Thanks for your comments, Ritteri.
From what you said about the image shifting with power levels, I believe an employee (no longer with us) must have wired the L-pad resistors to mid and tweeter "backwards", which would produce some strange results. It would have likely affected both pair, as they would have been made together.
"for the money they represented... better drivers or crossovers could have been used."
You may not know those retailed in 1995 for only $1295/pair, for a 10" three-way.
We don't believe we compromised:
Hovland and Solen caps,
Solen air core inductor on the mid,
350Watt E-I laminate-core inductor for the woofer,
voice-coil Zobels on all drivers,
high-power non-inductive resistors,
Kimber TC wire with Wonder solder, hard-wired,
a Morel neodymium soft dome with acoustic felt around it,
a 4.5" mid made for us which measured +/-1dB from 250Hz to 5kHz before any crossover circuit was applied,
an Audax 10" woofer we modified with a vented dustcap and epoxy reinforcing its chassis,
an industrial-grade particle board woofer cabinet with adjustable spikes, and
a cast marble mid and tweeter housing, adjustable for "Soundfield Convergence" to most any listening position.
We sold several hundred of them, but never got the man-hours down low enough to make sufficient profit- one of the mistakes of a young company...
You are right- passive crossovers usually veil the sound. Over the years, we've found better parts (the best parts?), and still only use one or two per driver with no circuit board, which is about as transparent as you can get. Much of the loss of transparency I found came from using certain well-known brands of parts. Much sharpness is also lost from the "voicing" tricks designers use when the circuits are not time coherent, to "compensate" for cabinet reflections from the mid and tweeter, to "correct" drivers that have non-flat responses, and to balance the sound from multiple woofers/mids/tweeters for a specific listening distance. As you may know, these manipulations always produce a very irregular impedance curve and/or a complicated circuit.
Our tolerances for capacitors: < 0.5% from the design values, +/- 0.05% pair match.
Inductors and resistors: < 1% from design spec, +/- 0.1% pair match.
Drivers: < 0.5dB from the design spec max (usually +/- 0.25dB), +/- 0.25dB pair match.
No way to know where those speakers went?
Thanks again for your thoughts.
Best,
Roy
From what you said about the image shifting with power levels, I believe an employee (no longer with us) must have wired the L-pad resistors to mid and tweeter "backwards", which would produce some strange results. It would have likely affected both pair, as they would have been made together.
"for the money they represented... better drivers or crossovers could have been used."
You may not know those retailed in 1995 for only $1295/pair, for a 10" three-way.
We don't believe we compromised:
Hovland and Solen caps,
Solen air core inductor on the mid,
350Watt E-I laminate-core inductor for the woofer,
voice-coil Zobels on all drivers,
high-power non-inductive resistors,
Kimber TC wire with Wonder solder, hard-wired,
a Morel neodymium soft dome with acoustic felt around it,
a 4.5" mid made for us which measured +/-1dB from 250Hz to 5kHz before any crossover circuit was applied,
an Audax 10" woofer we modified with a vented dustcap and epoxy reinforcing its chassis,
an industrial-grade particle board woofer cabinet with adjustable spikes, and
a cast marble mid and tweeter housing, adjustable for "Soundfield Convergence" to most any listening position.
We sold several hundred of them, but never got the man-hours down low enough to make sufficient profit- one of the mistakes of a young company...
You are right- passive crossovers usually veil the sound. Over the years, we've found better parts (the best parts?), and still only use one or two per driver with no circuit board, which is about as transparent as you can get. Much of the loss of transparency I found came from using certain well-known brands of parts. Much sharpness is also lost from the "voicing" tricks designers use when the circuits are not time coherent, to "compensate" for cabinet reflections from the mid and tweeter, to "correct" drivers that have non-flat responses, and to balance the sound from multiple woofers/mids/tweeters for a specific listening distance. As you may know, these manipulations always produce a very irregular impedance curve and/or a complicated circuit.
Our tolerances for capacitors: < 0.5% from the design values, +/- 0.05% pair match.
Inductors and resistors: < 1% from design spec, +/- 0.1% pair match.
Drivers: < 0.5dB from the design spec max (usually +/- 0.25dB), +/- 0.25dB pair match.
No way to know where those speakers went?
Thanks again for your thoughts.
Best,
Roy
