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

closenplay stated,

"To add clarity, concentric is a subset of coaxial. In other words, all concentric drivers are coaxial but not all coaxial drivers are concentric. @erik_squires Pardon the presumption; you are probably referencing most designs intended for the hifi home user, of which most (if not all) are concentric."

I know what "coaxial" means but how are you defining "concentric"? Are you suggesting that two coaxial drivers (i.e. their voice coils) may me mounted at an angle to each other? That they are centered but not perpendicular? Or?

@herbreichert - Not to speak for @closenplay but my interpretation was that he’s focusing on the z-axis (forwards / backwards) alignment. An egregious example of z-axis non-alignment would be in some car stereo drivers, where they (sometimes) clumsily suspended & mount a tweeter in front of a woofer. That’s what I think he was calling out.

But the reality is that none of the coaxials really seem to have perfect z-axis alignment (relative to the 2 drivers’ acoustic centers). Certainly not Tannoys, which mount the tweeters well behind the back of the woofer, coupled through a relatively long waveguide. Tannoy’s brief attempts to time-align the drivers via electrical means were generally regarded a failure. Their pepperpot waveguide drivers at least have phase alignment at the crossover point; not sure about the tulip drivers.

Tannoy chose to call theirs "dual concentric" early on, probably to help distinguish their approach from far less refined coaxial arrangements of the time.

@herbreichert wrote:

I know what "coaxial" means but how are you defining "concentric"? Are you suggesting that two coaxial drivers (i.e. their voice coils) may me mounted at an angle to each other? That they are centered but not perpendicular? Or?

sincerely

herb

Pragmatically speaking it would seem mostly to be a terminological twist; Tannoy calls it ’Dual Concentric,’ whereas others typically refer to it as ’Coaxial.’ Whatever differences there are between different iterations/designs of these point source transducers, not that they're irrelevant, should have no practical impact on whether they’re called one or the other.

Coaxials with acoustic centers which are not coincicent does kind of beg for an active, DSP crossover doesn't it? :)

more dumb, not rhetorical, questions:

what is the definition of "acoustic center" ?

 

how do we know when they are aligned? A tone burst? 

 

what is the definition of a point source? 

 

I am completely confused. 

Is there a book on this stuff?

 

herb

 

 

That being said I've heard the SourcePoint 10s and am listening to the Heretic AD614s right now.

 

hr