I came full circle back to kef and i'm not sure if it's because of my familiarity with the house sound or because they just due midrange better. I had the r105/3 and consistently listened at 104db peaks and the louder they played the more realistic they sounded. I was always let down by the bass which measured good in room but just didn't sound full bodied. I would say the benefits of the kef design is fairly easy placement to get most of what the speakers are capable of, most will be under powered, but many speakers that design for a flat in room response sound bass shy and take time to adjust to. Kef Blades have ironed out the midrange driver reflections making for a softer and more detailed treble play back than earlier designs and bass has been addressed.
Coaxials - Reality vs. Experience?
Should say "hype vs. reality" in the headline.
Coaxial speaker design has been around in one way or another for a long time. I often think I’ll be absolutely blown away by them, but in practice traditional vertical layout speakers often have sound as good, or have other features that make them sound better.
Thiel, KEF, Monitor Audio, Tekton, Seas are among the many players attempting such designs, but none has, by the coaxial drivers alone, dominated a segment of the market.
What are your listening experiences? Is it 1 coaxial speaker that won you over, or have you always preferred them?
- ...
- 97 posts total
One sound quality I rarely see mentioned is how a speaker sounds all around the room. While the "listening" position is important, I also demand that speakers sound good as I walk around the room, and also around the house. I’ve had multi-way speakers whose sound falls apart as soon as you stand up. My 15" Tannoy’s fill the room, and sound natural all around the room, and while I’m working in the kitchen. This is very important to me. I also use an 8" Tannoy driver as a center channel (in a DIY cab). It makes an ideal center, with no off-axis "phaseyness". No my Tannoys are not perfect, but this is a quality that they excel at, over non-concentric speakers. |
Hello everybody, please help me with a dumb question that I do not know the answer to. closenplay stated, "To add clarity, concentric is a subset of coaxial. In other words, all concentric drivers are coaxial but not all coaxial drivers are concentric. @erik_squires Pardon the presumption; you are probably referencing most designs intended for the hifi home user, of which most (if not all) are concentric."
I know what "coaxial" means but how are you defining "concentric"? Are you suggesting that two coaxial drivers (i.e. their voice coils) may me mounted at an angle to each other? That they are centered but not perpendicular? Or? sincerely herb |
@herbreichert - Not to speak for @closenplay but my interpretation was that he’s focusing on the z-axis (forwards / backwards) alignment. An egregious example of z-axis non-alignment would be in some car stereo drivers, where they (sometimes) clumsily suspended & mount a tweeter in front of a woofer. That’s what I think he was calling out. But the reality is that none of the coaxials really seem to have perfect z-axis alignment (relative to the 2 drivers’ acoustic centers). Certainly not Tannoys, which mount the tweeters well behind the back of the woofer, coupled through a relatively long waveguide. Tannoy’s brief attempts to time-align the drivers via electrical means were generally regarded a failure. Their pepperpot waveguide drivers at least have phase alignment at the crossover point; not sure about the tulip drivers. Tannoy chose to call theirs "dual concentric" early on, probably to help distinguish their approach from far less refined coaxial arrangements of the time. |
- 97 posts total