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Coaxials - Reality vs. Experience?

Should say "hype vs. reality" in the headline. 

 

Coaxial speaker design has been around in one way or another for a long time. I often think I’ll be absolutely blown away by them, but in practice traditional vertical layout speakers often have sound as good, or have other features that make them sound better.

Thiel, KEF, Monitor Audio, Tekton, Seas are among the many players attempting such designs, but none has, by the coaxial drivers alone, dominated a segment of the market.

What are your listening experiences? Is it 1 coaxial speaker that won you over, or have you always preferred them?

erik_squires
ronboco
845 posts
 

@mulveling 

Have you compared Rockport speakers to your Tannoys and if so how did they compare? 
Happy listening!

 

crustycoot
644 posts
 

Surprised no one has mentioned the new MoFi 10 that has made a splash on You Tube.  Anyone heard them?  To me it promises to be a modern Large Advent with sealed box bass and by using coincident tweeter placement, a seamlessly integrated crossover transition.

tweak1
3,667 posts
 

Ive owned lots of seakers over the decades from boom boxes to electrostats to Maggies and Accoustats (2+ 2s), by far my favorite. The closest are Emerald Physics 3.4s, open baffle; 12" concentric coaxials with 1" polyester tweeter. As much as I love them, the 2.8s add 2 @ 15" woofers which I can utilize in my large room

antialiased's avatar
antialiased
43 posts
 

I prefer Coaxial Speakers. Point source makes a lot of sense to me. They are also less visually obtrusive. High WAF factor.

mulveling's avatar
mulveling
1,913 posts
 

The real purpose of a coincident source driver is because of the waveguide affect of placing the tweeter in the center of the bass driver. A waveguide to a tweeter extends the frequency response lower allowing a 2 way to utilize a larger driver for more bass extension and volume while not asking it to operate outside its physical abilities thereby introducing distortion. Andrew Jones mentions this in his description of his speaker. Not really anything new though.

@boostedis How can that be the "real purpose" of a coaxial when you can more easily put a separate tweeter behind a wave guide - no complex coaxial required?

The real purpose of a coaxial seems to be the advantages (whatever those are) granted by the spatial co-location of the main tweeter and mid-woofer. In Tannoys featuring a single dual-concentric driver, this better estimates a coherent "single point source" driver, but with more extended FR compared to single-cone drivers or the complications of huge electrostat panels.

Have you compared Rockport speakers to your Tannoys and if so how did they compare?

@ronboco Unfortunately, I have not, yet - but they look amazing! I’ve always admired pics of their builds.

@russ69 Did you really start this thread with a "times moved on" argument against coaxials and then admitted to using Ohm Walsh’s, a design from the early 1970s? lol

There were many bad coaxials back in the day, where you see tweeters kludgily bolted on in front of a woofer. That's what we've moved on from. Not the excellent Tannoy design (which they got right back in the 1940s and have been refining since then), nor the other sophisticated coaxials we we see in high end audio today.

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