF dome ("invented" decades later by KEF for their ICT coaxial drivers) and improved the magnet system, but it was the swan-song. The "grand children" of the Eckmiller in the form of the Isophon Orchester 2000 and East German Schulze TH-315 (O18) retained little commonality, other than the coaxial principle.
TH-315/O18/V1-31
Isophon Orchester 2000
Having experienced the Eckmillers at the RFZ in Berlin, together with the O18 there and in many studio's in east germany, and having owned the Isophon Orchester 2000 later after the fall of the wall and also experienced and owned respectively the Altec Lansing 604 and various Tannoy Coaxials, I feel the most realistic, believable sound was produced by the Eckmiller. I'll take an original Alnico Magnet Tannoy second and an Altec 604 with Mastering Labs crossover (or the Urei version of same) third. I did like the O18 a lot more than multi-way speakers with vertically separated drivers, same for O2000.
All that changed, I guess, when the ME-Geithain RL-900A - a great-grandchild of Eckmillers O15 - became available. That was still behind the Iron Curtain and the "Great Wall of Berlin". I was never able to own or justify owning a pair, but a pair of ME-Geithain RL-901K are on my "desert island/retirement equipment" list.
https://sonicpurity.com.au/blog/2017/9/27/me-geithain-active-speakers
https://static1.squarespace.com/sta...df5e231a4c8d0fb47/1493363422584/RL901Keng.pdf
Given what this modern Coaxial system with electronic time-alignment (we were finally back at the time-coherence of the 1930's eckmiller concept) and cardioid radiation pattern across all frequencies delivers the asking price of around 12,000 Euro is even reasonable... I just wish Joachim Kiesler would give up on using TL074's in his crossovers, now the TI OPA1679 is shipping in volume at a minimal increase in cost.
Magnum Innominandum
It seems that the only qualification for speakers to appear in this thread is to look wired and use the most boring conventional technology, with one or two minor exceptions. Worse most often they seem to be featuring multiple spheres, which are the second worst shape for speakers, acoustically speaking, behind cubes (with interesting exceptions), while having less volume.
What seems missing are speakers that have interesting technical solution, that deal with real problems and offer technology that was ridiculously ahead of their time...
But first the one notabene exception, Tom's Bass-Tech 7. I had the chance to use these in a touring/rental PA system in Germany in the late 80's/early 90's. The rest of the system were Community SLS980... We used 4 BT7 & 4 SLS980 per side.
They were driven by bunch of crown/amcron macrotech amp's, including macrotech 10k's on the subs and SLS980 LF, meaning each cabinet got 1.25kW unclipped audio for sub and lf.
The SLS980: http://www.loudspeakers.net/sites/default/files/SLS980_spec.pdf
This translates into 1m maximum SPL's of 140dB+ max from ~30Hz to 100Hz (BT-7's), 150dB+ max across ~ 100Hz - 450Hz for the SLS980 LF and "more than enough" SPL above 450Hz. On top of that, the system was pretty decently "time-coherent" due to the woofers and midrange drivers being at the same depth inside their horns.
I'm sure the frequency response would make Amir's pink panthers look very unhappy, mind you, it could also be they got blown to smithereens by the sheer SPL. At 110kg per SLS980 and seeing how few have survived I feel they are pretty save from Amir's tests.
Honestly, looking at modern installed and touring sound, I do not feel this system has actually ever been equalled or exceeded, while systems are a lot better on average - compared to the 1980's average (disclosure - I still occasionally do live sound engineering, installing or tuning up club sound systems or recordings in my little studio) - but very little to match older top-end sound reinforcement gear. We got more flexibility, more control, line array, but not as much pure performance, excluding some of Tom Danley's latest designs. Funktion One systems seem closest these days (I worked with a few) but are club "only", conceptually quite old as well and you need more than 4 of their dual 21" subs to match 4 Bass Tech 7's...
I think all this qualifies as "unusual speaker design" across the board, plus perhaps the addition of "certifiably insane performance".
I'm sure if the Mythbusters had used this kind of system they could have easily confirmed the reality of the legendary "brown note" using an e-bass lower e-string (41.2Hz) and a tiny bit of castor oil added to the water cooler...
I remember doing one gig at the then biggest club in europe (in Köln Wesseling, 7k capacity), which had a huge JBL system for the dancefloor. We were supporting a special event with live bands and a public appearance by a new and upcoming german Formula One driver driving for Jordan. At first the club's manager seeing our small stacks of speakers suggested perhaps we would also want to feed into the club system? We politely declined and turned the system up to 11 with a music track.
At the event's end the normal "disco" took over. 16 Huge JBL tops (15" X 2, Cinema Sized Midrange horns) flown over the dance floor with massive numbers of dual 18" JBL Bass bins (at least 24) where clearly being overloaded (amplifiers clipping) and still were very audibly quieter than our system and could not build that physical pressure in the bass the bass tech 7's did. I'm sure everyone in the venue - myself included - had some temporary (??) hearing damage form that gig.
Anyway, is there something even more out of this world?
Allow me to introduce to "System Eckmiller"...
The first version is described in the german Funkschau some time from 1944.
At first blush, it's a generic "Rice Kellogs" dynamic speaker. The devil (here the WW2 german Hugo Boss wearing Obersturmbandführer devil) is in the detail.
First, on the outside, we see the perforated basket - that is actually an acoustic flow resistance, that introduces a very predictable mechanical damping of the driver's main resonance. This is further helped with a seamless alu voice coil former and (would you adam'n'eve it!?) with grease dampers connected to the spider!
Why? This driver was intended to be driven with current source amplifiers, not your usual voltage source. Which has some interesting results - including to cancel out eddy current distortion. And removes the usually quite non-linear electrical "damping" of the cone. The newly invented pentode tubes with very high output impedance and very low distortion were specified for the amplification.
Next is the "funky" looking phase plug - actually there is a 2" Alu Dome under this "Verdränger", forming a compression driver.
It gets more interesting in the cutaway. The pole pieces are shaped in the way we see on many recent FEM designed magnet systems to give an even and symmetrical magnet field
The voice coils of woofer and tweeter are concentric. In the same magnet gap. Both drivers were designed for flat frequency response with well controlled out of band rolloff. The crossover is a series crossover (first order), which again has some interesting effects, like minimal phase-shift / good time-coherence if correctly implemented, with the crossover point at around 2kHz.
There are also interesting further details, such as the use of a NAWI cone shape using a felt-like soft paper that allowed pistonic behaviour up 300Hz and controlled breakup above that. The alu dome is pistonic up to 10kHz. Realistic usable bandwidth is 30Hz-15kHz, in 1943!.
The Driver was designed to offer monitors that allowed the quality of the then new Neumann Kondensor Microphones (still studio recording standard eight decades later) to be equalled.
Now, remember, this was a speaker designed in the late 1930's to early 1940's. It was the Monitor Speaker used for the first High Fidelity Stereo Music recordings on magnetic Tape, using Neumann Microphones and AEG Magnetophone HF-Bias Stereo Tape Machines in Berlin. It was also manufactured by Konskie & Krueger Berlin, who also made the Enigma coding machine.
The Eckmiller was an intentionally low distortion, point source, time-coherent, controlled dispersion monitor driver. In the early 1940's in WW2! It addressed design goals that only really have become recognised for hifi and monitor speakers in the last decade or so!
So, how was this marvellous, even in today's world, monitor speaker tested? An AP2 was not available. In addition to measuring frequency response, extensive listening tests were performed, with noises like keys jingling and paper being torn, noises that could not be reproduced clearly recognisably by earlier "reference" speakers.
Later version of this speaker after the war refined the concept and used inductive coupling between woofer voice coil and HF dome ("invented" decades later by KEF for their ICT coaxial drivers) and improved the magnet system, but it was the swan-song. The "grand children" of the Eckmiller in the form of the Isophon Orchester 2000 and East German Schulze TH-315 (O18) retained little commonality, other than the coaxial principle.
TH-315/O18/V1-31
Isophon Orchester 2000
Having experienced the Eckmillers at the RFZ in Berlin, together with the O18 there and in many studio's in east germany, and having owned the Isophon Orchester 2000 later after the fall of the wall and also experienced and owned respectively the Altec Lansing 604 and various Tannoy Coaxials, I feel the most realistic, believable sound was produced by the Eckmiller. I'll take an original Alnico Magnet Tannoy second and an Altec 604 with Mastering Labs crossover (or the Urei version of same) third. I did like the O18 a lot more than multi-way speakers with vertically separated drivers, same for O2000.
All that changed, I guess, when the ME-Geithain RL-900A - a great-grandchild of Eckmillers O15 - became available. That was still behind the Iron Curtain and the "Great Wall of Berlin". I was never able to own or justify owning a pair, but a pair of ME-Geithain RL-901K are on my "desert island/retirement equipment" list.
https://sonicpurity.com.au/blog/2017/9/27/me-geithain-active-speakers
https://static1.squarespace.com/sta...df5e231a4c8d0fb47/1493363422584/RL901Keng.pdf
Given what this modern Coaxial system with electronic time-alignment (we were finally back at the time-coherence of the 1930's eckmiller concept) and cardioid radiation pattern across all frequencies delivers the asking price of around 12,000 Euro is even reasonable... I just wish Joachim Kiesler would give up on using TL074's in his crossovers, now the TI OPA1679 is shipping in volume at a minimal increase in cost.
Magnum Innominandum
tuga
Major Contributor
That sounds useful...in Guantánamo.
Gourmet food ?
Some pro audio from Void Acoustics, not radical looking in the Hi-fi world but definitely different in the pro audio arena.
Keeping it PA, not a speaker but a drive unit:
The Powersoft M-force driver.
Application example https://www.funktion-one.com/products/f132/
Killingbeans
Major Contributor
Magnum Innominandum
Member
Looks like a linear motor take on the Danley Servodrive system. But 32" and 15kW...
Did I mention Funktion One as standouts among today's drab, non-timecoherent and generally average sounding gear.
Mind you, when it sounds really bad, it's usually the sound engineers fault.
MI
Yep, however excited we get about equipment it is the recording quality that makes the most difference on competent equipment IME.
Koloth
Active Member
What freudian nightmare is this?
Presumably a sculpture which sad hifi nuts like us might mistake for a horn like speaker.
Lorenzo74
Senior Member
Yes. But it seems to work accordingly. Step response returns a nice triangle and freq. response is relatively flat. It can reproduce frequencies without phase delay (many said it doesn’t make any difference, others instead claim it improves imaging)
I did one to one comparison using Dirac Live (keeping same freq. response but time align drivers) and is audible on some tracks (drums and when you have attacks)... my 2cents.
From Stereophile about Earthworks...
“It is very rare, in my experience, to find a loudspeaker that excels in both the frequency and time domains. Taken overall, its measurements suggest that the Earthworks Sigma 6.2 joins that small community.”—John Atkinson
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