Twl, I appreciate your position regardless of whether or not I personally buy into De Lima's theory. Thanks for taking the time to explicate your thoughts in depth. As you probably know from our past discussions, I have always been curious to get a good audition of a system along the lines of what you promote, but haven't done it so far, and admit to not having made any great efforts to do so (then again, the same thing applies to me with any audio gear - I stay away from the shows completely and the shops as much as I can, and none of my friends are audiophiles, so there you have it...).
As far as the one technical point you raise in the above responses subsequent to my last post: Although I am willing for the time being to take your word about the HF capabilities of the Lowther - or at least its perceived performance (being that un-rolled, wide-dispersion response above a certain point is of debatable necessity) - I don't really believe that this driver could be so unique in terms of its moving mass. I mean, designers and manufacturers of dynamic cone drivers have been expending great effort on reducing driver mass while increasing stiffness (something the Lowther must possess if it is to cover the frequency range it is called upon to do) through applied research and technology for many decades now, the whole world over. I will do some investigation online of this driver, because the technology presumably required for its intended application intrigues me, but will say for the time being that I find it difficult to accept the proposition that it could be so very much lower in mass than many other manufacturers' designs (even if those designs aren't intended to be used full-range).
As far as the electrostat reference we have both made goes, yes, these are much lower in moving mass per area of driver surface than any dynamic design, even a dome tweeter. This is possible because the diaphragm is uniformly driven over its entire surface, so rigidity is not needed, and HF response is not impeded by high moving mass. (I also want to mention that my reservations about the validity of the Doppler-intermodulation theoretical critique of wide-range drivers has as much or more to do with the fact that the eardrum itself is a single-membrane transducer, as it does with microphone physics - I'm just not convinced that the ear/brain is in fact sensitive to this supposed problem as it applies to driver operation.)
Clueless, I am sorry if any of my comments may have offended you, and thanks for the link. They were not intended as an attack, so much as that I personally hate to see what is quite likely a very valid movement in terms of not only providing people with another listening option, but also in serving as a useful check on - and critique of - the status quo, feeling that it must engage in what I perceive to be a black-magic, slight-of-hand pseudo-technical argument in order to bolster its case.
I of course realize that disortion cancellation is an accepted phenomenon in certain circuit designs, but I do not feel there is a direct analogy between balanced/opposing-phase circuits or lines and the SET/single-driver theory. I will read the article you have linked (although I may have read it before, I'm not certain - I know I have read about this in the past, but I can't recall whether it was De Lima himself or another writer[s] citing his [or the same] arguments). In general, I feel it is very easy for a technically literate writer who is so inclined to baffle the masses with speculative theories if they choose. My response is, show me some evidence. I may not be an electrical or acoustical engineer, but I find I can usually rely on my own BS detector to weed out the spurious arguments. In audiophilia, technical competence has never been a guarantee against quackery, even among nice guys. :-)
Again, I'm not questioning anyone's beliefs, to which they are entitled. To me, it's not about belief - if something is plausible, and its effect demonstrable, then the mechanism should be verifiable. Since no one seems to have verified this mechanistic belief, I will go with my instinct that it is not plausible. The proposition that SET/single-driver systems may be the most 'pure', on the other hand, I do not reject on its face at all; I just feel that other, and fairly obvious and well-known, factors could account for that being so, if true. If something in his paper gives me a different perspective, I will post about it here.
At the end of the day, everything we have been talking about here just comes back to the hard reality of the 'audiophile condition', if you will - the fact that there is no, and can never be any, 'perfect' speaker or amplifier design. In the real world, everything is a design trade-off dictated by the laws of physics, and I think we all acknowledge that. It's simply left to us try and pick our poisons based on our experiences and preferences. My own inclinations are pretty conventional: low coloration (even frequency response), wide bandwidth, wide and even dispersion, comfortable headroom, low distortion, accurate transient response with low overhang, etc. I do not lightly dismiss Twl's, or any other careful listener's, positions in favor of simpler systems. I do not know if his or their preferences are a good match for my own, but I do know that they are sincere, and wouldn't be listening to plainly deficient sound reproduction by anyone's standards. I regard myself as still of an open mind, not only because their advocacy leads me to believe that there must be something to it, but mostly because I am cognizant of the reality of the paradigm of trade-offs inherent in any particular engineering approach stipulated above, and that must include the approaches my own system employs.
