Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site


In the Forum: Audio Discussions
In the Thread: A quest for a better monitor.
Post Subject: Monitor speaker project: my hope.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 6/17/2006

I would like to share some ides what I would like to do in my monitor project.  This are just intention and I did not try to put it all together. Probably I will do it with the next few weeks.

I’m planning to use the Celestion SL-600 enclosure as I fill it is quite wonderful. As the MF driver I’m planning to use the source of my constant pain and pretty much what made met o think that it would be worth to try. In the end of the 90 I bought a Focal Utopia 165W set for my car. I had a hybrid tube-bipolar amp in my car that was driving the Utopia 165W (no subwoofers or any crap like this). Also I was very lucky to have a very good installer who did very good (and very expansive) job to mount the MF driver into my car. I was running that car off 3 year of the lease period and I can tell you that it was absolutely amassing sound.  The Focal tweeter are garbage and the sound like it but what the Focal Utopia 165W did in lower midrange kept surprised me and gave me a lot of very pleasant time.

The Focal Utopia 165W used 6.5” driver, It is typical W-type cone mid-woofer, with Neodymium magnet,
1.5 coil of 0.42mH, Fs=64.4 Hz, phase plug, 4" magnet, 93db sensitivity, meant to use with 24dB/octave at 2.5kHz. (It is not the today's "Be" version but the older one) I think the JM Lab use the same driver in their Mini Utopia monitor but I’m not sure. The Mini Utopia sound like crap and generally I’m not a big fan of the JM Lab multi-layers fiberglass coupled with the layers plastic foam. However, the Utopia 165W’s bass driver sounded nothing like Mini Utopia’s bass drivers. I presume that the similar larger drivers have that plastic, overly high resolution, depersonalizing tone but the smaller drivers might have no enough length of the cone to develop those qualities. Anyhow, the165W’ bass driver was very fast, very dynamic, phenomenal tonally, with superb withholding of tone and contrast at the lower listening levels (very big deal) and frankly speaking it was “a big secret of mine” how a pathetic car audio could be so musical. Of course a car is very small place and I would very much would like to see hot the 165W’s bass driver would perform in a larges listening room.

I’m planning to use it at 3.3kHz first order and high pass it with active basing first order at 60Hz. If it goes well then I will looks to the tweeter that would be relatively simple task.

The caT

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site