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RE: Harshness speculation

Ah yes! One can't reduce speculations to reality without good information.

Your technical knowledge far exceeds mine. I'm not really sure what that graph is saying as it's not labeled.

I haven't seen anything to suggest what the crossover regions might be. With a 6 dB per octave slope, I would guess fairly high due to power handling considerations. My impression is that Tom doesn't listen much at really high levels--I don't either, but I know how loud I listen within the limits of my RS 33-2050. I once had some two-way + passive radiator speakers (Kef 104, later modded to 104aB) which crossed over to the tweeter at 3 kHz (but at 18 dB per octave). The response was quite even in the listening window but the off axis dispersion from 1-2.5 kHz wasn't very even. They had a great impulse response, too. (Richard C. Heyser reviewed them for Audio magazine). With careful set up, given a lot of room well away from the walls, and at a reasonable distance, they could sound very good. Even Paul Barton said that they could sound good in an LEDE room. In a big room in the far field, they could sound rather bassy due to the depressed power response in the presence region.

Now, a speaker with a highish crossover relative to the mid-woofer will have what John Atkinson calls an off axis "flare" around the crossover because the tweeter's dispersion is so much wider than that of the woofer in that region. That could cause harshness. Nothing to do with amplifier clipping. Now, if the Mastersound 845 has a dip in the FR around there with the Aliante PF Ones (which would not occur with an amp with a low output impedance), that might improve the sound--maybe his speakers do sound better with his tube amp.

I wasn't in the mood at the time for a long explanation to Tom, but that's how a tube amp *might* work better in one respect with those speakers.

I was amused that the Aliante site waxes eloquent about the expensive copper used for the phase plug! I found a couple of subjective reviews of the Aliante PF One, one by the late Lars Fredell (who seemed like a very nice guy--he emailed me once about absolute polarity) who went on at some length about by the way the speaker handled sibilants, the other by Stephen R. Rochlin, who also seems like a very nice guy--judging from his posts here. I didn't note anything about the crossover point, though, and nothing technical beyond the Aliante literature. Neither of them seemed bothered by anything the speaker did with SS amps.


____________________________________________________
"Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony."
------Heraclitus of Ephesis (fl. 504-500 BC), trans. Wheelwright.

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