Side firing bass designs - Pros & Cons?...


In an earlier "Adiogoner" thread someone asked if anyone had heard speakers from Amphion. I quickly went to their web site to see their speakers and noticed on the Xenon model they incorporated a side firing bass design. Based on the little bit of knowledge I've picked up from more knowledgeable audiophiles it seems to me this set-up would create time and phase coherency issues not to mention sending sound waves away from the listener instead of toward them.

Are there advantages in this type of design I don't know about, because Amphion isn't the only manufacture employing this side firing woofer strategy(Israel Blum uses it)? What are the pros and cons?
128x128dawgbyte
I think the key here is, 'minimized'.
Loudspeakers are all imperfect to me, versus real music.
The pipes do some things really well. Mostly micro, macro dynamics because of the drivers redundancy, plus the lack(make that lessening) of the earlier mentioned driver air displacement distortions.
The designer is tight lipped enough on this that he may have come up with the formula to make his filtering less than previously thought possible. Who knows?
They are great, though, in some ways, not all, of course.
Larry
Sean, check out Israel Blum's side firing designs. He places multiple drivers on the side. Thanks for the line array web site it looks very informative!
Some of the Joseph Audio line. In fact, the designer talked about some of the issues with side firing in his Sphile interview.
Dawgbyte: I mentioned the Coincident Technology aka Israel Blume's speakers. Glad you liked that website as i'm sure it is loaded with info.

Jmcgrogan: Thanks for the reminder. I'm sure that there are other speakers out there that i overlooked. I hope nobody feels slighted if i didn't mention the brand that they are running with side firing woofers : ) Sean
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