Some people around here seriously need to chillax. This speaker may end up being garbage, phenomenal or, somewhere in between. So what? Who is forcing you to like it or buy it?
If you’re so upset with it, you either have no problems in life or very serious problems. Either way, your priorities are really messed up.
That is exactly what I am saying.
Only by accepting the proffered expected price and listening to the prototype - both of which may change, of course.
From a helicopter perspective, it seems what happend in the one or other thread provoking annoyed reactions has very little to do with the products/pricing etc. themselves (like here this speaker). More with a meta-level of certain rituals of communication and non communication of all parties in the forum and a few occurrences. Just my 2ct and even if interesting imo and worth a thought, not a good alternative topic for this thread, so I sit back again and wait for a chance to listen to this interesting speaker some time 
Nice line and totally agreed.
“If you’re so upset with it, you either have no problems in life or very serious problems”
I’ve heard some rubbish $100,000 speakers, and people buy them!
There is no one product that everyone loves. For every product you like I’m sure there are people who don’t like it. Heck I know people who think the DS Sr. isn’t for them.
Hello Paul,
According to the original schedule, you guys “should” be by now, working on the AN2 as well. Is it so or did the redesign of the AN3 shifted all other plans?
Cheers,
Renato
It occurred to me that that was a rather famous speaker with a horn loaded midrange/treble ribbon and a 12" bass unit. It was the first speaker commercially designed by Peter Walker produced by Quad, in 1949, before the ESL57. It was called the Quad Corner Ribbon Speaker, the ribbon also fired backwards, it was very good for the time but had an issue with the crossover of the lower frequency range of the ribbon (at about 1.5-2Khz) and the upper range of the bass unit (a 12" Goodmans mid-bass driver). The problem was with the lost frequencies of the ribbon’s midrange. The ribbon driver was an in-house design. Some online have suggested that band is going to be a critical part of the AN3 speaker’s performance, especially with the two mid-bass units.
SB Acoustics develops many good speaker units and that for many other speaker manufacturers
Neil Gader, one of the true gentleman in the audio community, gave a nice RMAF 2019 “first impression” description in The Absolute Sound.
Thanks for this addition!
When watching two new questions came into my mind:
isn’t it a problem that the midrange driver fires into the back of the coaxial tweeter and reflects there in multiple ways?
what are considerations of speaker designers to build a crossover to provide max. depth of image vs. what other characteristic? Is it true that a less deep imaging design sounds more direct, lively and dynamic or is there no downside to a deep as possible soundstage in case it’s preferred?
I would love to see FR of various depth settings, in anechoic room
I had a similar question/concern about the large tweeter assembly blocking the midrange, but Paul stated it was not the case and would try to get Chris to elaborate on it. I haven’t seen a response to it yet tho.
Well, I’m happy to give some more information on this and I would be glad to publish some measurements of the finalized speaker, though sometimes 3rd parties like Stereophile or Soundstage are better at this as an unbiased 3rd party, so you can compare against other products in the same measurement conditions.
Regarding the coaxial mid-tweeter, planars ribbons done right have the the best sounding midrange that I’ve encountered. Some of the reasons behind this include a diaphragm that is directly driven across it’s entire surface with no transitional components (spiders, surrounds, former, glue joints), essentially zero inductance, and incredibly low mass (lower than the air load that it is driving), resulting in very low objectionable distortion and intrinsically very high damping. Even the very best cone drivers have some consequences from break-up in their pass band and can’t match some of these performance characteristics.
However, excursion on planar ribbons is quite low (in the range of 1 mm at the center of the diaphragm, in our case) and so, for a given low frequency cutoff, they must have a quite a lot of diaphragm area, relative to a cone driver (with greater diaphragm displacement). Making the diaphragm smaller or clamping it to make a tweeter in the middle (as one manufacturer does) greatly increases the resonance and limits the lower frequency extension further. Still, as a result, at about 5" x 10", our mid-range driver is larger than optimal for crossing over in the traditional tweeter range. In an axi-symmetric driver, this beaming frequency is commonly referred to as ka=2 and relates to the frequency versus source (driver) size.
Though horizontally, as a >5" source things are quite wide in the frequencies in question, with a 10" height, things would beam above ~1khz… While we have ears on the side of our heads and are more sensitive laterally, having a large notch in the vertical off-axis response is still detrimental to the tonality of the early reflection and total sound power in the room.
The solution that we have with coaxially mounting the tweeter keeps the benefits in the midrange of using a plan but gives much more constant directivity in both axes. While it looks like the tweeter is obstructing the midrange output, it in fact is not. Yes, that would be the case at very high frequency. However, while a bit counter intuitive, at lower frequency (because of the wavelengths involved and behavior of drivers in the nearfield) the midrange doesn’t “see” the tweeter. The tweeter is literally sitting on the midrange and are only .5" apart between the planes of the diaphragms.
This also bears itself out in the measurements and beyond a very small cavity resonance that we damp completely with some felt, the behavior is pretty textbook. Coaxials almost always measure slightly worse on-axis (because of some of the symmetric reflections and baffle stuff) but the total system response (including the vertical and oblique angles) is between and the overall integration and sense of coherenace that is hard to beat.
Are you able to manage the difference in time alignment (0.5”) in the crossover?
Nice, thanks Chris. I really do like the concept, and appearance, of that coaxial unit. Very nice looking setup!
Coherence rules, really (and dynamics )
Would be interesting to know if with speakers it’s the same as with Ted‘s DAC, that when things are done right theoretically, it also sounds great…or if it’s more difficult with speakers.
I’d also be interested in the difference between time alignment done by mechanical construction or crossover design.