Looking for my Final Pair!!


Been through the high end maelstrom for over 30 years and although I have enjoyed the ride, I desperately want to find speakers that exude dynamics, tone and presence.  I want to be transported to the Village Vanguard where The John Coltrane Quartet are performing any night I desire.  I want to feel the timbre of his sax 🎷. When I close my eyes I want to be enveloped by the atmosphere of the space and awash with the impact and emotion being expressed by the musicians.  I don’t want to hear what the engineers hear after they mix a recording...I want to be in the studio when the tracks are being laid down!  So far, Tannoy Heritage Arden have come to my attention, Klipsch Cornwall IV’s, JBL S4700’s or perhaps Spatial Audio X3’s?  Help
128x128dave_b
Dear @dave_b : "" Try psychotherapy... ", you can go on insulting me in all the ways you intent/intented.

What you need is to learn and understand the IMD meaning that obviously that as you several other persons in this thread just can’t understand it or have a severe misunderstood for a very low knowledge levels in that speacific IMD regards.

Here " something " that could help to fix your misunderstood.

You say I need psycotherapy because you are sticked as one stupid here with the very old " fashion " ( same as REL people. ) to use a subs as only a low bass speaker reinforcement even with true full range speaker designs.

That old and wrong way to use subs to listen MUSIC in stereo home systems changed several years ago in favor to lower the IMD levels to achieve true improvements in the room/system quality sound reproduction.

Next some high-lihgts and links to understand about:

this comes from white papers by Putzeys.


""" Read any discussion about loudspeakers and you get the impression that distortion as a topic is eagerly avoided. If it is mentioned, it is done sotto voce, implicitly. For instance: “you can’t get good bass out of a small long-stroke driver. There’s no substitute for cone area when you want to move air”. Doesn’t sound like it is about distortion at all, does it? Let’s unpick the statement a bit: there is no substitute for cone area. Of course there is: displacement. If you want to move 100 cc of air, you could move a 500 cm 2 cone by 2 mm or you can move a 200 cm2 cone by 5 mm. At the wavelengths we’re talking about, there’s no difference between the two. So if the bigger driver sounds better, it must be because it’s managing that 2 mm movement much more precisely than the smaller driver is managing its 5mm. And that is a statement about distortion. If we can crack the question why a short-stroke driver is more accurate over short strokes than a long-stroke one over long strokes, it should enable us to build a long-stroke driver that’s just as accurate as a long stroke one for the same acoustical output. More accurate in fact, because once you understand the problem, there’s no reason why you couldn’t reduce distortion even further.

A HD measurement done on a complete driver tends to show a complicated jumble of frequency and amplitude dependent distortion products. An IMD measurement shows another jumble.

When we talk about distortion, there’s often a distinction made between Harmonic Distortion (HD) and Intermodulation Distortion (IMD). These aren’t two different types of distortion per se, but different ways in which the same distortion mechanism can manifest itself more or less saliently. Take for instance a woofer whose BL curve droops progressively with excursion. Tested with a single 30 Hz sine wave, this will only manifest itself as a form of soft limiting. This sounds like a change in tonal quality, but little more. The effect of the suspension progressively stiffening (Kms increases) with excursion would sound more or less the same in a single sine wave test. A HD measurement is not helpful in telling you which of the two effects is happening. By contrast, imagine what happens if you add a 1kHz tone to the bass tone. The added excursion caused by the 1kHz component itself is negligible. But now the two distortion mechanisms show very different signatures. As BL rises and falls throughout the 30 Hz cycle, so does the sensitivity of the motor. The 1 kHz tone gets amplitude modulated. You can hear the 1 kHz tone wobble. BL droop manifests itself not only as harmonic distortion, but also as intermodulation. The variable stiffness of the suspension however has no such effect. The 1 kHz tone will not be modulated by suspension stiffness. Why should it? 1 kHz is well above the resonance frequency, so there the mass of the cone completely dominates how the 1kHz component makes the cone move. The difference between the two distortion mechanisms is plainly audible on any genre of music that has both bass and midrange content. And as a distortion mechanism, the droop of the BL curve is much more audible than the progressive stiffening of the suspension. This is rather important. One often encounters drivers where two different distortion mechanisms are precisely orchestrated to make their harmonic distortions cancel. Such drivers look great on paper but this sleight of hand actually worsens IMD.

The distortion takes the form of the signal being multiplied with a filtered version of itself, so it is predominantly second order in nature. Now, there is a common misconception that second order distortion is innocuous. This may be largely true of harmonic distortion where a second harmonic is easily masked by the fundamental, but in the case of intermodulation distortion it is patently false. Second order IMD generates difference frequencies which are below the signal frequency and don’t get masked at all. They audibly clog up the bass region in a manner which becomes extremely obvious once you remove the distortion. Also, amplitude modulation of mid frequency signals by the bass is very audible as burbling. """


http://www.klippel.de/know-how/measurements/nonlinear-distortion/intermodulation-distortion.html

In next link read critical issues and you will see IMD:

http://www.klippel.de/test-objects/low-frequency-drive-units.html

http://www.klippel.de/fileadmin/klippel/Files/Know_How/Application_Notes/AN_08_3D_Intermodulation_Di...

https://www.audioholics.com/loudspeaker-design/audibility-of-distortion-at-bass/intermodulation-dist...

In next link you can read:

"" Another well known type of distortion is Intermodulation Distortion (IM) where a higher frequency is amplitude modulated by a lower frequency, causing new frequencies above and below the highest frequency at a frequency“distance” equal to the lowest frequency (mirrored side-bands). ""
https://www.rmsacoustics.nl/papers/whitepaperdistortion.pdf

Joe D’Appolito:

"" We can tolerate relatively high levels of harmonic distortion in program material because, as their name implies, the spurious components added to the program are harmonically related to the original program. Intermodulation distortion (IMD) produces output frequencies that are not harmonically related to the input. These frequencies are much more audible and annoying than harmonic distortion. ""

In 1967 a gentleman who cares about IMD made it his patent:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3327043


Now, the CW woofer handled a wide frequency band where exist very high IMD levels and that only can be lower if part of the bass frequencies goes out of that woofer and for this we need subs and a high-pass filter that liberates the CW woofer of that bass frequency short band.

I respect that you prefer the CW or any other speaker in full range status. So that means that you are not even aware of that IMD developed by those woofers in all the speakers you own or owned.

Stay where you are and follow sticked to that old and wrong " fashion ". It’s your privilege and no one can disagree with.

R.
I will assert my privilege and ask of you, Raul, to stop disagreeing with me!  Thanks 🙏🏻 
Bruno's comments contradict Raul's conclusion. Bruno teaches that a larger cone can get the job done with less excursion (which means 'lower distortion' in this case). The Klipsch has a 15" woofer, which is a larger cone resulting in less excursion. Bruno then uses the example of a 1KHz tone intermodulated thru Doppler Effect (with a high excursion cone); the Klipsch woofer is crossed over at 700Hz.

Because the Klipsch horn is well active at 1000Hz it masks the lower level distortions of the woofer at the same frequency in the same way that this occurs with many other loudspeakers. Bruno's comments support the idea that the Klipsch is a lower distortion loudspeaker insofar as its woofer is concerned.


We can see from this conversation that so far no particular argument has been leveled at the woofer itself. If there is a weak argument (re. Bruno) for distortion it would have to be about the crossover frequency not the woofer.

Occam's Razor is the oldest scientific principle. It teaches that given two explanations, the simpler one is probably the right one. We have Raul's remonstrations as the complex explanation, and we have the far simpler explanation: In a nutshell Raul was/is simply wrong; we see this in spades from Bruno's text, which explains why the Klipsch is a lower distortion design.
Dear @roxy54  : I can see in this thread that some of you ( including that stupid. ) posted everything against my posts even laugjhin of me and yes is very easy to make critics to any one posts when those critics has not to be proved by facts that were used as the critics foundation.

I can't see/read here to any of you posted any single contribution that can helps to improve the quality sound reproduction of the OP or in any of your systems.

Applaud is not a contribution and makes more damage than helps in any way.

Forums are places ( for me. ) where we can learn ( that's why I post, trying always to learn or help. ) or confirm what we already knew, it is a " win to win " excersice: no one is defeated but here some want to beat the other person ( in this case me. ) and try to do it with no first hand experience facts to do it.

I don't post to beats any one, this kind attitudes is almost the rule in the audio forums and is way wrong.

So instead to follow making useless/futile critics ( including Dave. ) my advise to all of you is to make true contributions that in any way can enhance the different issues developed through any thread.

Btw, I learned, by " test and error " , several years ago the critical and main characteristic that impedes to any system to have top quality sound reproduction and that has a name: IMD levels.

My ADS goes down to below 18hz and is designed to run with a stereo amp or to run in bi-amp way ( with out using external crossover. ) as many other speaker manfacturers designs.
Bi-amp works really good and enhance the quality level sound reproduction. Latter on ADS made it a dedicated external crossover for my speakers and obviously I bougth it and I achieved higher quality sound reproduction levels.
All those gaves me some kind of first hand experiences about and then I asked my self: why not add subwoofers? that in those times was a crazy idea due that my ADS goes really low but even that I tryed and for may self I step by step learned about that IMD.
For my self and not through links information or advise of other gentlemans else where.

That's why I posted in Agon the " old " subwoofer thread with foundation mainly as the subs main target is not to achieve better and lower bass range but to put at minimum the IMD developed by the passive woofers in speakers and as a side advantage better and lower bass.

Regards and enjoy the MUSIC NOT DISTORTIONS,
R.