Which SPEAKER for the 21ST century?

If 90% of music is in the midrange, then why not use a great single driver speaker? Keep studying Tweek, you will eventually find out that I have been right all along.

The reason in a nutshell, Twl, is that you won't be hearing what the composer intended you to hear. Some folks aren't bothered by that but many of us are not content to recompose standard works, especially from the "classical" repertoire. I wrote a long diatribe on this a few weeks back so i won't repeat it here. Suffice it to say that lots of folks want to hear all the notes the composer wrote and that you cannot do with virtually any single driver design, luscious midrange to the contrary notwithstanding.

will

Twl, with any driver there are + and - I'm sure the Fostex are nice. Like Bishop says a single point driver will not perform in the lower hz's like a Seas or Skaaning, and will not perform in the upper 's like a great tweeter or ribbon. And for mids the ATC midrange is suppose to be tops. Bishop explain "to the contrary notwithstanding"?

Bishopwill, I humbly and completely disagree with your point of view about not hearing what the composer intended. The same could be said about any speaker, whether it be 1 way or 6 way. If I said that a multi-way speaker did not produce the 16Hz organ note that is heard once in a blue moon, would you say it cannot produce the performance the way the composer intended? Almost every speaker in the world is rolled off somewhat on the low end. Are they all to be tossed out as well? My single drivers will reproduce even 20Hz albeit at quite a lower level than the average SPL. This conception that single drivers cannot reproduce bass information is just incorrect. It is there, just rolled off some. Just like many other speakers. And when you consider the problems encountered with crossing drivers in and out, with the response lumps, phase anomalies, and loss of signal information, would you say that these irregularities would be preferred by the composer as "more acceptable" deviations from his intended presentation. Are you saying that crossover distortions and losses are part of the composition? There are very few speakers in this world that are truly flat and accurate at 16Hz. And many of them sacrifice far more in musicality throughout the other areas of the spectrum in order to achieve that low end. I respect your opinion to disagree with my point, but I think when pressed in this way, you will have to agree that no speaker really presents the performance exactly as the composer intended and that most of them are deficient in the bass frequencies to some extent. You just seem to think that a single driver with a rolloff that begins at 40Hz is not producing bass below that point and that somehow multi- driver speakers are. You may be surprised to learn that the majority of multi-way speakers are not flat below 40Hz or even higher. I guarantee that if you heard a good single driver system, you would not have the opinion that you have.

Twl, your argument is a good one but at the end of the day it doesn't pass muster. First, as to the organ work with the occasional 16Hz pedal tone, yes, a system that will not reproduce that pitch is recomposing (or decomposing) that work. If the composer did not want you to hear that pitch, s/he would have spared the organist the bother of playing it. None of us would cut speaker systems any slack about accurately reproducing other aspects of music, why do the extreme ends of the spectrum get an exception?

Here's an example: Last night I was having coffee with a friend in a local coffee shop that prides itself on being a bit artsy-fartsy. To my delight, they put on the Herbert Howells oboe sonata, a work out of my own performance past. The fast, nuanced playing totally defeated the resolving power of the tiny Bose-ettes mounted around the room. Further, the wonderful, woody nasality of the instrument was almost totally lost. Now, virtually no one on this list would defend a speaker system that decomposed the music in that fashion, yet folks will cheerfully give away an octave or so on both ends and defend their decision to do so. Stay with me now: I'm not comparing Bose microspeakers to good single driver systems in any respect other than this one--that they deny the listener the opportunity to hear the music as the composer intended it to be heard. It may still be very pleasant. I was far happier sipping my java with Howells in the background than being subjected to Kenny G or Barely ManBelow. But I was not having the experience that Mr. Howells wanted me to have when he wrote the piece.

You may say, "But no speaker can reproduce everything just right!" And you're correct. Indeed, that endless quest for the sound of live performance is the driving force behind the high end. I would submit, though, that a good full-range system that is down perhaps 2-3dB at 20Hz comes closer to realizing the composer's intent than one that is down 20-30dB at 20Hz--at least to the extent that the composer wrote notes down that low. So defending single driver systems with steep low-end rolloff simply because all systems have SOME low-end rolloff doesn't make much sense to me.

For persons who listen only or primarily to music with frequencies that fall within the range of single driver speakers, I agree that they can offer superb midrange sound and a number of other very positive characteristics. For those of us who are accustomed to hearing live organ or orchestral or other musical forms that include significant low frequency content, single driver systems simply leave out too much of the music.

This is exactly the kind of disagreement that makes high end audio interesting. Thanks for the gentlemanly tone of your response to me and please accept my comments as I intend them, not any kind of attack but simply a difference in point of view.

will