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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Satisfying result: the RMAF Show + Cogent
Post Subject: maybePosted by Dominic on: 11/15/2006
I hooked up that old organ yesterday and listened to some stuff i remember listening to through it before.
Before i get any further it's the only thing with tube amplification in the house, pp6v6 ~6w, driver is 12" Rola. My observation was that it was sharp as a mofo, hit doesn't acurately describe it, maybe 'hard and fast' is better. romy you might be right about the 'something missing' but i'm not sure what it is, aside from the thing being run on its own and having all frequencies thrown at it- it's not a fullrange driver so missing bandwidth. Actually i noticed that your graphs from the S2 experiment showed a narrower native bandwidth with the field coil driver, and mainly on the low end, so that may be part of it, sounds like a similar phenomenon here. Next on the list of observations is that it was nowhere near as clean as i remember, the source is crappy(iMac DV) but is the one i used before (possibly, it may have been the g4 cube, which has a tripath amp), it was certainly not a whitewasher and was also kind of shouty, this sucked balls in this room but wasn't a bad thing in the tiny superdamped basement i first tried this experiment in. The shoutiness i found interesting, first because it reminded me of lowthers' (which i'd very much like to hear at the very least as reference) reputation, it puzzled me because often it's been said that this is due to too much magnet power for the cone weight which seemed counter to my earlier impressions of this thing. When i noted it didn't go very high all that time ago i thought of it as soft and chalked it up to not being as strong a motor as was needed and begrudgingly accepted that perhaps 'field coil' did not mean 'powerful motor'. I'm starting to think otherwise. It definitly saounded different from anything else i listened to but did have an unnerving similarity to the little Harmon drivers in the Mac. possibly last on that list was that it filled the space (14'x8'x28') very well, the sound i was getting was kinda crap in some ways but the darn thing despite being a shitty impersonator of an infinite baffle filled the space with a realness. I wonder if one can make an annalogy to the magneto-rheological fluid dampers (ferrofluid shocks) in some cars. I think maybe the map of the theoretical improvements versus actual effects relative to common practice might look similar because of the similar relative way they work.
my overall un-concrete conclusion is that my first impression of this thing got me excited because it gave a very strong hint of 'what can be done' not much more, and not much less. The idea to actually post something came from comming across this post: Damn Speakers where Antonio speaks about his adventures. Mine seem to have been exactly the opposite, everytime i try something or listen to something new i eventually hear a moment or remember the sound in a way that makes me think of what can be done -if only. i've yet to hear much that gets more than a kind of moment right. the 12" rola in the organ has a couple of them but makes no sense in a live room as a fullrange driver at all as it stands. Interestingly those dorky little speakers in the computer somehow manage to give a sound with a feel of space, it's not great sound and sometimes it foo-king sucks so much i get depressed but it is one of those sometimes humbling little 'what could be done' moments. I wonder also how much of my impression has to do with the amp in the system being exactly what it is.
before i go i thought i'd write down that i think trying the Rola in a very much fullsized upper-to-lower-mid midbass horn might not only drop the shoutiness by being in a tighter acoustic but harness all that excess juice to show kick rather than just hardness. This whole thing warrants much more experimentation though so nothing i wrote here today can be taken as final in any way, just what seems to be the most effective way to verbalise what i think i'm understanding about it so far. And i hope all this give a bit of added perspective to the whole field coil idea.
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