axpert, I totally understand your apprehension. I feel very much the same way. People have been messing with speakers for over 100 years and there is nothing mysterious about the engineering. New materials and CAD have improved the engineering but products that go off the beaten track should always be suspect and treated with a degree of caution. Thus, my inquiry about the Manger. It is a very different approach and I am not hearing a lot to recommend it although it is rather rare in this country.
full range drivers have several advantages. They are a perfect point source. They can be made to be directive without beaming. They are phase coherent. The big "but" is that as soon as you ask them to make low bass you force them into making long excursions which force the suspension into the non-linear portion of the range increasing IM distortion and you add doppler distortion on top of that. Pull the deep bass out and you have a remarkably different situation. The same mistake is made trying to make ESL do bass. They can do it but the penalty is very high if you like to listen at realistic levels and I do not mean Rock stadium levels. I mean jazz and symphony orchestra levels.
Ths became obvious to me back in 1978 when I started in with Acoustat Model X's. They made wonderful bass as long as you did not take it up over 80 dB. Then they started farting all over the place. Randy Hooker had just come along with his Helmholz resonating subwoofers. A pair of those with a Dalquist Crossover and two Kenwood LO7M amplifiers gave you state of the art bass of the day and let the Acoustats do what they do best unhindered. I have not changed my approach in over 40 years.
I have never tried it in the context of a small, very efficient full range driver
but I can not see why it would not work wonderfully. It will give you a smaller image but would fit much better in smaller rooms than honking huge ESLs and would cast a lot less. Building a SOTA system for less than $10K for the preamp, amps and speakers would be quite a stunt.
full range drivers have several advantages. They are a perfect point source. They can be made to be directive without beaming. They are phase coherent. The big "but" is that as soon as you ask them to make low bass you force them into making long excursions which force the suspension into the non-linear portion of the range increasing IM distortion and you add doppler distortion on top of that. Pull the deep bass out and you have a remarkably different situation. The same mistake is made trying to make ESL do bass. They can do it but the penalty is very high if you like to listen at realistic levels and I do not mean Rock stadium levels. I mean jazz and symphony orchestra levels.
Ths became obvious to me back in 1978 when I started in with Acoustat Model X's. They made wonderful bass as long as you did not take it up over 80 dB. Then they started farting all over the place. Randy Hooker had just come along with his Helmholz resonating subwoofers. A pair of those with a Dalquist Crossover and two Kenwood LO7M amplifiers gave you state of the art bass of the day and let the Acoustats do what they do best unhindered. I have not changed my approach in over 40 years.
I have never tried it in the context of a small, very efficient full range driver
but I can not see why it would not work wonderfully. It will give you a smaller image but would fit much better in smaller rooms than honking huge ESLs and would cast a lot less. Building a SOTA system for less than $10K for the preamp, amps and speakers would be quite a stunt.