Hi C1ferrari: I never thought about a plasma microphone. That's wild, and might well be more executable than a full-range plasma driver. How it would sound compared with conventional microphones, who knows? Very interesting. (What I have thought about before is what a large-panel planar-magnetic or electrostatic microphone array would sound like -- think recording into a pair of Maggies.)
Hi Tiggerfc, you raise a potentially problematic point, one which I had considered but really just don't know how it would play out in the listening: How *physically* coherent would, or could, a 1/2-octave, 17-way design sound?
My contention -- although from the response I've gotten so far it's clearly a counterintuitive one -- is that, purely from a perspective of crossing-over one driver to another, a much more restricted bandwidth per driver, using more-similar adjacent drivers, would actually *help* make any one crossover point *less* audible, and designing and implementing those crossover points *easier* -- not more audible or difficult, as some seem to assume. (Though I strongly suspect this is true as far as it goes, how sonically significant the resulting distortion reduction would be, or how the overall presentation would ultimately sound compared with the regular way of divvying-up duties, I can't say.)
But Tiggerfc isn't mainly arguing with that: He's saying that, in total, the sheer spread of physical separation across all the drivers from top to bottom needed to implement such a design, even if each individual driver is located hard next to its neighbor, would inevitably shoot any chance of getting it all to sound like a quasi-point-source -- as many, if not all, conventional 2- and 3-way designs claim or ostensibly strive to achieve. (And despite any superficial similarity, it wouldn't be a line-source either. And mirror-imaging a doubled array of drivers to simulate a centrally-located point-source, like in an MTM array, or as is sometimes done across an entire 3- to 5-way design using anywhere from 5 to 9 drivers, wouldn't seem to be an option in a 17-way concept for obvious reasons, unless you live in a gothic cathedral.)
Whether or not the sound at the listening position would actually suffer from this presumed effect -- and I'm not sure that it would -- would definitely need to be a concern, maybe one answerable only by making a prototype. (A speaker testing this idea could be roughly prototyped without needing each driver to be individually optimally-sized for the wavelengths within its passband -- you could just use multiples of the same 3 or 4 drivers that you'd use in a conventional design -- or including the low-bass drivers at all, which wouldn't be a concern from the standpoint of frequency-band localization, and would probably be side-mounted on the completed design in part because of that.)
Hi Tiggerfc, you raise a potentially problematic point, one which I had considered but really just don't know how it would play out in the listening: How *physically* coherent would, or could, a 1/2-octave, 17-way design sound?
My contention -- although from the response I've gotten so far it's clearly a counterintuitive one -- is that, purely from a perspective of crossing-over one driver to another, a much more restricted bandwidth per driver, using more-similar adjacent drivers, would actually *help* make any one crossover point *less* audible, and designing and implementing those crossover points *easier* -- not more audible or difficult, as some seem to assume. (Though I strongly suspect this is true as far as it goes, how sonically significant the resulting distortion reduction would be, or how the overall presentation would ultimately sound compared with the regular way of divvying-up duties, I can't say.)
But Tiggerfc isn't mainly arguing with that: He's saying that, in total, the sheer spread of physical separation across all the drivers from top to bottom needed to implement such a design, even if each individual driver is located hard next to its neighbor, would inevitably shoot any chance of getting it all to sound like a quasi-point-source -- as many, if not all, conventional 2- and 3-way designs claim or ostensibly strive to achieve. (And despite any superficial similarity, it wouldn't be a line-source either. And mirror-imaging a doubled array of drivers to simulate a centrally-located point-source, like in an MTM array, or as is sometimes done across an entire 3- to 5-way design using anywhere from 5 to 9 drivers, wouldn't seem to be an option in a 17-way concept for obvious reasons, unless you live in a gothic cathedral.)
Whether or not the sound at the listening position would actually suffer from this presumed effect -- and I'm not sure that it would -- would definitely need to be a concern, maybe one answerable only by making a prototype. (A speaker testing this idea could be roughly prototyped without needing each driver to be individually optimally-sized for the wavelengths within its passband -- you could just use multiples of the same 3 or 4 drivers that you'd use in a conventional design -- or including the low-bass drivers at all, which wouldn't be a concern from the standpoint of frequency-band localization, and would probably be side-mounted on the completed design in part because of that.)