Was the Snell Secret a Wide Baffle?

And Devore’s inspiration for the "O" series came directly from the Audio Note N...


I would conjecture that the same feature is a good part of the reason for the recent success of the Wharfedale Lintons...

twoleftears,
From what I've seen John D say on the subject, it sounded like the Snell speakers were the bigger inspiration for his going the wide baffle route.

My JBL 4319 speakers are of the old school, wide baffle design and they image better than my old, narrow baffle monitors that were purported to be imaging champs.

With the JBLs, the images can be as wide and deep as the recording dictates with very stable imaging, with a rich and full toned presentation.

I have nothing to complain about and think that all the fuss about narrow baffles was just a way to see if things could be improved and it caught on and became de rigueur, only to come full circle, and, hopefully, back to the basics that work.

All the best,
Nonoise

All of the Audio Note speakers E, J, and K are descended from Snell, Peter Q bought the designs. I have a pair of J's myself and have heard E's and J's multiple times and they are all great speakers. Not just the wide baffles but the high sensitivity, plywood cabinets, and closely matched drivers all contribute to the great sound.

There is definitely debate between wide baffle vs narrow baffle.  Objectively, wide baffle has diffraction issue at low frequency whereas the narrow baffle diffraction happens at higher frequency.  Subjectively, wide baffle does not quite have the image detail of narrow baffle but on the other hands, people have comment that wide baffle such as the Sonus Faber has more of live sound.  When you listen to live music, you don't really see "image" as from a stereo reproduction, but more like a bubble of sound coming from the musical instrument, and wide baffle tends to have these type of sound.  But I think the weakness of wide baffle is that the image could get phasey especially at low frequencies.  The speaker baffle does affect the phase of the driver and the wider the baffle, the more it will affect, and hence the image phase in general.  

Personally I prefer narrow baffle mostly for it has better image localization.  As for having image size as in real life, I don't think it has to do with wide or narrow baffle.  It's more about overall implementation.