Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

Up the thread I told that I settled on a pair of 4-way hybrids (The Loudspeakers) as minimum speakers for my purposes. Germane to this post, I will repeat something that might be a surprise to some readers just tuning in, namely that I regard the large and complex The Loudspeakers as a sonic compromise, in that they are “very wide range” rather than “full range” speakers, even though they pretty much dust other loudspeakers on most fronts, including (and especially) “range”. You see, “full range” to me includes “ULF”. If you are thinking, 18” drivers ought to do ULF just fine, then please join this discussion, because my own experience suggests that the driver itself is only part of “useable ULF” for me, and I have not seen/heard a decent ULF solution using wide-range woofers. Yes, The Loudspeakers “get down there”; but LF isn’t ULF to my ears, and to my ears, it’s either/or, LF or ULF from a given driver/amp combo. The way I run them, The Loudspeaker’s woofers cover 3 octaves, from ~20 Hz to ~200 Hz, bi-wired from the same amps that run the MTT drivers. I have never heard a woofer/amp combo capable of covering a wider range than I already have. Despite “there is plenty of power” in this case, IMO this is just because of smart BR cabinet and X/O design that “make the best of BR” specifically by NOT trying to wring maximum LF from it. Sure, BR is a compromise, too, used in order to make a 4-way that can - with the right amp – get good LF when driven by 1 amp per channel, albeit by leaving ULF in the lurch. I think we have a “ULF Thread” already started somewhere at GSC. This post is mostly about The Loudspeakers, just (necessarily) touching on the generic issue of ULF propagation. For a long time I have supposed that “Musical ULF” requires a solution that is “aurally integrated and physically/electrically separated” from “the wide-range system”. >>

Paul S

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site