[Bret L]

On Jan 14, 3:31 pm, Ferstler wrote:
On Jan 14, 2:49 am, Bret L wrote:

Ferstler has never done any DIY projects. Nor is there any evidence
that he could.

David Rich is another matter. In the old "Audio Critic" he would g
through commercial designs and essentially critique their component
engineering, always suggesting a better IC or other part for each
stage. Why he didn't simply design one "de novo" and publish a PCB
layout for us proles is my question, and one he never deigned to
answer.

Well, blast, I cannot let this one pass, even though my better
judgement says otherwise.

Not too long ago I sold off the Dunlavy Cantatas in my smaller system
(they were just too large for my wife's taste) and replaced them with
some home-built jobs. I used Allison tweeters and Tang Band mids in
vertical MTTM arrays with each system, and with a small Allison woofer
on the bottom of the slender, four-foot-tall cabinets. I designed the
crossover network myself (all second order, with polypropylene caps in
the tweeter and midrange high-pass networks, bipolars elsewhere,
chokes purchased from Parts Express, and with independent polyswitch
fuses installed to protect each driver array). All of the woodworking
and electrical assembly was done by me out in my workshop.

After they were done, I compared them to the Cantatas (level matched,
following guidelines I outlined in my recent AudioXpress article) and
they sounded quite similar, with the new systems being a bit more
spacious, thanks to the Allison tweeters and Tang Band mids and the
nature of the Dunlavy directional output design. I then hauled them
into my main system's listening room area and did a level-matched
comparison between them and my Allison IC-20 models. During some of
the A/B sequences, using mostly baroque and classical source materials
(music most of you people would not be able to comprehend), I could
hear no differences between my units and the Allison units at all.


Yes, but you can't buy Allison tweeters, anymore can you? And how
efficient is this system?