Change to Horns or stay Dynamic

Dgad: You bring up a common misunderstanding about active systems. Many do have built-in amps, but that's not necessarily a given. Some use external amps, e.g., Linkwitz Lab Orion, Gradient Revolution (I think), Morrison, Nomad Ronin, among others, including what I build.

Yes, the initial set-up is a little more involved, but once you've got it connected, you're done. The gains of active out weight the extra work. And if you want control, an external active x/o allows for far greater control than a fixed internal passive.

Here's another link that goes into the specific benefits of active: http://www.tnt-audio.com/casse/active_speakers_intro1_e.html

Thermal compression is real and one of the most important as well as overlooked parameters in loudspeaker performance.

Absolutely...northern european woofers with a voice coil the size of a mere tweeter and a metal phase plug to try and keep cool the pole and connected to a lightweight rigid driver work well up to mid 90's at 1 meter.

Great engineering for great sound at modest levels for low cost but far from realistic reproduction.

On the other hand - money saved from purchase of expensive drivers can go into woodwork and veneer to create a work of art...

Great point George!

For audiophile drivers cone size and voice coil size are of secondary importance. Contrast this with the pro drivers' big voice coils and oversized and vented magnetic cores that can sustain prolonged periods of abusive power (read 400-600 watts) with just maybe 2db of thermal compression while playing at around 120db average level. There really is no comparison!

Agreed - "there really is no comparison".

I'd re-iterate to try Shefield Labs Drum Tracks on a pro design speaker like (PMC, ATC, Meyer, Westlake, custom Augsperger and many other pro designs) and your audiophile ears are in certainly in for a big surprise...hey that actually sounds like a real drum set in the room!

(Bear in mind mastering engineers compress the crap out of what you mostly can buy in recorded music - so you won't always achieve realism except on recordings where dynamics have been deliberately preserved.)

Shadorne,

Thanks, and right you are about the tweeter sized woofer voice coils of the north european drivers. Very well put.

To further my point, let me say that in addition to the Summas' reviews that more than anything else cite that speaker's unrestrained dynamics, there's another loudspeaker that I mentioned earlier, the Jazz module by Audiokinesis (Duke Lejune by the way, is the designer and is one of the nicest and most helpful posters right here on the Audiogon forum). The Jazz module is similar in design to the Summa. It has recently received a golden ear award from TAS and the word on the forums from people that have heard it is that it too excels in dynamics being able to play very loud without compression. This loudspeaker also uses pro-drivers made by TAD and Beyma. See a trend here?

It's also worthwhile to note that in all the reviews of both of these systems, people are reporting the lack of horn coloration and horn-honk from the waveguides. So, the reason I am excited (even though I haven't heard either of these two yet) is that you can finally have your cake and eat it too having the dynamics of horns with out the artifacts.

Cheers,
George

"Bear in mind mastering engineers compress the crap out of what you mostly can buy in recorded music - so you won't always achieve realism except on recordings where dynamics have been deliberately preserved"

Excellent point, very well said and perhaps a topic deserving it's own discussion under the heading "atrocities sound engineers commit during post mastering" although I have a feeling it's been discussed before.