Any monitors clearly better than Pulsars?

andy,


I don't find myself having much beef with your beef about the infinite slope claims.  :-)


Though I would say:  Regardless of whether the specific technical claim is true about the infinite slope crossovers, I'm personally not sure about how much is due to the drivers vs the skill of the designer.


I've heard/read from numerous speaker designers that the crossover design is one of the fundamental challenges,  so choosing the proper drivers in the first place to get what you want, and then nailing the crossover design, especially to the degree you get so many plaudits, seems like a major part of the process.

Btw, I can understand anyone not liking the JA speakers, personal taste being what it is.   I was just puzzled by the particular nature of the critique lobbed at them in this thread.

At low frequency, our hearing may not be that sensitive to distortion since the wavelength is so long.  At low frequency, what's more important is how well the bass is properly damped - otherwise the bass will be lose or flabby.  Two most important variables that determine the quality of the bass is first the driver QTS, and the internal volume of the cabinet.  As for how low the driver can go determined by first the size of the driver surface area, secondly the material (such as paper, aluminum, ceramic ...), and thirdly the Xmax (or how much excursion can the driver move back and forth).  In general, everything else being equal, the harder the cone material, the more bass extension.  Hence materials such as aluminum, kevlar or magnesium will have more bass than paper cone.

I think the Harbeth 30 woofer is made of paper or paper that has been coated with some sort of material.  The Pulsar woofer is magnesium, so most likely it will have more bass extension vs. the Harbeth.  I personally have used the Seas 5.5in magnesium, and I would crank up the volume and that thing would just play on.  I did the same thing on a lesser paper cone driver it broke on me.

The challenge in designing small monitor such as the Pulsar is that you need some sizable internal volume to able to control or dampen the bass.  But most people want small monitors so that they look pretty in their living rooms.  If the internal volume is too small, you have a midbass hump.  For the magnesium woofer on the Pulsar, you probably need about 13 - 15 liter of volume to properly damp the bass output.  I've read the Stereophile review and it seems like the Pulsars do have a bit of a midbass hump.  The midbass hump sometimes can be mistaken for having deeper bass.  And to be fair, most monitors in the same size category as the Pulsars probably don't have much deep bass to speak of so it's more like a game of millimeter.  

I heard the midbass hump on the Pulsars (Stereophile noted a bit of added warmth to the Pulsars too), which is why I gravitated to the Perspectives, which evened that out and sounded more linear t me through the lower midrange/upper bass.

Prof, btw, I really liked the pulsar when i heard them. its just that I prefer a speaker with more bass and even more importantly is how loud it can play cleanly along a life size image. The 30.2 for me have more of a life size image, but one of the trade off is a soundstage that cannot be compared to the Pulsar. The pulsar use totl Seas driver and its quite impressive in many ways, but I still find the presentation lacking in many ways.

I see you also really like the Devore 093/096. to me its a perfect example, that sort of presentation is to my ears in another league to the Pulsar as well. For the same price, lets just say I know which speaker id get.

ok, back to OP