@rauliruegas , thanx a bunch Raul. I sit 4 meters away. You have to remember That my system is line source. It's volume does not fade with distance like a point source system will. Yes, each main speaker has two transformers. They are nothing near as complicated as the crossovers in most modern high performance speakers. I also take the bass below 100 Hz out of them with 48 dB/oct digital filters which increases their headroom rather dramatically. 105 dB peaks is not a problem at all. Each one has a 350 watt amp on it and each subwoofer has 1800 watts on it, all 4 of them.
System that sounds so real it is easy to mistaken it is not live
My current stereo system consists of Oracle turntable with SME IV tonearm, Dynavector XV cartridge feeding Manley Steelhead and two Snappers monoblocks running 15" Tannoy Super Gold Monitors. Half of vinyl records are 45 RMP and were purchased new from Blue Note, AP, MoFI, IMPEX and some others. While some records play better than others none of them make my system sound as good as a live band I happened to see yesterday right on a street. The musicians played at the front of outdoor restaurant. There was a bass guitar, a drummer, a keyboard and a singer. The electric bass guitar was connected to some portable floor speaker and drums were not amplified. The sound of this live music, the sharpness and punch of it, the sound of real drums, the cymbals, the deepness, thunder-like sound of bass guitar coming from probably $500 dollars speaker was simply mind blowing. There is a lot of audiophile gear out there. Some sound better than others. Have you ever listened to a stereo system that produced a sound that would make you believe it was a real live music or live band performance at front of you?
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@rauliruegas Being that the Sound Lab is a large curved panel, you have to add 6dB to the rating to find out the effective sensitivity when you are back about 10 feet. The reason is that at 1 meter most of the output of the speaker is not picked up by the microphone. Roger's sensitivity numbers on his website doesn't tell the whole story, since sensitivity is a voltage measurement and so impedance is pretty important. The Sound Lab is 30 Ohms in the bass (the sensitivity is stated for 8 Ohms), meaning its efficiency is actually higher by a good 3-6dB in the region where most of the power exists. The speaker isn't hard to drive for any other reason than impedance. If you have amps that can drive the impedance the numbers @mijostyn provided are entirely realistic in many rooms. |
Much of the energy used to drive the Sound Lab is soaked up by the passive crossover, because SL (for other compelling reasons) chose to use a resistance in the RC network that comprises the high pass filter that is much lower than the natural impedance of the panel itself, sans RC network. Thus the amplifier is expending more energy to drive the resistor than to drive the panel. With RC network removed, the big SLs are remarkably efficient and present an impedance in the 20 to 25 ohm range (never below 20 ohms) from about 100Hz to 5kHz. Impedance goes up below 100Hz and down between 5kHz and 20kHz. This gets rid of the midrange impedance issue that Ralph alludes to. And of course it’s favorable for an OTL tube amp. I daresay that a 50W amplifier is sufficient; my Atma-sphere amps with about 100W are coasting. Of course, you also have to replace the treble audio trans with a suitable full range audio trans. They’re not easy to find. |
Many years ago as an audio dealer peddling "descent stuff" , I attended a concert featuring the Polish national champion string quartet -- to "recalibrate" my ears. It didn't take long to come to the realization that our equipment was embarrassing insufficient at replicating the experience of a live performance. The lack of lower midrange detail struck me as the most prominent deficiency. As a result we upped the ante on just about everything in the musical chain and lived happily every after. Well, for 2 more decades, anyway. |
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