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A very good issue. Wes reports on a super-speaker and Art reviews a good DAC. The (Klipsch) speakers in particular got me...because they seemed so darn close to the $100k YG's. It sounds as if the Klipsch's were *better* on vocals !! And it was equally shocking to see Wes state that the YG's were *not* more musically involving, at five times the price. The Klipsch's are just the latest horn (this decade) to show what they're capable of.

Then, Kalman's review of Floyd Toole's book. Toole was instrumental in pioneering loudspeaker measurements. But loudspeakers still have a long way to go. Designers have failed to overcome the (still) very-high distortion in their systems. And power response/radiation is pretty bad as well. Sigfried Linkwitz has been saying this for years.

I mean, if designers were aware of just two things:

1. The virtues of compression-driver horns
2. The time-of-arrival difference between (live) hall reflections and ones generated from box speakers at home.....

....they would change what they're doing. But they haven't.....

It may interest you to know that Siegfried Linkwitz provided a rave review of Dr. Toole's book on Amazon.com.

http://www.amazon.com/Sound-Reproduction...6095&sr=1-1

Now, if we could only get Dr. Earl Geddes to review the book . . .

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2. The time-of-arrival difference between (live) hall reflections and ones generated from box speakers at home.....

This is not ignored by Toole (it is the focus of much of the first part of the book) or in the HT world but it seems, still, to be an arcane topic for traditional stereoists.

Kal

The biggest problem of loudspeaker design is a fundamental one. It is quandary of the highest order:

Everything you want a loudspeaker driver to do, is fundamentally the worst thing that one could ever ask it to attempt to do.

In other words, everything that you ask a loudspeaker driver to do ~as perfectly as is possible~ is Exactly the thing that creates distortion.

Everything that you do to -or with- that driver...in an attempt to cure or mitigate distortions...is exactly the WRONG thing to do to have the driver work fundamentally WITHOUT distortion.

In the end, all we can do -is to attempt to mitigate the greater effects of the differing distortions, with regards to how the ear hears things.

Can you explain what you mean more directly? ....because it logically follows from what you're saying that the BEST loudspeaker is one that you ask to do nothing, in which case the best loudspeaker I own is in the $10 clock radio that got buried in the bottom of a closet somewhere in my house.

All materials have a transmission rate or energy transfer function. All have a resonance.

Drivers are required by nature, to attempt to replicate more than one frequency.

If the cone is pure material is has a specific number for modulus of elasticity and many other considerations. If it is a pure material is its good for exactly one frequency under one load. That's it. All others aspects such as other frequencies and other accelerations begin to creep into compromise, ie distortion. Composite materials damp. Damping is both good and bad. it's great at one frequency and acceleration..and begins to creep into compromise under other conditions.

Basically, a driver is series of compromises that are balanced out under testing, design..and most specifically..listening. A literal attempt to balance out efficiency and distortion.

It encompasses multiple stacked aspects of magnetic, electromagnetics, electrical function, mechanics, resonance, elasticity, acoustics, etc. With a permanent magnet design type driver..we go from poor electrical transfer to a resonant mechanical mode that has multiple (many!) stacked resonance issues, and is fired/worked/controlled or worked against a magnetic motor, which is all attempting to effect a perfect transformation of the original signal to 'air'.

Good freaking luck. It is a difficult proposition at best.

Loudspeaker drivers and loudspeaker design are one of the last high technology 'black arts'. It encompasses physics from a minimum of 5 separate branches that all have to be solved together..and goes from simple mathematics..all the way into various sorts of molecular and chaos theory.

Loudspeaker drivers may look like they are common and they are everywhere..but at the highest level of design they are a world of their own, equaled by few other areas in science. It is accumulated lore in the minds and lives of driver designers that allow such things to even approach the idea of 'high fidelity'.

Anyone can slap a driver in box..but few can make one work very, very... well.

Essentially: the fundamentals of the electrical, magnetic, acoustical and mechanical aspects of a driver are in near total disagreement with what you are attempting to get the driver to do.

Horns are no panacea or fix. They have their own issues that easily equal the issues that other driver and radiation/box types have. Planar types are no fix either. Same thing - they have their own pile of issues.

It tends to come down to the given human being. Whether the types of issues created by the given system are bothersome to the individual- or not.

I just realized exactly WHAT Klipsch did with that Voight horn design. Very smart. A single photo is more than enough, in my case.

Few will understand what they are looking at. heh heh. They might copy it, but they won't know why. Which means they will fail.

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it logically follows from what you're saying that the BEST loudspeaker is one that you ask to do nothing, in which case the best loudspeaker I own is in the $10 clock radio that got buried in the bottom of a closet somewhere in my house.

Probably a driver that inexpensive isn't the answer but consider what the implications are of what you just posted. Consider how a single driver system such as you have in that clock radio differs from what is commonly sold to the high end market and why you came to the conclusion all of those other designs have major flaws when compared to the simplicity of a single driver. What is missing from that single driver in your radio and what has been added to the high end market in order to sell to a largely male dominated market? What are the limitations of that single driver and how best should those limitations be overcome or manipulated to minimize their effects?

However, the point here is not that any one technology is the answer but that all technologies have their own peculiar trade offs. You must establish what priorities you have and then apply those priorities to the trade offs you hear in any speaker design. If there were a single magic bullet, everyone would want to be using it. Anyone who claims they have that bullet is not telling you the truth.

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Linkwitz raved the book - but says uni-pole radiation is a flawed idea. Toole's book may cover time-of-arrival...but box speakers are too fast in this regard. And this is the type of speaker Toole's been associated with. The book echews deep discussion of compression-drive horns, too. A great concept for serious music reproduction...

No, actually, that is not quite what Linkwitz said. He said he thought that for creating a space within a a space "the potential of 2-channel playback in doing so has not been fully explored." He notes that Floyd Toole has explored a multi-channel approach, whereas we know that he has explored another. Linkwitz is not so small minded as to downgrade the book because he has investigated another possibility.

I did suggest that Earl Geddes offers still another perspective, and his speakers are said to be quite sensitive.

However, Linky's insistence on 24db slopes is not to my cup of tea. Too much wild transient and complex phase related distortion reflected in the crossovers, and too much resonant energy left uncontrolled in the drivers. Can he not hear it?

That is true. It depends on the application.

However, I have made a misstep, IMO. I made a personal comment in/on a public forum, and must not allow that to happen again. I will comment on and argue about subjective vs objective, but must not speak in a way that throws someone's product into question. Apologies to Klipsch on that front, are in order. I will now exit this conversation. Let me just finish in saying that I have not heard the speakers in question, and that Wes is nobody's fool when it comes to evaluating audio equipment. He thinks highly of the Klipsch speakers in the article concerned, and that's enough for me.