Speaker manufacturers are not so honest about their impedance range and a curve is the only way to know. If they didn’t do so many tricks in the crossover we would not have this problem. The drivers are not the problem, the crossover is.
In my experience most speaker designers do not know much about electronics or care about what the amplifier may have to do.
+1 on this, I’ve felt this for a long time.
I’ve heard this from ESL owners where the impedance rises in the bass to very high values. They believe that OTL amplifiers are better for their speakers because they can supply the extra voltage to drive the high impedance in the bass. They indeed get more bass if the damping factor is low, but not the bass the speaker was designed to give. They get more and perhaps like more but it is one note bass.
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This is where we get in trouble with the power paradigm which had led people to believe that the speaker wants constant power. It does not. I cannot think of or find a modern speaker that wants constant power, the varying impedance and flat response insure that the designer uses a constant voltage amplifier, ie one with high damping.
@ramtubes
The first paragraph is false. You don’t get a one note bass at all, even if the OTL has no feedback (and most do use feedback). Please keep in mind that one of my employees (who now works at Bel Canto) owned ESL57s, and don’t forget Bill Toberman (RIP) who had ESL63s. The one note bass phenomena only occurs when the panel speaker (it doesn’t have to be an ESL) is too close to the wall behind it, allowing the back wave to reinforce around one frequency. This happens a lot if the ESL user has a solid state amp because getting bass out of the speaker becomes a challenge- most solid state amps can’t make power into 30 ohms or more!
The last paragraph is a bit misleading. The Power Paradigm does not lead people to think speakers want constant power. If anything, most people think the idea is ridiculous. And as you state, most speakers are Voltage Paradigm. Its not until they hear what a properly set up Power Paradigm system can do that they might begin to think that its not bunk (ask clio09). And there are manufacturers that make speakers that are Power Paradigm and I’ve mentioned a few already- Audiokinesis, Classic Audio Loudspeakers, DeVore Fidelity, Lowther, PHY, Feasterex, Onken, Volti Audio, PureAudioProject, Evolution, Sonic Flare.... I can go on and on but I hope you get the point.
Most horns and panel speakers are Power Paradigm devices unless something unusual was done to change that (there’s a guy named Wayne Piquet who does just that with Quad ESL63s, by adding an extra panel to the speaker). For example, Magnaplanars are Power Paradigm but because of their resistive nature work fine with Voltage Paradigm (constant voltage) amplifiers.
Sometimes its the intent of the speaker designer that makes the difference, so the speaker might be acoustic suspension, like the AR-1, or it might be bass reflex and so on. Your comment at the top of this post has a lot to do with that- many speaker designers went to the school of ’by gosh and by golly’ and are simply trying to make the speaker work with a particular type of amplifier, like an SET (which is likely the most common application). If they get the latter right, they will have a Power Paradigm device.
In case you are thinking I made this stuff up, this is really all about history; take a look at this Google search, in this case one for a Fisher A-55:
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=fisher+A-55&ie=utf-8&oe=utf...One of the first hits is an image from YouTube, showing the damping control on the amplifier, which is a dual-gang pot. If you look closely, it is labeled "constant voltage" with the control all the way down, "constant power" with the control at noon, and "constant current" with the control all the way up. In this case, voltage and current feedback are balanced against each other in the noon position.
Now current drive never really developed into a thing (meaning there are almost no speakers based on current drive), but power drive and voltage drive did. This amplifier was built about the time (mid-late 1950s; Fisher, ElectroVoice and a few others had such ’damping controls’ on their amps during this period) when the voltage rules were first being proposed and so amplifiers had to be adaptable to whatever was out there. Instead of balancing current and voltage feedback, you get similar results with no feedback at all, which is understandable because as you know, current feedback **raises** output impedance while voltage feedback decreases it.
@bifwynne
Roger has one of the best tube matching services in the country.
I suspect that one reason you have issues with the taps is that the ARC amp really needs a few more db of feedback; 15 db is slightly on the low side to get right.
