Your favorite Electrostatic, Panel spkr
A true ribbon CAN be made in a wide width (Apogee did it), but it's expensive. Such a ribbon is very insensitive, and apparently it's impedance has to be very low (Apogee's sure was). A difficult loudspeaker to pull off, but some consider the Apogees the best they've ever heard. I've never heard one, the best I've heard are imo ESL's, though magnetic-planars have their charms. |
bdp24, even with neodymium magnets the field strength drops of very quickly. You can increase the magnets deeper front to back but the you start to make the ribbon beam and cause diffraction effects plus the magnets, even the Chinese ones get prohibitively expensive. This may be why the Divas were everybody's favorites and when the humidity was right (joking) they were wonderful and I did live with them for almost a decade but they were fragile, volume limited and lacking in deep bass whereas the 2+2s I have now are indestructible, go loud as h-ll but are still deep bass challenged. After year/decades of piddling around I finally figured out a way to put subwoofers under them but I would never have been able to do it without digital bass management and it would have taken a lot longer without the system I have which allows me to change both high and low pass filters independently on the fly from my seat with a laptop. I have not changed the configuration now for somewhere around five years which for me is a very long Time. The Soundlabs, because they are so wide will produce very deep bass and I believe most people use them without subwoofers but because they are one-way speakers the entire frequency range is doppler effected by the long excursions deep bass takes. My long experience with ESLs of various configurations tells me that removing the low bass from them will increase clarity, banish any volume compression and add perhaps 10dB of headroom. But it will take a lot of subwoofers to make it work. The 845 is a very big loudspeaker. The plan right now is to use eight 12" Morel drivers in four sealed decagonal enclosures made of 2" thick MDF. Nice Winter project (after I finish the kitchen or somebody we know is going to be in big trouble.) |
Hi mijostyn thanks for the compliment. I should have mentioned that the speakers I built are using 8 Spectra panels per side, 4 below and 4 above. I am trying them right now with a pair of Contrabass subwoofers. Not sure if I like them as much with subwoofers. Here is a link about the speakers https://www.diyaudio.com/forums/planars-and-exotics/183168-acoustat-answer-219.html see post 2187. Am planning on trying a row of 33 planar ribbon tweeters per side (22 front, 11 rear). |
Atom, Those would be 4+4s. BIG speakers. Two subwoofers are not going to be near enough. I use 4 subs with 2+2s. You should put two inside and two outside the Stats preferably against walls. Cross over 100 to 125 Hz. As I said in the post above I will be getting SoundLabs 845s in the hopefully near future. They are the same size as your 4+4s and I plan on using an eight 12" driver array with them. Assuming they are in a room with eight foot ceilings you have full range line source loudspeakers and you are trying to use them with point source woofers which simply can not project power as well. If they sound right at one volume as soon as you turn it up higher the stats will just overwhelm the woofers. If you message me I can send you a picture of what I have in mind. Mike |
