Getting to a wideband driver that can cleanly do upper frequencies (above approx 3k to maybe 10k) is an art that few driver designers can meet.
It's very tough to do, with regard to being capable in all directions required. Generally...the more wideband a driver is... the more restricted it is in some vital areas.
Some/most are very aurally sensitive to the distortions created in these drivers that attempt such wideband behaviour, and this is why you don't see many of them out there.
For example, the crossovers in white van speakers generally run the midrange drivers wide open on the top. You don't see anyone crowing about how good they sound.
It's a complex subject, but the point remains that wide band drivers with all the requisite capacities are exceedingly rare, and pretty well all have shortcomings of some sort..
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The Eminent Technology LFT-8b employs a pair of LFT push-pull magnetic-planar drivers that cover the 180Hz to 10kHz frequency range, without a crossover. An 8" dynamic driver in a sealed enclosure handles 180Hz down, and a ribbon tweeter 10kHz up. $2499/pr. |
I wonder why you don't make your own? :)
There's an ongoing, re-hashing going on at DIYAudio.com about the crossover in the midrange debate, again. Personally I'm of the opinion that there's nothing inherently wrong with a "low" crossover around 2kHz. As another DIYer put it, things were different when simulation and measurement tools were more limited, slower and expensive. With modern tools it is MUCH easier to get a seamless transition from one driver to another.
I listen exclusively to 2-ways I built with "low" crossover points and they disappear, with no trace of integration issues. You might also listen to Joseph Audio who uses this approach even in 2-ways.
The use of a wide band has ardent followers in the DIY community, so maybe you should consider looking into DIY'ing one for yourself. There are some interesting 2-way designs, called "Woofer Assisted Wide Band." where a single driver covers 400-ish to 20kHz.
There are significant sacrifices to be made in distortion, extension and dispersion with a WAWB, but there's no math to explain what you would like. You should listen for yourself.
Best,
E |
+1 bdp24! LFT-8b's might do the trick! |
Many of the most popular designs deal with the 2k crossover challenge in different ways. You may not realize it, but you are hearing the challenges of a crossover in the presence region.
It expresses itself as a lack of coherence, which can be discovered when you hear a good speaker that is not playing with overlapping transducers or is using a very simple, low sloping crossover.
Thiel, Vandersteen, etc. deal with crossover induced phase shifts caused by woofer tweeter integration by using a first order crossover. Omega runs their widebanders without tweeter support. Spatial Audio uses compression drivers that are crossed low enough to mostly get out of the way.
The above design examples create different compromises, but how they deal with the coherence challenge is a big part of their secret sauce. |
I thought the exact same thing after I converted to single/wideband driver designs I think the main reason is the ragged frequency response and the marketing issues this introduces. Buyers and manufacturers want to be able to justify their products/purchases with impressive specs. I’m past that, sound first, measurements second. |
ive often wondered the same question. in my car i have 3 way acitves that feature a 3" wideband driver made by hybrid audio technologies that is cspable of 200 to 18000 hz. it does not sound its best running like that but it sounds amazing using it from 400hz to 5000hz which gives you the keat of the music in a single coherent point source. it also allows the tweeter and woofer to run miles away from their break up frequencies and puts the crossover points where phase issues are easy to manage. the system sounds clean, loud and spectacular and i would love to have a home audio speaker with similar approach.
economics may play a factor because wide band drivers are typically lower sensitivity and multiple drivers may be needed in passive setups to prevent padding down the woofer and tweeter so heavily. still quite feasible and desirable though, imho. |
Not many folks realize this, but you can stick a $50 wide band driver on a 48x60 inch piece of plywood (with just a hole cut for the driver) and get mind blowing good sound from a current source amp...and if you use the right driver you can get bass below 50hz that gives a smoother room response than a sealed sub. |
Interesting idea seanheis1. I challenge everyone here to go out to the garage, grab 2 sheets of plywood and stand them on end in the corners of the rec room. Wait till the warden sees that! |
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The on-paper interrelated issues with widebanders is distortion (resonance), frequency deviation and dispersion. I don’t know Bache, but I do know Reference 3A and Horning Hybrid. Both lines use mechanically rolled of mid/woofer in to a tweeter that is connected to a capacitor. Subjectively I did not find either line to be a standard of mid-high frequency integration, although I like them both. The most coherent box speaker I know is Voxativ, although there is penalty with roll off over 10k as there is a widebander but not a separate tweeter. (The experience is well worth the rolloff, imo and probably the money as well). There are brands with more traditional crossover points like YG (1.75kHz), ATC (varies) and KEF (2.4kHz) that I think are extremely well executed. Vandersteen also does an awesome job in integration using quasi-widebanders with 1st order crossover with the tweeter point at 5kHz. The former three though have better dispersion, though. There is a lot of variety in execution, and it is fun to sample them. It would be cool if more companies like Reference 3a and Vandersteen would execute minimal crossover designs with carbon fiber drivers. |
Speakers designers which try to use wideband drivers usually get some
mistakes . First- to reduce distortion they shoud be works with
woofer with crosspoint about 500-700hz, integration with active bass
module become problematic and get issue , Active bass get crosspoint
up to 150-200 hz, and wideband driver get poor performance (buffel
step ), Sound become is thin. To integrate with tweeter we cut whizzer
cone ,I try to illuminate all this problem in my speakers line
Greg Belman Bacheaudio ( Sorry for my English)
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Eric_squires—true, the diy community has been doing FAST (Full range Assisted Subwoofer Technology) or WAW ( Wide band Assisted Woofer) for some time now. My diy 2-way has a woofer that crosses over at 535 Hz to a Tang Band Full range driver loaded into a tractrix waveguide. The SQ is amazing and driver integration is seamless. Many designs set the crossover frequency lower, usually close to the baffle step frequency. One of the inherent challenges of these designs is the crossover component costs- you’re looking at huge inductors and caps crossing over that low—might explain why we don’t see more commercial designs. |
Eric_squires—true, the diy community has been doing FAST (Full range Assisted Subwoofer Technology) or WAW ( Wide band Assisted Woofer) for some time now. My diy 2-way has a woofer that crosses over at 535 Hz to a Tang Band Full range driver loaded into a tractrix waveguide. The SQ is amazing and driver integration is seamless. Many designs set the crossover frequency lower, usually close to the baffle step frequency. One of the inherent challenges of these designs is the crossover component costs- you’re looking at huge inductors and caps crossing over that low—might explain why we don’t see more commercial designs. |
Gee...I wonder???? Henry Kloss had a classic quote "A Two way speaker is a good way to stay out of trouble" a no crossover speaker may be even better if well executed |
Gee...I wonder???? Henry Kloss had a classic quote "A Two way speaker is a good way to stay out of trouble" a no crossover speaker may be even better if well executed Andrew Jones is quoted as saying, "The best two way speaker is a three way speaker." |
Altec 655's go from 60 hz to 12k hz with fairly even response and high sensitivity! Out of production for decades. Now wish I had kept my pair of 655E's! |
Most importantly, if one is gong to SELL product to buyers, the product should be, as much as possible, what is known as a ’pull’ product, and never a ’push’ product.
a pull product is where the customer is actively seeking the item and pulls it from the company/store/brand. A push product is where the customer has to be actively sold the product by being convinced it is a thing to buy, and done by either the brand, salesman, store, reviewer, etc.
since humans are emotionally motivated, no matter how logical they think they are..and this is quadruply true in the realm of music reproduction gear, a business can go bankrupt in tumbleweeds and a ghost town of alack of customers... if the try to sell push products.
so we can have great products that due to people’s not being capable of being informed, or one step too far in their logic capacities/mental position, or simply so new it is not on anyone’s radar or ability to mentally negotiate, and so on.
then we can and do have reams and reams and reams of mediocre product that fits what people know and expect - and they keep pulling it out of the stores. People have a tendency to push buttons over and over, hoping that one of the newly pushed known and expected buttons will somehow work better than the last.
It’s all down to how the individual meat box approaches use of it’s rose colored glasses that all mental aspects are unknowingly filtered through and colored/altered/shifted by. (their individual sea of unconsciousness that far outweighs and far out powers their conscious ’voice in head’ thoughts)
a round bout explanatory way of saying that unknown and unrecognized speaker types will never sell and you’ve have to want to go out of your way to capture a tiny market that might not even be enough to make a living off of and might run out of customers quite fast once initiated.
Ie, that some may have a passion about a given idea in speakerworld...but ultimately it’s about selling product and putting food on the table in a stable long term manner.
And augmented full rangers probably won’t make the grade. Otherwise they’d be here already.
It’s difficult enough, even when you do have an fully viable functional winner in the ’actual new’ department, but that people don’t understand what it is.
Ie, we’re dealing with new technology that people don’t really understand. Even at the university and research of fundamental physics level. Mathematical models so complex they are unreachable. Which says nothing about the sound quality. We gain excited customers in the high end physics end of the audiophile pool, as they ’get it’ in a heartbeat, and they try the cable out.
But the rest of the buying public is so worn out by cable hype, and they don’t understand how freaking off the norm and how much of a break and change this is for the flow and sheer meaning of electrical function...well..it tends to look like just another space oddity in the charlatan end of the cable pool.
But when the physicists end of the buying pool looks at our cables they..get wide eyed and their minds wander and they quietly mutter "f--- me!! - mind fully blown".
A pull product for some, a push product for most. Product can also be legitimized by having competitors enter the market, and has the effect of making it seem more real and thus more customers enter the fray.
We patented a cornerstone in transmission technology so no one can follow. That’s how ’first’ we are across the technological/physics/engineering area that is involved. We are enforcibly unique by legal fiat. Which is part of why a well known cable manufacturer really did tell us that the high end cable industry did not like us, at all. That we were perceived as a threat to their existence, as they all knew that the next step in audio cables was literally in our hands exclusively.
One problem emerged. They’ve got pull products and we’ve got push products.People just aren’t getting it. Besides all the active attempts to make sure we are kept down. Seriously. People are strange. Especially when they sense a threat to their envelope of perceived self entitlement.
So, you can see...even good functional ideas that are backed by really good physics and really good sound quality can still crash or not achieve what they might in the minds of some idealistic projections.
Another part of it is if one has a product that is notably more correct but introduced in a market where where everything is ranging something like worse-to-wrong..you can’t gain traction, as people are living in an aura of doing things wrong, listening wrong, making wrong equipment choices and so on. So one can add the gear that is doing this far better than before but not have it match up to what the bulk of the market is struggling with and understands as music reproduction. Which is inherently working toward a fringe scenario, and makes for a non viable business model. That known phenomena about how the first company in a new item/idea/ area, is the one to break the market... but will die profitless as the market has to change first.
So, to survive in audio, one must produce what people expect and know ...and the bulk of the world is almost invariably wrong. This is a known phenomena. That the bulk of the given public is always wrong (the number is 97% of the public is wrong). To say so and try to change that ...is a quick way to financial and business death... so give them the wrong stuff that they want... and all new proposed stuff must be couched and clothed in the manner that the buyers pool project what the next step upward is. (ie, tattoos became the new unique thing over the past +decade. So now everyone is unique with their tattoos. All unique in the same way. right.)
And when you look at the most successful companies in the word of audio, that is exactly what you see. You don’t see cutting edge, you see what people, the potential buyers pool... thinks of as cutting edge.
Hope that helps explain why you don’t see much in the way of amazing and interesting gear out there, and that it never gains mainstream traction. As it simply can’t. It’s impossible. the definition of the center of the bell curve of the buying public is by nature one of mediocrity in both ideals and projections.
The long way home to dealing with the human (colored) logic involved in understanding that there is no real market for the OP's idea in speakers, even though it might be more correct.
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Here is a widebander that I think has push and pull....push because most speaker buyers aren't thinking widebander....pull because its got good reviews, budget price and support by decware...i haven't pulled (no pun intended) the trigger yet but I've been tempted!!
http://www.caintuckaudio.com/check out the decware video http://www.decware.com/newsite/Caintuck.html |
Here is a widebander that I think has push and pull....push because most speaker buyers aren't thinking widebander....pull because its got good reviews, budget price and support by decware...i haven't pulled (no pun intended) the trigger yet but I've been tempted!!
I own the Betsy. Pairs nicely with SEP or SET. With my REL sub it's tough to beat. |
Hi guys, I've been out of pocket for about a week, just saw this.
@cellcbern up front, I need to say that I've never heard your speaker... But, I have played with this 3 inch Tang Band and it is very good indeed.
I agree completely with Erik about the 2K crossover point. In fact, might even argue that the 535 hz crossover quoted above could be harder to negotiate because it is clearly in the middle of the male and female vocals both. In the end, it is really up to the designer to be able to seamlessly integrate the drivers being used and as you have eluded to, many cannot make that integration.
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Timlub- funny, I’m using the 3” TB W3-2141 for full range duties. The 535 Hz crossover gave the flattest response without breaking the bank in caps and coils. I can’t discern the crossover point when listening, and the speakers pretty much disappear. But, it’s a challenge; I spent about 18 months with software, drivers, more filter designs than I can count and cabinet parameters before I got it right, to my ears at least.
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Here is a paragraph excerpted from Laurence Borden's July 2014 review of
the earlier Bache 001 for Dagago. I think it gets to the heart of the
augmented widebander advantage: "In a typical 3-way speaker, the crossover point
between the midrange and tweeter is typically between 1 and 2 kHz, which
is smack-dab in the region to which our ear is most sensitive. No
matter how well designed a crossover might be, the tweeter and midrange
drivers invariably differ in their dispersion characteristics, transient
response, and distortion characteristics. Making matters worse, the
crossover often introduces phase shifts. Although these differences are
often not recognized per se (except in especially poor implementations),
they become apparent when they are absent, as they are in a speaker
based on a wideband driver. As implemented in the Bache Audio speakers,
the Tangband covers the range from about 100 Hz to about 10,000, or
almost seven octaves. Not surprisingly, they are superbly coherent. As a
result, music has a wholeness — or oneness, if you prefer — that makes
it seem more lifelike. One has a sense of being more relaxed while
listening, a trait I find very desirable in a speaker. Not surprisingly,
instruments that span many octaves — like the piano — are especially
well served, yet all instruments benefit". Here's the link to the full review: https://www.dagogo.com/bache-audio-001-loudspeaker-review
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I don't remember it all perfectly, but I recall that the 3 inch or the 4 inch Tang Bands either one needed to be crossed around 200 on bottom and their maximum usable frequency to keep within very tight tolerances was about 5k.... again on either 3 or 4 inch full range bamboo driver. I guess that I could have played with other models, but at the time, there wasn't a lot of choices, but from 200 to 5k, they were fabulous, easy enough to build a world class speaker.
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The W3 series, both ferrite and neodymium play out to 20 kHz. The neo has a flatter frequency response, but they’re both very good drivers. Going back to the OP, I think one of the challenges ( at least for commercial production) with crossing so low is that the crossovers end up costing more than the drivers. Re-capping mine with Mundorf Supremes approaches $500.00. But, I’ve built a few speakers with the typical 2nd order L/R at 2000-3000 Hz crossover- using pretty decent tweeters- and the wide banders come out on top. I’m not sure why—they just sound more coherent. And despite the fact that I’m using large values for caps and coils, the parts count is actually pretty low- not a lot of parts in the signal path- which might explain why they sound good. Some of these designs use a simple first order x-over on the woofer and second order on the FR. With impedance equalization you’re looking at maybe 5 components in the x-over, maybe less. Compare that to the parts count in a 3-way. |
Another good design is the Silverline Minuet Supreme. 3.25 inch woofer crossed to the tweeter @3500hz. The little woofer can play very high and the tweeter only comes on for the highest notes, delivering the airy and delicate top end that a widebander can't. Crossed over to the sub @60hz makes for a really nice small room or desktop setup. Icing on the cake is that it's easy for a tube amp to drive. |
My mistake on the Altecs! They are the 755 series, with the 755A's being the most desirable because they claim to be built by Western Electric. I had a pair of 755E's. Not as rare, but still sounding fine (and a lot cheaper!). An excellent DIY choice for a 1 driver system. They particularly excell in the midrange! |
And in a two- cubic foot box they have quite satisfying bass - and high sensitivity, too! |
I have a Feastrex Full range driver, 9inch field coil. It practically covers from 60 Hz to 18khz. I augment with a pair of subwoofers (REL) and Supertweeters (Townshend Ribbons). I agree with cellcbern that the midrange of widebanders offers something special compared to conventional multiway speakers and that's why I've stuck to fullrangers/widebanders for many years.
I think the issue is not just the crossover point but also the phase. Additionally you can't ignore that below/above a crossover point, the music is handled by different drivers with different impedances, sensitivities etc. Hence, its hard to get music to sound coherent as it crosses the crossover point frequency.
What you gain in coherency though you give up in other areas e.g. frequency range, dispersion, power handling and hence dynamics etc.
But for me, I've found the strengths of fullrangers/widebanders to outweigh the negatives. YMMV though. |
Thoughtful, well written post from Teo_Audio. However at least one company - Zu Audio has made augmented wideband speakers enough of a "pull" product to be successful.
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To many offering such to list. |
Don’t forget about the Vaughn loudspeakers using widebanders with plasma tweeters coming in about 5k.
I haven’t ever heard them myself but I’ve talked to many around our country that have,and they definitely have my interest peaked.
Enjoy,
Kenny. |
I get the theoretical appeal of a speaker using a wideband driver - theoretical coherency and all that.
But in practice, I don't really find speakers divide up that way in terms of coherence. I find plenty of 2, 3, 4-way speakers to be quite coherent.
For instance, a couple of Thiel models I own as as coherent in the mids/treble and down as any speaker of my acquaintance. I can come beck home from listening to tracks on my pal's electrostatic speaker and hear no loss of coherence through my speakers.
(And I went from Quad ESL 63s to Von Schweikert box speakers and heard virtually no loss in coherency).
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If anybody who interested to listen widebands drivers coherence in different configuration just welcome in Brooklyn listening room
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The short history to design my speakers based on wide( full range ) First step-------------One driver no crossover Second step- Bache audio-001 remove whizzer core ( i realize after measurement and listening is impossible to made flat response just to add supertweeter and leave whizzer is on) and add active Sub, crossing wideband with 100 HZ crosspoint Third step-- I realize that wideband get poor ability to work midbass region 100-500 HZ ( baffle step) , Some Disigner to avoid this made very wide baffle (voxativ) I dont understand the ZU lover folks. The sound ( especially male vocal, lowest piano and punch sound thinner than real , http://bacheaudio.com/bache-audio-00...tereotimes-com We made Bache audio-002 to add separate midbass driver with active build in amps . But for all another speakers based on wideband with no built in amps, we have to add woofer with crosspoint 500-700 HZ ( Metro-001, Tribeca-001 etc) Conclusion-- Wideband driver get good ability just to work like midrange with extended freguancy response, and get choice to implement not regular dome tweeter , but supertweeter.
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My Bache Audio Metro 001’s are now substantially broken in, and my enthusiasm for them continues to grow. The imaging and sound staging now surpasses what I enjoyed with the Merlin VSM’s, and the midrange, which has opened up since I took delivery of the speakers, is even more clear, tonally dense, and articulate than when I started playing them. While the VSM’s BAM produced bass response down to 35hz, the bass from the Metro-001’s eight inch woofer goes lower, is more tactile, and can be felt as well as heard. The Heil air motion transformer, used above 10,000 hz gives up little if anything to the Esotar in the VSM.
I am not qualified to debate the technicalities of speaker design, but I have 40+ years of high end audiophile experience and fairly educated ears. I used the word "coherence" at the start of this thread but perhaps that term is inadequate to describe what I am hearing. To my ears the Metro-001s sound more relaxed, natural, and "all of a piece" than any non-wideband speaker I have heard, including every Thiel loudspeaker I have heard, and I have heard many of the models. |
