Salk owners -- any interest in a more sensitive Salk model?

Have folks seen these speakers? 

https://www.adelaidespeakers.com/valve.html

@b_limo 

Not sure if or why it matters,  but Jim has his wife and a couple of other employees. That’s it.  Company would be a stretch. Very very small business. Cabinets all in house from the cutting to the veneer and finish.  
 

What does it matter if Salk or any other speaker manufacturer does not make their own cabinets? Am I missing something?

Salk is a company, Fritz is one-person shop. The heads of companies, even smaller ones, may not do some of the labor personally, right?

I said, from my knowledge in case it wasn’t true.  I have heard that there isa furniture builder near him that does the cabs or possibly just the veneer?  Regardless, Jim isn’t building cabs and veneering them personally correct?  Fritz builds his cabinets and veneers them himself.  
 

I wasn’t trying to take anything away from the looks of Salk, Im just saying that I think he has a furniture builder build them and at that point, anyone could have the same level of cabs if they used the same builder and paid the $.

@b_limo 

Jim builds everything in house.  Been there several times.  

Outsourcing? What is your evidence for this belief?

From my knowledge, Jim Salk outsources his cabinets.  They are not built in house.  Not sure its pertinent to the conversation but I hear quite a bit of responses about his cabinets.  The pair I had could have been finished better in that it could have had a waterfall edge with regards to the veneer on top and sides, and the veneer on the backs was upside down in my opinion.  I actually felt like my Fritz Carreras Veneer work was better than the Salk HT2-TL’s I had.  Salk has some nice dyed finishes that I like quite a bit though.

@hilde45, I would not presume to think so ...

As a Salk owner.

I’m not interested, save possibly for something like the Exotica with the twin powered subs.  But with a bit snappier top end.

I’d like to see Jim build a new flagship like the SS12 (my current speaker), before a a high sensitivity design.  I’ve told him as much at his place.

I am not shopping for a speaker

@hilde45, maybe give the Salk T-Lines a shot you may be impressed ...

Song Tower RT $ 2995 base ... I'm a bit surprised Salk did not point it out.

Ok, so there’s more history to this. There was a 95db Salk speaker. It’s no longer around. In an AudioCircle (SalkSound) thread entitled, "Any interest in a more sensitive Salk model?" (2018), take a look at this great quote from the designer of that older Salk with higher efficiency (95db).

https://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?topic=68989.msg640113#msg640113

"Being the designer of the Pharos and Archos, both of which are higher efficiency designs, maybe I should comment.

First, what makes a speaker efficient is primarily in the driver design itself. But there are always trade-offs - and those trade between Fs, Vas, and Qes, which are driver parameters. In other words, they lock you into what is called Hoffman’s Iron Law, which basically tells us that you can not have high efficiency, low bass, and a small box at the same time. One of those has to go in order for the other two to exist. When we targeted a high efficiency design we had to set a target for each of these. In the Pharos I targeted 95dB sensitivity. Then I had to compromise between acceptable low bass extension and enclosure size. The JBL woofer allowed me to hit the sensitivity mark and get 40Hz extension out of a reasonably sized box at the same time. It offered the best compromise available at the time.

For the Archos, the newly redesigned Lambda woofer gave us lower bass extension in a smaller box, and we kept the sensitivity close to that of the Pharos, but it is a little lower.

Then there is the matter of the impedance. This is tricky. It is not easy to design a three-way speaker with flat response and flat resistive impedance at the same time. However, this goal was accomplished with the Pharos. The impedance curve with it is nearly a flat line above the bass peaks (above 100Hz).This makes the Pharos a perfect match for the most demanding SET amps. The Archos has a fairly well-controlled impedance that varies only from a low of about 5 ohms to a high of 9 ohms across this same range. In most cases this is stable enough that most any amp will be fine with it too, but it is not quite as flat (resistive) as the Pharos impedance is.

The Pharos also has an extremely flat frequency response as well. Apart from not having really deep bass extension it does everything else extremely well. The Archos, by virtue of the open baffle midrange, is a little more dependent on the room set-up and placement, but can also offer very flat response when set-up well. I have listened to both, but I probably should keep my personal opinions on which I would pick to myself.

What I am getting at is - you can ask us to design you a high efficiency speaker with great bass response that comes in a reasonably small box, and unfortunately, it just can’t be done. Something has to give somewhere in one of those requirements. As a result we have tried to offer what we felt was the best and most widely appreciated combination of those characteristics in the speakers that were offered. We felt that what we had arrived at would have the widest possible appeal - compared to a refrigerator sized speaker or one that only reached down to 70Hz before it started rolling off.

I’ll tell you this; if Jim were located in Japan he would be selling Pharos’ like crazy. Both this JBL woofer and the PHL midrange has a cult following over there, and they love ribbon tweeters too. This speaker would have some real impact in that market. Also, beware of some commercial speakers that advertise high sensitivity and low bass. A lot of tests show that many of these do not measure up to their claims in either category. We have tried to be conservative in our ratings so that everything was out there on the table and lived up to the claims made.

Jeff B."

(As I use subs, I’d be happy to give up the bass extension on the monitor.)

It’s an interesting question. 

@decooney Thanks. Perhaps your explanation may help.

Rather than dickering with me about whether this is a good question, I'd love it if  Salk owners would consider whether a Salk-approved and designed speaker would be attractive to them -- Yes or No. Perhaps a few reasons how a more sensitive model might suit their present or future audio needs.

Imagine Jim was reading this thread and would consider the feedback as pertinent to the effort he might spend working out the feasiblity of an idea like deCooney's.

I’m not a Salk owner however as a former professional and hobby speaker builder, there is no doubt in my mind Jim Salk could build a nice efficient speaker for use with fleawatt amps if he wanted to. The Exotica carries native 94db drivers as i recall. He's not too far off the path now.  

>>A simple 2-way, semi resonating cabinet, 3 wood color options c/b nice.<<

Chiming in, I’d be interested in seeing Jim design and build something similar to a wide front baffle 10-ohm 96db Devore Orangutan O/96. Might be fun to bug a colleague to design and build a limited run of small purpose built single or strapped triode tube mono amps for them. Some of the Salk diehards might even line up for ’em. My local AN dealer has sets like these, very musical and enjoyable to listen to, amazingly so, when driven with the right triode amplifier(s).

Ahh just looked. Exotica 3 is 92db so I guess what you are asking already exists?? Unless 93 is your cutoff for high efficiency. Not fleawatt territory but should be ok with 30 watts or so. 

They have a speaker that is higher sensitivity and is 8ohm nom. It’s on the website. It’s 90db I believe with measurements. 

@hilde45   I could have chosen a more apt and moderate word than coerce, I guess. I believe Jim recognizes the inherent virtues of high sensitivity, but, nonetheless opts to forego that path because the price to be paid to achieve it is too high in terms of sacrifices he would have to make in other areas he deems more important.

@decooney    Before I made my initial post I made sure to go to Salk's webpage to determine what characteristics a "proper high performance speaker" should embrace. Phase integrity and even frequency response were the qualities that seemed to resonate the most in his philosophy. I am not discounting his recognition of the need for strong, well made cabinetry or high quality drivers and crossover parts. I am not implying that he is a 2 trick pony at all, just to be clear.

"core values", where are those documented?

Speaker designers and builders try all kinds of stuff, and there is nobody regulating what lane or box they need to stay in. Try it. If people buy them, build more.

So, you are basically asking him to stray from the core values he embraces...
I think you would be better served to proceed in that direction than to try to coerce Salk into building a speaker that eschews his core philosophies...

This post is about whether Salk owners would be interested. I’m not asking him to *do* anything. I’m asking him what he thinks, as I’m asking folks here what they think. I have no power. I'm a guy with a keyboard asking a couple questions.

Jim is a mature businessman with a vision for his successful company. Because I understand that, I wouldn’t ask him to stray from his core values, because I know that he knows his own mind. And the notion that a single customer (or a thread starter) would be "coercing" him by asking if there was a market of a single new product, well, that’s just not what "coercion" means.

In our exchange, Jim saw the validity of this question and he is thinking about it a bit, especially after hearing about some of the innovations Devore engineered with his speakers. Jim of course is just thinking and it would of course have to be done to his satisfaction.

Two last points. Agreed, 92db is not highly sensitive. If Salk were to find a way to pull off the engineering, he would do well to pursue a higher sensitivity -- e.g. Zu, Omega, etc. There is quite a selection of tube amps coming on the market these days, and a Salk model that plays well with them would be a good business proposition. And, finally, while Jim has a speaker at 92 db, they’re $14995 per pair. If he were to really hit the market with a sensitive speaker, and they were higher than 92db, he’d really be ringing the bell if he could provide Salk-levels of beauty and tonality with a price that competes with Zu, Tekton, and Omega (if not Devore and AudioNote).

Of course, Jim is quite free to ignore my email. But if a lot of people post saying "Wow, I’d buy that" then he has an inkling that it might have a market if a design met his standards.

+1 to @acresverde 's post.

Like acresverde, I'll be direct... I would choose Daedalus over Salk, every time for their sound quality performance but Salk every time for Salk's cabinetry.

If you want both, take a look at Volti Audio. There are others...mentioning Volti since you have Klipsch.

It seems that Jim Salk places a high value on even frequency response and phase integrity in his designs. To achieve his goals, in general, seems to require fairly complex crossovers of rather high parts count, High parts count is the enemy of high sensitivity due to insertion loss (am I wrong here?). So, you are basically asking him to stray from the core values he embraces by requesting high(ish) sensitivity. I wonder if he would really be able to commit and put his heart in it.

I have a friend who once owned Salk for a few years and then decided he wanted to dabble in the waters of high sensitivity and moved on to Daedalus (where he remains today on his second pair). He sold his Salks to a work colleague and that person has since moved on to a second pair of Salks. Both are currently happy campers. I have been to these guy's homes on more than one occasion, heard the systems, and have certainly enjoyed both presentations (in vastly different settings but, in both cases, powered by tubes although the Salks have recently been repowered with SS). Both speakers feature beautiful woodwork and I believe the Daedali are solid wood as opposed to veneer but I have to say that the Salks seem to be the more professionally rendered finish while the Daedali appear to be more of "made in the garage" type product. This implies nothing about their sound and, Tom, please don't hate me for saying this...it's just the way I truly see it.

Sorry if I got sidetracked a little back there. My point is, there are plenty of builders out there already who fully embrace the high sensitivity approach and I think you would be better served to proceed in that direction than to try to coerce Salk into building a speaker that eschews his core philosophies about what disciplines need to be incorporated into his definition of a "proper sounding high performance speaker". Now, having said all of this, maybe Mr. Salk will come on board and proceed to blow up my whole hypothesis point by point. I will certainly listen.

Just one more thing...92-93db sensitivity into 8 ohms certainly trumps 84-86db into 4 ohms but it still isn't truly high sensitivity, FWIW.