Sunday, 31 August 2014

LouReed with new carbon cone speakers

This summer the shipment of our brand new carbon fiber speakers finally arrived.
The first listening test worked out quite promising, so we decided to upgrade our LouReed systems with these babies.
Nico is going to use a set of these speakers for some complicated acoustic performances during itgwo , so the design goal of the adjusted filters would have an emphasis  on producing a clear natural sound.
As opposed to rocking your guts with e.g. Rammstein, that is.
Probably Sebastiaan will call this boring (I guess) :)

By looking at the speaker you might expect a really full bottom-end with long excursion bangs of the speaker like 'car' hifi speakers do.
Not so!
Fortunately in this case 'cause that would bring also a lot of intermodulation distortion. Think thumping yourself on the chest while singing. Not looking for that in this case.
So why a rubber surround? 
As is the case with al stiff materials in speaker design, shurely they sound a lot better: stiffer cone -> stiffer piston movement -> less break up distortion.
But when they do breakup (and at at 'our' levels they always do): HORROR.
Remember the 2' titanium vs 2' aluminium driver diafragm 'upgrade' problems?
Or the special sound of that A brand line-array with yellow speakers for everything, when you hit it real hard?
Well here comes the genius of our Chinese friends: the rubber surround will absorb those hard breakup modi! Brilliant!
I also tested a other speaker in the same cabinet.
From the front the cone looks like your standard 12' (guitar) speaker.
Soundwise this gives you that nice zzhangg you are looking for in metal guitar a la Rammstein.
Not that pak-pak from a modern plastic coated speaker (think 'french' PA's).
So what's the Chinese ingenuity here? Back Coating! 
Al the advantages of a stiffer cone by coating without the ugly breakup. Again brilliant!

So in fact we now have two recipes for our LouReed systems
Does this mean a different magnitude/phase slopes of the overall response?
No, certainly not, actually the final results show quite simular curves.
Does this mean different EQ needed to match or linearise the responses?
No, also certainly not, actually in both designs zero EQ was applied.
(to the speaker that is)
Shurely, different program material makes me want to apply different micro EQ (no more then 3 dB, Q<2, that is), but I always end up in bypassing them again.

Which will have to bring me to the next topic:

Distortion matching as a design goal in loudspeaker tuning

oh, euh, yes, by the way: all the time we are talking distortion here I mean that very-fine-grained-hardly-noticeble but still quite -important-emotion-wise effect for which I don't know how to quantify else then by using my ears...