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Well, if we start talking about Music, Notes and Fundamentals....

195.99.125.202

Posted by Thorsten on May 23, 2000 at 13:26:45

In Reply to: Re: Two way systems..."What about the piccolo?" posted by Gariver on May 23, 2000 at 12:59:00:

Hi there,

If we look at the regin within which most notes played have their Fundamentals we find about 200Hz - 2kHz to be correct.

If we look at the full range (and exclude the 16Hz Organ Pipe) than the Lowest Fundamental Note is at about 32Hz on the Piano Grand and with Human Voices and Piccolo we get up to about 4 - 5kHz as highest fundamentals.

If a X-Over is placed in this range (especially the 200Hz - 2kHz range) timealignemnt and phase coherent Filters are NOT OPTIONAL (IMHO). This can become seriously a major PITA as timealignement is dependent upon the hight of the ears of the seated listener and the listening distance, hence the Enclosures need to be adjustable against each other, ideally.

The other option is to look for a really wideband Midrange Driver (say the 5.25" Audax Paper Cone or woven Carbon Fibre units or Seas doped papercones should they be still available) and operate this as wideband as possible, rolling in a Woofer ideally with higher Sensitivity at a frequency to offset the baffle loss and with a Tweeter that goes seriously but rolls in fairly late (> 4kHz)....

This of course leaves us with a 3-Way Speaker and the "classic" 200 - 250Hz Lower X-Over and about 4 - 5kHz higher Crossover as found in many Speakers from the "golden age"....

It also sounds suspiciously like a Von Schweikert VR-3 or VR-4....

Now, in such a system it is possible (for example) to use the exceptional Scan Speak (or the nearly as good Vifa) 3/4" Softdome Tweeters which generally operate much higher than 1" Units before turning to much and a reasonable quality Woofer.

Yes, such a Speaker is more expensive than your average 2-Way, but it will actually work well. We can arrange a Woofer that will manage to get down to 32Hz (say a Seas/Vifa/Scan-Speak 10") in room, a Midrange that can cover the "critical range" with low Intermodulation Distortion (and if we select something with > 90db real sensitivity with even quite low Harmonic Distortion) and if we chose the Narrow Fronted Tower we can actually make the whole thing Image well. Ideally we'd want time-alignemnt at least for the Tweeter, but that is not that difficult.

If we chose the NHT style "angled inward" baffle and the inverted Woofer Tweeter arrangement we can with a littel trickery achieve a fairly decent alignment.

This perhaps illustrates also the thinking behind some of the currently available pretty decent "conventional" Speakers (larger NHT, von Schweikert, Aerial, Naim NBL/DBL, Audio Physics, Hales, Thiel, Wilson, BC Acoustics and so on).

The other option is of course to chicken out of all of this stuff and go Fullrange (as I have done).... ;-)

Later T

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