The best speaker you ever heard?

Norm

I think Jon Dahlquist was a mechanical engineer and may have been aware of the swamp of vibrations you refer to. The fact that part of his crossover though mounted on the top of the cabinet was a step ahead by not being hammered inside of the main cabinet. The fact that 4 of the 5 drivers were mounted on their own baffle boards would effectively reduce noise and clutter and cross pollination of resonance.

Jon once sent me a box speaker to audition and called me for an opinion. It was just okay. Months later I received the same oak speaker now finished in Nextel and with some flocking material on the front baffle..they sounded like a totally different design. He said everything was the same except for the 2 features I just wrote of. I think Jon was way out ahead of this peers. Tom

Tom, as I recall, the Dahlquists just had wooden feet. I don't recall any effort to control vibrations, but that was a long time ago. Were you a dealer back then?

I have enjoyed many of these speakers folks are talking about. I heard the Vandersteen 7's again yesterday driven by Audio Research 10k stereo amp and their matching preamp. Nothing special for that price range. It was through the Romulus CD players (best digital I've ever heard) and I was in shock as to how good it was again. I've heard it with the Ayre monos as well as AR ref in the past and each time it just sounded perfect. Lacked nothing. I would love to hear it with the producers of some of the music I was listening to.I'd love to know how close to their original it is because it takes on the sound of everything upstream. I"m pretty familiar with the products I heard and the Vandys were just right scale, pace, tonally etc... They just sounded the way music sounds when you are there.

Norm

The Nextel paint finish and the flocking material on the entire front speaker baffle are control materials. Both materials seal a bad sounding mdf cabinet from venting its form of bad sound into a listening room. These 2 materials sonically made these same speakers disappear. I thought highly of Jon looking for something different than the standard solution. This was circa 1984. Tom

Tom, my experience was between 1976 and 1978 so I guess we are talking about different speakers.