[[email protected]]

Hate dry, harsh, thin sound ( think Krell as perhaps worst offender ). I
can think of four ways to get a more robust , deeper sound. If the
electronics allow run two sets of high efficiency speakers one set
placed a few feet behind the other... have a manual crossover box ( such
as was on the KLH 12s ) to feed the mid range into the larger woofer and
tweeter into the mid range ....use a time delay ( btw is this and the
manually controlled crossovers featured on home theater set ups ?
).....use speakers that have backfiring drivers and place them close to
corners/walls. My Probe Jaydes throw off a huge amount of sound to the
rear and the Jaydes sound much much better ( great) with the reflection.
Any opinions ? SD

[Peter Wieck]

On Jul 12, 9:35*pm, wrote:
Hate dry, harsh, thin sound ( think Krell as perhaps worst offender ). I
can think of four ways to get a more robust , deeper sound. If the
electronics allow run two sets of high efficiency speakers one set
placed a few feet behind the other... have a manual crossover box ( such
as was on the KLH 12s ) to feed the mid range into the larger woofer and
tweeter into the mid range ....use a time delay ( btw is this and the
manually controlled crossovers *featured on home theater set ups ?
).....use speakers that have backfiring drivers and place them close to
corners/walls. My Probe Jaydes throw off a huge amount of sound to the
rear and the Jaydes sound much much better ( great) with the reflection.
Any opinions ? SD

A few, but first let me be sure that I am understanding what you are
attempting to achieve. PLEASE correct me if I am not quite getting it:

a) Set additional speakers in a layered array. This would suggest that
one set is a few feet off a wall, the the other on or very near the
wall. Or, all of them away from the wall, but staggered.

b) Mix the frequencies in the various drivers, presumably to enrich
what is coming out of them.

c) Set speakers in corners, with the woofers as close to *in* the
corner as is physically practical.

If this is a correct perception, I am mostly 'agin' it for several
reasons:

1. A well-recorded and staged event will place the microphones at the
various sweet-spots so as to capture the sound as closely as possible
to what someone in a theoretical audience might hear. So, sound
reaching those microphones will reflect the distance of the
instruments from them and from each other as the various sounds hit
their diaphrams. That sense is also (presumably) maintained during the
mastering and finally the actual printing process. Setting speakers in
layers throwing the same signal will necessarily muddy all that up.
What it cannot and will not do is clean up or replace any sense of
depth that might have been lost during the recording process. This in
addition to the artifacts that listening room acoustics will
contribute, of course.

2. There is (almost) no such thing as a full-range conventional (cone/
dome voice-coil) driver. Asking a 12" woofer to make 12,000hz in any
meaningful way in a home-listening environment is silly. Asking a 2"
dome mid-range to make 40hz in any meaningful way is equally silly.
There are those wedded to the concept of the Horn-type speaker with a
single driver (although usually with 'wizzer' tweeters as part of
that driver), but they have their own difficulties and are clearly
not what you have in mind. The crossover was developed to make best
use of the characteristics of various drivers. Some combinations are
better than others, but the concept is clear. What you are suggesting
might better be achieved by simply eliminating the crossover
altogether?

3. Placing speakers in corners will certainly enhance the bass
response - again with varying contributions from room acoustics - but
is that what you are trying to achieve? It is quite unlikely that what
you get will be an accurate reflection of either what was recorded, or
the actual original event.

Now, to be just a little bit snippy - the Bose 901 became and remains
part of Audio History by largely doing exactly what you are
suggesting. And there are very few who would deny that they can fill
a room with rich and textured sound. That the sound is at best the
second-cousin, once-removed of the intention is neither relevant nor
important. You might seek out a pair of them together with the
accompanying equalizer and see if they meet your needs.

Or, you might try working on the layout of your listening room and its
acoustics. If the room is full of soft materials and the speakers are
placed for decorative purposes it is unlikely that you will get their
full potential... and so forth.

Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA

[Gary Eickmeier]

wrote in message ...

).....use speakers that have backfiring drivers and place them close to
corners/walls. My Probe Jaydes throw off a huge amount of sound to the
rear and the Jaydes sound much much better ( great) with the reflection.
Any opinions ? SD

You're starting to think about spatial qualities of sound, but wrong on
first blush about wanting to place speakers close to walls or corners. All
this achieves is a clustering of sound images near that speaker. You need to
place speakers so that the actual speakers and their virtual images (from
the walls behind and beside them) form a lattice of equidistant sources that
can float a soundstage in a region between them that is solid and evenly
spread. Imagine, for example, two Bose 901s or Mirages placed 4 ft out and 4
ft in from the sidewalls in a 16 ft wide room.

One insight that most audiophiles need to latch onto is that the spatial
qualities of the original will be replaced with the spatial qualities of the
playback situation - that is, speakers and room boundaries. For example, if
you have highly directional speakers, everything recorded will have a
goldfish bowl imaging and spatial characteristic - very flat and narrow, but
highly focused. If you have a pair of omnis placed well out from the walls,
you will have a deep and spacious soundstage, and if you don't screw up
speaker placement you can retain a good focus of individual instruments. The
"canvas" on which you can paint the recorded sounds will be much larger,
deeper, and more capable than with the more limiting situation.

Gary Eickmeier

[The One[_2_]]

Certainly my experiences with speakers/electronics is fairly limited ( I
heard a lot of stuff in the late 60's and again in the early 90's when I
was in the market for equipment ) the KLH 12s ( vintage late 60's ) had
the manual frequency control box, I thought they were OK set on normal ,
but great to my ears when set to the limit ( most frequencies put into
bigger drivers ). The Probe Jades are flat to my ears when set four/six
feet from a wall (recommended) but great when the bottom module is
inches from a corner ( backfiring tweeter and midrange ). I've heard a
time delay make a crumby electrostat seem sweet. SD