$15,000 Speaker Does Not List Freq Response Specs

Thanks Bill_K,

Carver Amazing speakers used to be ribbon/panel, but now they're fully ribbon. Amazing indeed.

My point was very clear that specification such as 24Hz...24KHz is useless. So why post it? Why provide something that is NEVER true? A detailed plot of speaker response measured in anechoic chamber likely not be understandable by casual consumer while typical Hz...kHz numbers are truly misleading.

I have datasheet for my Aerial 10t speakers provided by Mike Kyle after I requested it. Bob Carver is highly respectful engineer designer of consumer and professional sound won't mind sharing datasheet if requested.

Hopefully I made it clear after all.

You're right, Czarivey. Giving performance specs for the ALS is particularly difficult, as it is with any bipole or omnidirectional speaker designed to energize the listening area in a certain way. The ALS has a very unconventional driver layout:

13 ribbon panels facing front in a line array
Small ribbon tweeter at the tiptop of the array, almost 90" above the floor
22 high excursion (0.48" exc) ~4" dia. mid/woofers, eleven each facing to the right and to the left.

The included SubRosa *does* have printed specs, which includes 18-110 Hz and max spl of 110 dB.

The array is pretty unconventional, especially the side-firing dynamic mid/woofers, and which obviously rely on room reflections to work as intended. They are probably sensitive to the distance between drivers and side walls. Any setup with less than 4 feet to the side walls will probably be compromised.

Back in 2007, Ultimate A/V->Home Theater->Sound&Vision mag (operated by S'phile) did a review on the Mirage OMD-28 floorstanding towers plus matching center, surrounds, and sub. The OMD-28 is an omni and since it radiates in all directions, the tweeter as a point source is shelved down to compensate for all the room boundaries that will reinforce (i.e., flatten) the treble response.

And yet, the reviewers still measured the speakers with their close-miked "quasi-anechoic" measurements, which produced this frequency response curve with a 10+dB dip at 5Khz, which implies that the treble would be dull and lifeless, which is totally untrue. In fact, Thos. J. Norton's commentary at that point stated:

The measured responses of both the OMD-28 and the OMD-C2 are relatively disappointing, and surprisingly uneven considering the system's admirable sonic performance. However, speakers with unusual radiating patterns—dipole, bipole, and omni—are notoriously difficult to measure in an anechoic or pseudo-anechoic way that relates to their performance in real rooms. They often sound better than they actually measure, and this is certainly the case here.

Mirage's designer Andrew Welker took exception to this hamfisted handling of their flagship OMD-28, the result of years of measurements and calculations at Canada's National Research Center, and responded in part:

Judged against the accepted "flat frequency response" goal of a directional forward-radiating system, any Omnipolar design will appear down-tilted and show an apparent "excess of bass". However, any anechoic measurement, by it's very nature, will not take into account the reflected energy that will be present when the loudspeaker is placed in a listening room. An Omnipolar loudspeaker will also not follow the inverse-square law at mid and high frequencies. Both of these facts suggest that an Omnipolar speaker should NOT measure "flat" otherwise it will sound excessively bright and thin in a typical room.

And lest we take the ALS's $15K purchase price for granted, it was originally $23,500, the new price will be $17,995 and the $14,995 is a limited time offer. Considering it includes a high powered $3500 sub and room-tuning tools, that's an attractive deal.

This speaker is a line source omnipolar up to about 3 kHz, so a anechoic freq response is pretty much useless. I do know those ribbon tweeters go up to 26 kHz, no problem. Publishing FR of speakers makes sense for forward firing point source speaker, but in the real world it still is a bad measure of how a speaker sounds. For dipole, omnipole, planar, line source/array speakers, FR can be very misleading so I can understand why designers of such speakers don't publish such an archaic measurement.

The OP went to a showing of this speaker and stated it didn't impress him, even though he admitted he was way in the back of the room off to the side with people packed in the room. Can you draw a valid conclusion based on this experience? This is the worse show condition one can imagine. Why did he decline offer for a private audition by the dealer? That would have been much more informative, best thing next to having them in your own room.

I have no idea why the dealer wanted to use a super tweeter with this speaker. I heard the preproduction version of this speaker, and it needed no extra help above.

As for the Rel subwoofer, some speculate it is better than Bob's own subwoofer that he designed to work with the ALS. I would speculate Bob's dedicated subwoofer likely sound just as good if not better than the Rel.

The dealer did not use Bob's tube amp with the ALS. Again another mistake. His tube amps are fantastic and should have been paired with the speakers. After all, Bob voiced his speaker with his tube amp.

I posted a thread on Bob's ALS without realizing this thread was about his speaker.

Anyways, just my two cents.

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The dealer did use Bob's tube amps in the demo, they are gorgeous.

I did not draw a conclusion. I stated my opinion was inconclusive based on the listening conditions and the
non-Carver components added to the system.

Bob's website allows an in-home trial. I am going to try them in my own home. My room is nothing like the room where the demo was held....and the conditions will be infinitely better.

For the record, I'm a huge fan of Bob Carver. If you look closely at the photos on my system page, you'll see at least four of Bob Carver's Silver 9t monoblocs on the floor near my speakers. I've had numerous Carver components in my systems over the years and loved most of them.

The addition of the REL sub and the $3,600 super-tweeters were probably more of the dealer attempting to hawk his wares rather than to augment Carver's speakers. I just didn't see the logic of not using Carver's sub and adding the super-tweeter. Adding those items was more of a sales pitch than anything else.

I want to be clear that this was not an attempt to bash the Carver speakers...far from it. I still want to give them a serious audition in my home...and I will. The thought of not having to spend upwards of $50k to get serious sound in a room of my size is enticing, and I won't pass it up.
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Before reading this thread, I hadn't really considered that this speaker didn't lend itself to anechoic measurement and I might have been critical of Carver. However, the posts here have built a solid case that that's not true.

Maybe Carver could include a brief note in the spec section from the manufacturer indicating that the broad dispersion pattern of this particular design makes posted anechoic specs misleading. That might be useful to anyone hesitating on a purchase due to this lack of info. If anyone here is inclined, forwarding a link to this thread to Carver might not be a terrible idea.