My Listening Report of 3 Single Driver Speakers

I’m visiting Atlanta over Christmas & New Year & decided to take the opportunity (gifted to me!) one afternoon to pop over to Earth Shaking Music (ESM) just outside downtown Atlanta. ESM are dealers for Cain & Cain, Carolina Audio & Omega single driver speakers. They deal with a lot of other audio stuff & with musical instruments but single driver speakers was my focus this afternoon. I was particularly interested in finding out just how one can make a single driver speaker that covers the entire audio freq range as it goes against all that I learnt about speakers & individual drivers to represent each sub-section of the audio spectrum.

The speakers I heard were the Carolina Audio JTM & JSM stand-mount, Cain & Cain Abey & BEN & the stand-mounted Omega Super 3. The Carolina Audio comprises of one Jordan driver while all the others comprise a single Fostex driver. There are some visual differences among the Fostex drivers – the Abey driver has a whizzer cone, the BEN driver has 5 deep ridges & 5 less deeper ridges (to delay cone break-up when asked to put out high SPLs) & the Omega speaker driver has a long (1”) phase plug. The Jordan driver is a metal compound.

The amps powering these speakers were various Antique Sound Labs (ESM stocks only this line of amps) – ASL Explorer DT 50W/ch mono using 805 tubes, ASL 100 IDT 50W/ch & 30W/ch stereo amp where the 50W/ch uses KT88 tubes & the 30W/ch uses EL34 tubes & the tiny ASL MGSI15 5W/ch stereo amp using KT88. I heard all these amps on all these speakers.
CD player was a cheap Toshiba mass-market DVD player.
Preamp was an ASL Passive TIDT (transformer-based passive pre).
Cables were all Carolina Audio i.e. interconnect & speaker.

I had forgotten bring my CDs on this vacation so Dave (owner of ESM) played his – Miles Davis “Kind Of Blue” re-mastered version-track 1, Bill Withers “Best of”-“Aint No Sunshine”, Buddy Guy “Blues Singer”-“Crawling Kingsnake” & a 6-man vocal group – forgot name! & some tracks from Australian & Irish duo which was gothic-like singing with techno percussion.

So, how was the sound??? In one word – unbelievable!
I never thought that a single driver speaker could t-h-i-s good!! All speakers created a large soundstage, clean & crisp highs, plenty of high freq extension (I still am wondering how a large 3” or larger single driver can do this??!!), sufficient to plenty of bass (the BEN produced a whopping amount of bass, which was too much for that room & we both agreed that bass traps were sorely missing!), there was a decent amount of soundstage depth (but I have heard much better in my friend’s RM9-based system), all speakers were very dynamic & this came thru esp. with the 2 Cain & Cain speakers in the Buddy Guy track where Buddy really smacks the strings (much like Michael Hedges did). The JTM & JSM speakers were a touch (but certainly) laid-back/warm compared to the Cain & Cain. Since the Abey produced less overall bass compared to the BEN, it appeared, at 1st, to sound a bit cleaner than the bigger BEN. However, extended listening during the afternoon told me that the BEN was interacting with the room modes to create a lot of bass overhang & when this would be cured, it would be just as clean as the Abey. I was amazed to listen to the Buddy Guy track on the Abey – it created a holographic midrange & this was totally fantastic! There was another common strain among all speakers – they all sounded very natural i.e. no mechanical/techno/hi-fi sound thus one could listen for hours on end without any listening fatigue. One reason for this is a lack of cross-over circuits (no need for them with a single driver!) & boy, what a difference this makes for the better! As an aside, this convinces me more of 1st order cross-over circuits, which is the next best thing to no cross-over.

The JSM was the least efficient speaker in this group at 88dB/1W/1m while the Abey was 92dB/1W/1m, the BEN was 99dB/1W/1m & the Omega stand-mounted was also 92dB/1W/1m (I think!). It was totally amazing (for me) to listen to all these speakers thru the little ASL 5W/ch amp! There was no hint whatsoever of any amp compression & 5W/ch seemed to be more than plenty. This is my 1st experience with a “flea” powered amp & needless to say that I was -pleasantly taken-aback.

The ASL stereo amps have a triode/pentode switch where the pentode mode bumps up the power – the 5W/ch becomes 15W/ch. We switched the stereo amps into pentode mode - it was really, really required when driving the JSM (made a huge difference for the better!) – but the triode mode “magic” was lost esp. in the midrange, the obvious place to locate this loss.

It was an awesome afternoon (thanks to my wife!) spent listening to (what I would consider) unconventional speakers. Dave’s hospitality was great & he was a very obliging store-owner putting all his offerings thru their paces for me. I went in there a skeptic of single-driver speakers & came out quite convinced! The most glaring fault of these speakers is that they cannot play to very loud SPLs – maybe 105dB SPL is their max? Maybe some owners can shed more light on this? I could find no other obvious flaws in these speakers (I’m sure there are & I’d find them ifffff I could live with a pair for some time).