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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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General Asylum General audio topics that don't fit into specific categories. |
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In Reply to: RE: Agree completely posted by Todd Krieger on December 24, 2011 at 01:06:48:
The Tympanis were the big, multi-panel Maggie models. These are Norman M.'s Tympani IVa's:
The woofer consists of two panels, and the third panel has a midrange and ribbon tweeter. They're good down to 20-30 Hz and they have near-dynamic slam -- I used to have a pair of Tympani 1-D's and the only time they ever bottomed out the woofers was on the Telarc 1812.
The reason I mention this is that the Tympanis have an uncanny natural quality to the bass. They're often said to have had the best midbass of any speaker, I've always been curious as to why. I used to attribute it to their large size, since excursion in a planar woofer increases as the cube of the inverse of frequency and a large baffle pushes down the point at which the 6 dB/octave dipole rolloff begins, giving you get a big increase in usable output. And of course they don't have enclosure resonances or port noise. But they do ring (like many dipoles, they're underdamped to compensate for dipole cancellation) and they have high harmonic distortion and I think compression at high levels. So in those regards they're no better than the typical dynamic.
Now I'm beginning to think that the naturalism of the bass is that they're almost immune to room modes. Other planars aren't because despite the fact that they're dipoles, they're usually toed in, so they end up exciting the lateral axial modes. Whereas with Tympanis, you can leave the woofers parallel to the front wall and just tilt in the hinged mid/tweeter panel. An omni woofer in a conventional position just can't have that kind of time domain response, even with bass trapping.
It's kind of an obscure point, I know, but I thought it had a bearing on the thread topic and your point about the importance of naturalism in bass.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Agree completely - josh358 12/24/1108:19:21 12/24/11 (0)
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