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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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Critic's Corner Discuss a review. Provide constructive feedback. Talk to the industry. |
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In Reply to: RE: Stereophile Reaches a New Nadir posted by A.Wayne on November 1, 2017 at 16:01:42:
I actually had a pair. But they were in non-working order. This was about 1985 or so - so long ago that don't even remember how I got them - maybe a dealer trade-in. I looked at them and realized it would take a month of Sundays to get them running properly, and sold them. I never have heard them, although I've heard tons of electrostatics, from Stax headphones to Acoustats to Martin-Logans to Beveridge to some direct-drive tweeters I made using RTR panels. But I've never heard Roger Wests, Quads (when I was going to shows like CES, nobody had them on display), Dayton-Wrights, Infinity Servo-Statiks, or any of the other dozens of smaller brands.When I was a kid my father couldn't afford JansZen tweeters for his AR speakers, so he bought some Lafeyette ESL's, but it turns out they were only single-ended and not push-pull. I think they were $20 a pair in 1961.
When I started getting into building and designing loudspeakers, I wanted to make something that sounded like electrostatics but didn't need multi-kilovolt polarizing voltages. I thought the biggest secret was that ESL must be pistonic, with their "force over area" approach. When I finally figured out how to measure diaphragm motion without a laser scanner ($50,000 back in the 1980s and still about the same today, although the dollars are worth far less) I found out that ESLs are not pistonic and that there are ways to design with dynamic drivers so that they operate pistonically.
That is the single largest coloration is most systems. When the diaphragm breaks up, it is resonating in chaotic modes, much like a cymbal does.
You can easily do a thought experiment (assuming you have ever held a pair of cymbals and struck them together, or hit a cymbal with a dtrumstick). Imagine a bunch of cymbals that are identically shaped and dimensioned - down to the grooves in the surface left by the turning process used to form them. Got it?
OK, no have one of the cymbals be brass (normal), one be of aluminum, one be of steel, one be of polystyrene (model car plastic), one be of polyethylene (Tupperware plastic), one made of glass, one made of solid diamond, one made of Bakelite (composite of thermoset plastic and either cloth or glass fabric, like the black heat-resistant handles on older cookware), one made of pressed paper pulp (like a speaker cone), one made of rubber (like an inner tube), one made of cotton cloth coated with damping goo, and one made of silk cloth coated with damping goo.
No imagine striking all of these cymbals with a drumstick. Will they all sound the same? If not, why?
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Follow Ups
- RE: Stereophile Reaches a New Nadir - Charles Hansen 11/1/1717:24:22 11/1/17 (3)
- RE: Stereophile Reaches a New Nadir - goldenthal 01:38:33 11/14/17 (0)
- RE: Stereophile Reaches a New Nadir - A.Wayne 19:18:14 11/1/17 (1)
- RE: Stereophile Reaches a New Nadir - Charles Hansen 20:46:03 11/1/17 (0)
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