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What
Makes One Speaker System Sound Better Than
Another?
Factor
#1: exotic or uncolored drivers.
The
finished system cannot sound better than the
drivers at their best. You can usually recognize an
exotic because it is made of ceramic, ribbon, or
works in an entirely different way than the
everyday cones and domes of paper and plastic.
If
you put $100. worth of drivers in a box, then sell
it for $10,000 (which is what many high end
manufacturers do, as you can see if you just look
at the ordinary drivers in their boxes), then your
speaker will, to a large degree, still sound like
$100. worth of drivers in a box, regardless of how
finely tuned the system is. To get true realism in
sound, you must begin with the best drivers
available, even though they are much more expensive
for the manufacturer to buy.
Factor
#2: usually the crossover and filter.
This
circuit must be designed both by computer analysis
and modeling, then refined over and over in
extensive listening tests with trained musicians
who are experienced at identifying subtle
inaccuracies, and who can determine how to correct
them.
Factor
#3: Usually the cabinet.
Attention
must be paid to the construction. The walls must
not vibrate, and care must be taken to minimize
diffraction (peaks and dips in the response curve
caused by the shape). A particular shape can
actually be used to control and improve the
response curve. Cylinders (and rounded edges) have
many advantages in both the above areas.
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Exotic
Drivers: What Makes A True Exotic?
Exotic
Driver: one with very low coloration, or sound of
it's own, added to the sound the driver is
reproducing.
How
is this achieved?
-
Either
a perfectly stiff material, or alternately a
totally flexible material driven linearly across
it's surface, but not anything in-between. This
requires rare and unusual construction methods
and materials with "space-age" properties.
-
A
"motor assembly" (voice coil and magnet) coupled
to a cone material that will start and stop on a
dime, without any motion (continued vibration or
"ringing") after the signal or sound stops. This
is harder to achieve, and thus more rare, than
you would at first believe. Measuring the
various types of distortion that you never see
mentioned does a far better job of describing a
speaker's sound than the superficial "20 -
20,000 Hz." claims that are often made. (How
often do you see published specs that show
speaker waterfall plots, the picture of their
time domain response, or harmonic distortion?
Most speakers perform so abysmally there that
the manufacturer would never want you to know.)
In the final analysis, a good pair of ears is
the best judge. However, you can recognize a
potential exotic with your eyes.
Traditional
drivers
The
drivers used in virtually all mid-priced speakers,
and indeed nearly all high priced speakers, are
merely small variations on the same principles and
primitive construction. They are usually made of
paper, hard plastic, or cloth. Most use dome
tweeters, which may be either hard or soft, but are
far too heavy and flexible for the rapid
start-and-stop vibration required for high
frequency reproduction. They cannot follow
accurately the high frequency electrical signal
from the amplifier, and "mush out", causing many
forms of distortion. The usual paper or plastic
mid-range drivers also bend and contort due to
excursion requirements, adding their own chorus of
(surprising loud) off-key sounds to your music. And
they all tend to honk and bray at one or several
resonant frequencies, making matters worse.
Various
types of exotics
Ceramic
drivers are very rigid. They will not bend at
all, unlike standard paper or plastic cones, to
distort the signal. They have a clarity and
transparency, a "sweet" sound, which is immediately
recognizable. Once you hear these drivers in a well
designed system, you will be able to quickly
recognize the dull sound of traditional drivers in
other speakers.
Ribbon
tweeters have only a tiny fraction of the
weight (moving mass) of dome tweeters. They are
therefore much better at following the high
frequency nuances, and capturing the detail of a
musical performance. They are fast, detailed, yet
totally without the edginess or resonant problems
of metal domes. Our ribbon is flat to 35 K with no
resonant peak.
DDD
bending wave converter This driver is in a
class by itself. Traditional drivers move air by
the "push - pull" method. The DDD is a bending wave
converter, which means it is totally supple,
similar to a ribbon, and is designed to bend as the
sound ripples down through the titanium cone. The
sound waves travel through the metal faster than
through the air. This creates a perfectly coherent
cylindrical omnidirectional sound wave rippling
through the room, as though the room were a still
pond, and you dropped a stone in the water at the
location of the full range driver. This cylindrical
sound radiation pattern is the way nearly all
objects in nature radiate sound. Also, since it
behaves more like an inverse microphone than other
types of speakers, it radiates sound the way the
microphone took in the original event. The result
is a much more natural, realistic sound and sound
stage. There is no trace of boxiness or phasiness -
the sound seems to be hanging in the air, instead
of beaming from a box. Since traditional drivers
become more "beamy" as they go higher infrequency,
it is impossible to equalize them, except roughly
for direct on-axis response. Unfortunately, most of
the sound that reaches your ears is reflected sound
from the walls (imagine flashlight rays of sound,
beaming out from your speakers, in a room where all
the walls are mirrors). The DDD, in contrast, has
correct tonal balance, or flat response, at all
listening angles, which gives several important
advantages. There is no location limited sweet spot
at all - the image is perfect everywhere in the
room. (Imagine that!) The total radiated room sound
(including all the reflections) has the same
(correct) tonal balance as the on-axis sound at the
listening position. Since it never "beams", it
fills the room evenly with cleaner and more uniform
waves everywhere, like virtually all sound sources
do (except box or planar speakers). This greatly
reduces standing waves, minimizes speaker and
listener placement problems, and eliminates toe-in
and the long tweaking process. Our ears naturally
evolved to interpret correctly the positional and
other auditory cues from this type of signal. This
relaxes the nervous system, because we are less
confused than we are by boxes, which cause a
greater degree of "locational uncertainty anxiety".
The driver operates full range (above 140 Hz.), so
it has no crossover to smear the sound or cause
phase problems anywhere in the voice or higher
frequencies.
We have
a great deal of sympathy for other speaker
manufacturers. The temptation to use traditional,
much cheaper drivers is very great. They are trying
to make a living too. If they can take a cheaper
driver and "fix it with the crossover", then their
profit margins are obviously better. So they try to
sell enough speakers to pay for the R&D
required to vainly attempt to fix and hide the
driver problems (in addition to their advertising
budgets, trade shows, etc.). And most high end
speaker companies are not getting rich, even though
their products are expensive.
Finally,
a system can only sound as good as the drivers. A
driver with higher internal coloration and
distortion will always sound artificial compared to
an exotic driver, no matter how good the crossover,
mating with the cabinet, and other details are
realized. So we have taken a different approach
than most companies. We start with the most
accurate (which means most expensive) drivers
available anywhere, and then our staff of engineers
and musicians don't approve the final version until
the speaker measures and sounds as good as
theoretically possible with the drivers. Will we
make as much money as our competitors? Only if we
sell more speakers. Will you get far better sound
with our speakers than from the same priced models
of our competitors? Yes, because you are getting
better drivers. We invite you to compare.
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Creating
Your Ideal Sound System
Speaker
design, with today's technology, involves design
principles based on your tastes and listening
habits. We believe that you will find the System
One and System Three to be the best two speakers
you have ever heard, though they are designed for
different types of listeners, different
environments. And if your budget doesn't allow you
to buy the very best today, note that we make a
wide variety of speakers, including our entry level
models which are based on traditional driver
technology, at a very reasonable price. We will be
glad to help you choose, based on your personal
needs. Call us for more advice.
Remember
that when you go into an audio store, it is much
easier for a salesperson to sell you something you
already want, or believe. For this reason, many
unknowing buyers, going into a store looking for
bells and whistles, spend as much on the power
amplifier or other components as they do on their
speakers. It is true that better amplifiers,
cables, etc., will make your system sound better.
However, it is an established fact that most of the
distortion and coloration in an audio system come
from the speakers. Designing a transducer to
convert electricity to large amounts of air motion
is a difficult task, much more so than amplifying
electricity. A speaker must recreate the sound of
any vibrating object in nature, from the smallest
string to the sound of thunder or a cannon. Our
present transducer technology is primitive compared
to amplifier technology. Speakers tend to be the
link in the audio chain where increasing quality
yields the most dramatic improvement in realism.
Therefore an increase in speaker quality (which
often means cost) will usually produce a greater
improvement in sound quality than an improvement in
other parts of the system, all things being equal.
As a general rule, an audio system with the
greatest percentage of the total budget spent on
the speakers will outperform one where the budget
is more evenly divided. Your system will be as weak
as the weakest link. Unfortunately, in the real
world that weakest link is usually the speakers,
because they have the most difficult job to do.
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