New PS Audio speakers?

I think red, green, and blue would cover the spectrum. Maybe throw in black and white just to make sure.

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A pair of white for use outside, in the winter. The speakers will really disappear!

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Well, while I think that Amir and Erin are very smart guys, and have more than “put their money where their mouth is”, I would likely use Warkwyn (the folks that sold them their Klippel gear and do this for a living) than them. I mean, it’s impressive that Erin dropped nearly $100k on some speaker measurement gear. If I wasn’t already divorced and bought that, I would be, haha. I can’t say that I’m not a little jealous though.

However, It’s not that I don’t think that Amir or Erin’s measurements are good, they are, it’s just that you also get some “color commentary” along with them.

We do have a Klippel distortion analyzer at the factory that we’re using on the woofer designs and a Klippel QC in production and I’m generally a huge fan of their equipment.

For my other development work, I do many of the same kinds of measurements free field using a forklift and speaker turntable for polars and post process the data in vituixCAD for the polar maps, listening windows, DI etc. It’s a more manual process but it’s easy enough to send the speaker to warkwyn for final testing, if I need to. It costs nearly as much to ship the speaker to them as the test does and so it’s not a huge burden, though it would be fun to own the fancy measurement gear (beyond the nice B&K mic and AP systems etc. that we already have here.

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Chris have you used the Clio system for measurements? I use the Clio Pocket. Just curious if you have any opinion of it.

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I look forward to seeing the published polar plots and full suite of measurements from Warkwyn.

BTW - I’m pretty sure they didn’t sell him his NFS. :wink:

I sell IT projects, and the same 90/90 rule applies to the sales process… :confused:

Nice! We have a Clio pocket at work and when I was at BG we had an old DOS clio and Cliowin system, so I’ve used a few of their systems.

As with a lot of tools, as long as you can make it do the things that you want, it’s fine. I guess that my only complaint would be for dealing comparing a lot of curves, importing/exporting data from it, I find the interface clunky, even as compared with some freeware options like REW or Holmimpulse.

Well, this is a bit inside baseball but, I listened to the whole video and, while he mentions the price in euro and being fulfilled from Europe, it’s not clear that Warkwyn isn’t the dealer. I have reached out to Klippel directly for pricing and technical information, Warkwyn has been copied on the email and mentioned as the company that would fulfill the orders, etc. As far as I know, they are the exclusive US dealer for the hardware, in addition to providing measurement services and contract engineering.

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Yeah for sure. User friendliness was not one of their priorities.

@Chris_Brunhaver

Hi Chris

We have been discussing internal speaker wiring on the Iconoclast thread . Have you considered working with Galen and crew for the PS Audio speakers? If not how much importance do you place on internal wiring and what type of wire will you be using?

Also Danny at GR Research talks about the importance of quality crossover components, can you talk about the types of resistors, capacitors, and inductors you will be using in the FR series speakers? Will you be making trade offs in the crossover components in the FR30 $15K speakers vs the lower cost $8K speaker ((just a guess on the various price points)?

Or at these price levels will the quality of internal components be roughly the same.level?

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Great question. I’m glad you asked it; I was wondering the very same things.

We’ll, I’ve known Danny for nearly 20 years. I met him at some audio shows when I was working in the DIY/kit speaker space in my early 20’s and used to supply BG NEO planar drivers to him (and his clients like Epiphany Audio) on an OEM sales basis when I was at BG. He’s a good guy and gentleman and has a great set of ears.

However, other than his kit speakers, it appears that a lot of his business is selling crossover parts and upgrade kits where the “design” is free but you need to buy the parts from him and that’s where the profit lies.

Also, in his kits, he’s using mostly drivers from Peerless of India (perless fabrikkerne, not to be confused with the Peerless that is owned by Tymphany) and Erisson Audio. They’re not terrible but also not fantastic.

If they were my products, I would seek improve those more rather than putting all of the money into fancy caps and resistors that have a more modest impact.

Yes, crossover component quality matters, but there needs to be an assessment of where to put your money for the most effect and value. In some of his upgrade kits where we’re putting hundreds of dollars in capacitors into a cheaper speaker (whose drivers are a fraction of that cost), doesn’t make much sense to me.

For the FR-30, where driver quality is state of the art, we’re just getting to this task of component selection and finalizing the crossover. Things like air core inductors are import on the woofers, as the woofers don’t hit their peak excursion until about 600 watts of input. It’s not that you need that much power to get great dynamics but I just want to make sure that the distortion from a cored inductor isn’t a factor in the bass performance.

For mid-tweeter use, we’ve previously had very good subjective results with some of the Caddock thick film resistors and will be exploring some film and foil bypass caps along with metallized film (I have some samples ready for this). I’ll likely be showing some of the details of the networks when finished, if there’s interest.

It’s not a case of “more is better” with these things necessarily, as you can think of them a bit like tone controls where, even though they aren’t changing the frequency response notably, parts quality effects “voicing”.

As far as internal wiring goes, yes, we aren’t using something branded, at this time. Even though we have close relationships with a number of wire and cable companies, they don’t have what I would consider a very good value proposition for internal wiring, unless you feel that the brand recognition helps your marketing effort. I did sample some 18 and 20 awg mil spec silver/teflon wire for the mid and tweeter that we’re doing some testing with for the mid/tweeter section and this is being assessed along with the final filter designs and we’ll keep you posted.

We have a little time left on the FR-30 because of the length of time involved in tooling some of the molds and production parts and so we’re doing a rigorous evaluation of these very things during that time.

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Thanks for the thorough reply

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Yes! Please.

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Another vote demonstrating interest. :+1:

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me three

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question kind sir:
i get avoiding the saturation of an iron or ferrite core, is the increased DCR also a concern, it’s tough to equal the DCR of a cored inductor unless you are using really fat wire for them?

Yes, the DCR of a series inductor like this pads the woofer’s response and changes the bass damping. You need to use sufficient gauge wire. In our case, we are crossing over at around 400 Hz and so the values aren’t huge.

It is common practice on good designs to use a series notch filter (in parallel across the woofers) to flatten the upper impedance peak of a reflex enclosure. This minimizes interaction with the lowpass filter and prevents peaking and an impedance drop in this area. The inductors in these “see” little power and so cored inductors can work well, though resistance can be high as well (depending) so air cores aren’t particularly large.

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Your lowest ranging woofer in the new speaker crosses over at 400 Hz? That seems pretty high, doesn’t it? I thought the punch region is usually co-covered by the mid woofer.

Well, there have been some changes to the system configuration of the speakers (for the better) but I don’t want to “spill the beans” just yet.

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