Sneak Peek: FR-30, now FR-80

Have a look at the past issues of the Audio Perfectionist Journal for details on Vandersteen, Thiel, etc. The positive features are life like imaging and focus, with a soundstage that is deeply rectangular, as opposed to triangular. The negative feature is a fairly narrow vertical window for best alignment.

Sorry man, that requires too long of an answer. It’s a bit like asking “how do you design a good speaker”. If you’re REALLY interested, message me and I can point you to some books and a lot of online resources.

The most useful knowledge I can give you is: there is no way (with today’s tech and the laws of physics) to make a speaker that is good at everything. That’s why speakers sound different - because their designers chose to make different compromises.

Magico is overpriced junk. Never in my life an expensive piece of electronics has disappointed as much. Maybe Synergetic Research beats em but not by much.

Yeah, baby? Got your Paisley flares on today?!

“What are you, an authority on vacuum cleaners?” :slightly_smiling_face:

Thanks all, I think I was misunderstood. What I meant is, how does their naming relate to the “physical or crossover time alignment“ matter? Afaik they have no extreme physical alignment, so probably crossover related…

I just didn’t get the connection to the posts before.

Time alignment has to do with the distance from each driver’s acoustical center to your ears. “Time aligned” means that at the listening position, the distance to each driver’s acoustical center is the same. This can be done with a slanted baffle (it shifts the tweeter a bit further back), a “stepped” baffle (take a look at Vandersteen speakers for this example; does the same thing - shifts the tweeter back) or, it can be done via active processing or if you’re crazy, within the passive crossover (crazy because of the shear number of components required).

Phase correct has to do with the diaphragms all drivers in a speaker going forward and backward at the same time. For every 6db (one order) of crossover slope, the electrical components (caps and inductors), shift the phase of the signal by 90 degrees. There is no way around this - it’s basic laws of nature.

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Nice crossover work :slight_smile:
If you share circuits, then please do, but of course if it’s your own proprietary design no worries!

Thanks. I’m not capable of something like that! Lol. It is Peter Noerbaek’s creation.
Crossover: 5th Order Charge coupled with 3 x 9V (27V) @ 900 Hz. 30dB/octave.

Well it’s a lovely job :slight_smile:

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One thing to note is that it takes a 2nd order high pass (12 dB per octave filter) to keep excursion constant with respect to frequency. So with a first order (acoustic) crossover, such as that required by a Thiel speaker, excursion is still increasing with deceasing frequency. They made a very high excursion tweeter with radial NEO magnet and special suspension to try to deal with this but it’s a losing battle. Job #1 of a crossover is to keep your tweeter from woofing and to achieve linear phase and phase coherency with first order filters, you get very high distortion ,more limited dispersion (because of the broad overlap with the midrange) - all of these compromises for very limited benefit. There are some great designers that made it work but it’s not something that personally interests me.

That being said, a design can sound very coherent and accurate without any of this and there is obviously some general confusion about what this means as it relates to perceived sound quality.

Part of why these first order designs sound good is that they are going to herculean efforts to make drivers that will handle the extra demands of first order filters (making a midrange that can cover 6 octaves without resonance issues and a tweeter that can cross over extremely low etc., coaxial alignments) and much of what you are hear good about these designs are other factors and not the phase characteristics themselves.

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Ah I seem to get it now (possibly):

you say that coherence can be achieved without caring for phase accuracy in the crossover and time alignment physically or in a crossover at all? And it will be done like that in the AN series?

What Chris said.

I didn’t want to go into the driver specifics required for 1st order x-overs since PSA is (at least to some degree?) designing their own drivers and I have no idea what design and manufacturing costs are or how they effect the final price of the speaker.

It’s more a question of what is perceivable by humans and to what degree. There are much bigger fish to fry.

And as someone pointed out above, even if the speaker is perfect, you will only get that perfection if you put your head in a vise at a very specific point in space.

Room acoustics have a higher significance by many orders of magnitude. Treat your listening area properly, it will make all speakers sound better!

I’m still wondering why speakers sound different in terms of prat (might be a “not word” for some). Some speakers simply let music sound much more lively in pace than others.
This has also nothing to do with phase coherence?

I’m willing to learn…but if nothing matters except the genius of the designer, then speaker design seems to be a black box with no rules :wink:

It has to do with a bunch of variables. How accurate are the drivers? How efficient are the drivers? What is the impedance curve of the drivers? What effect does the crossover have on the specific drivers? How “dead” or “alive” is the cabinet? What is the shape of the cabinet? What is the shape of the baffle? What is the shape of driver’s enclosure (not necessarily the shape of the cabinet)? And on, and on.

There are plenty of rules all governed by physics. But each solution to one problem effects other problems. Where the designer comes into play is in choosing which solutions to prioritize and to what degree. Oh and don’t forget that there is cost constraint - a designer can’t just do as they please - they must meet budget.

Thanks much, I see this is a too complex matter to go deeper and would mean to open the secret box of designers to clarify…not to say that we’d get fundamentally different answers from all 10 of 10 designers asked :wink:

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Those are good looking as well, how about we get to choose at order. Although I very much like your design. I like the original looks of the Walnut stands. Maybe by both any exchange them once in a while.

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My second reply about your metal stand design. I think it looks like a perfect fit. May be @Chris_Brunhaver and @Paul will consider it as a second choice.
Chas

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