New PS Audio speakers?

Those Diapason’s are a modern incarnation of Stewart Hegeman’s Model 1’s. I am fortunate to have a fully restored set of the Hegeman omni directional Model 1’s. They are magical. I have not heard the Shahinian’s but I have to believe they too sound amazing.

I am not sure how nearby sidewalls affect narrow speakers in general. I can tell you that narrow speakers, properly designed, image better than wider speakers in every application I have tried. I can also tell you that our new speakers will be dipoles. This means they are not affected by sidewall interactions. This is because where the two out of phase signals meet they cancel, thus sidewalls become less relevant.

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This is correct and if we go with side firing woofers we will, of course, provide the appropriate phase adjustments to compensate.

I had wondered about this before when seeing the renderings - so the top half or so of the rear of the speaker is open or grillcloth? There’s what looks like a port at the top, or is that a rear tweeter? And the rear wave of the mid is then passing between the sidewalls before exiting the back?

EDIT: Looked at the renderings again and zoomed in. So a box on top with tweets front and rear, and a box on the bottom for the woofer, — then open in between in the back?

Will it be fixed at that adjustment, or will the woofers have some sort of phase adjustment control?

Yes, with Omnidirectional Model’s 1’s as with Shahinian Diapasons speakers one can enjoy the recreation of a three-dimensional, natural effect of listening to music instead of the synthetic activity of listening to two sources.
The phantom image in-between the loudspeakers, which everybody gets thrilled about, can easily be achieved by the worst speaker in the world - simply switch to mono. :wink:

Shahinian went in a direction with the likes of A Stewart Hegeman, Otto Enckel, Murray Crosby, Buckminster Fuller… In Harry F. Olson’s treatise from 1939, following simple ideas such as the geometry published in Van Nostrand’s Elements of Acoustic Engineering. This said that the worst possible shape for a loudspeaker is a square cube with the driver mounted in the centre of one face, and that the second worst is a rectangular box - and for the vast majority things haven’t changed a lot in 79 years !!

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It continues to fascinate me how important imaging and soundstage are to audiophiles when both are unrealistic artifacts of recording and sound reproduction. Even a single acoustic instrument does not image in the real world as it does on playback.

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Elk,I couldn’t agree more…but its part of that magical illusion that makes stereo so much fun to listen to…

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Right - and why it’s dumb to get into arguments about it. They are two completely different things. It just seems like some stereo listeners insist that it is like reality, which pisses a lot of other folks off.

And the different ways different sorts of speakers image and interact with a room is part of the interest and fun of it - as long as you have the space to work with the speakers you have. They are all some sort of compromise, and have different strengths and weaknesses.

Absolutely. It can be a great deal fun and an absolute hoot.

It is particularly amusing with muti-tracked pop recordings where one can manipulate exactly where each instrument sits, how wide it is (odd concept, yes?), how far forward or back, etc.

If the AN3 was really possible around 6k, i’d love to see a 10k or little more line source not over its size!

I’d really be after the smallest, best speaker of that kind.

The DQ10 was the first phase aligned speaker I heard, it was a revelation like that was what I had been searching for. Couldn’t afford them, so I bought a pair of Ultraphase 2001 which had vertically aligned voice coils.

The ONLY way to make sound come from a point in space is to put an acoustic source there. Humans naturally triangulate position by reflection time delays and angles of arrival.

Panned stereo is a cheap learned illusion, here is diagram showing the fallacy of phantom center:

Pin_Dir_Enc

As we add up prices of components the AN-3 is creeping toward $10K anyway.

Well, then with MULTIPLE side firing woofs. AN3=2, AN2=4, AN1=6… Now u have the space, right…:sunglasses:

Paul, Can you provide an estimate of much the AN2 might weigh?

Yup. We have the space and enough to squeeze 6 into the AN-1, 2 into the AN2, and one into the AN3.

No. I really haven’t any idea. A lot, though, definitely a lot.

Anticipation is …

. . . catsup?