General Speaker Advice and Recommendations

I'm pretty skeptical of a kit which doesn't show even basic AFR measurements.

 

I haven't purchased anything yet. My journey into flea-watt SET amps had peaked my interest in horns so i've been on the lookout for sensitive speakers. I purchased the Tekton Perfect SETs a while back but have been underwhelmed so far. Other roads have led to Klipsch, which is why the used 'deal' peaked my interest until I was wised up by advice on pricing here. I have the feeling I'lll pick up the Cornwall IVs eventually just to hear them.

The Crites gear came up on several forums, all good reviews but I have several other DIY speaker projects in process right now, so they would have to wait.

Thanks to @dBel84 I've picked up a couple Pass Labs F4 amps, I'm going to experiment with using them on the outputs of the SET amps to see what happens with my less sensitive speakers.

 

I owned Crites Cornscala 'B' models directly before my current the speakers, the Klipsch KI-396-SMA-II and I can vouch for them. They're very, very good.

 

Does anyone know at what price range the midrange spectrum of speakers (passives) starts to be as resolving as the midrange of the ZMF Verite headphones or comparable mids of other headphones?

I have the Adam A7x and their mids are so low res compared to the Verite that I have a hard time listening back to them after I had a listening session with the Verite or the HE1000se.

I want to upgrade the Adams but idk at what price range I should be aiming at. I don't have the luxury to audition stuff unfortunately.

Bass resolution is not a concern as I seem to be deaf to that.

 

Take what the Verite cost, then add a zero
I haven't heard a ton of speakers that sound comparably good to some of the better headphones around that cost less than a new car, but just my experience.

 

Are you looking for powered nearfields? What’s your chain? And is it the same chain for your Verite as your speakers (minus the amp of course)? I assume you have a great amp for them as well...

 

F!@#...
I hope I find something comparable at least.

No I am going passives, small tower passives to be specific.
I don't have a speaker amp on my mind right now, will decide after choosing the speakers. I also will get the Bifrost 2 if they didn't announce a newer Yggdrasil this year. Currently using the built in DAC of my monoprice THX 788 :S.

I heard the Dynaudio small tower contours (none "I" ones) once at a dealer's room and I really liked their mids but I didn't a/b tested with anything and I was not familiar with the gear or the room so I really don't know.

 

Sorry I thought I deleted the word “powered”, meant to say just nearfields. So are you using the Adams currently in a non-nearfield setup?

Yeah the Dyns can have very sweet mids - the Contours you say? Which ones do you know? The 30? They should be pretty damn great in the mids compared to lots of others (and very good in other areas as well).

 

Yeah I don't like the nearfield listening with my Adams, it was too forward to my liking. Currently listening away 7ft and may change later depending on the speakers (I have a dedicated listening room so distancing is not an issue).

Yes I believe it was the 30, it was a very great audition.

 

All I can say is, you’re in the ballpark if you want smooth, very resolute mids, with great body, in a tower, plus lots of other great aspects. The Dyns would likely lean towards warmth, weight and density, rather than lean, fast and incisive. I can’t speak to the Verite because I’ve never heard them. Is the price of the Contour 30 in your price range, or you’re looking for lower (or could go higher)?

 

it doesn't really have to do with price range, but design.

a headphone is a wideband driver which is strapped next to your ear, without electrical filters in-line (though there are acoustic ones such as foam), and is not concerned with room interactions. if the headphone cups are open, it is not so concerned about rear wave interactions either. thus you receive a high resolution sound, as much as the driver and enclosure is capable of.

loudspeakers have many other compromises to contend with. to get similar resolution you would want a single driver which can cover the midrange, from 150~300hz up to 4.5~7kHz, ideally without electrical filters in-line. such designs don't really exist in todays commercial marketplace, they disappeared towards the end of the 1960s. now, the same driver is asked to play mids and lows simultaneously, and is commonly stitched to other drivers at the frequency of greatest hearing sensitivity, 2.5 to 3.5 kHz.

if you want a fun experiment, you can purchase some wideband drivers used in old tube radios and consoles for not much money, place them in a baffle, and listen.

an example https://www.ebay.com/itm/set-SABA-2...-Blue-Greencone-NT-ALNICO-5298U8/383737611534

 

I was sort of reading between the lines rather than being literal about wanting the same sound as a great pair of headphones, but of course you’re right - the designs are totally different due to typical multi-driver designs and crossovers.

The other major aspect than the driver/crossover design, which you allude to, is the room. It’s important to remember that a speaker that sounds amazing in one space may sound like garbage in another. That can be a massive and shocking let down, and it’s important to keep this in mind when dealing with speakers vs headphones. An in-home audition or a good return policy is a must in my opinion. Or just buy used, like I do, so you can flip it for little to no loss if it turns out they just don’t work for you.

 

Moving in an entirely different direction from my search for efficient horn speakers, I'm now looking at picking up 'old guy' speakers - Quad ESL 57s

https://www.stereophile.com/content/quad-esl-loudspeaker

Anyone ever hear these? Thoughts?

 

I am more into the neutral or warm mids than the lean ones so the Dyns are great contenders.

I can go for up to $12k for speakers alone but I don't like jumping, I want to enjoy the journey and develop my taste and preferences because I am not sure my head fi preferences gonna translate to 2 channel listening. All I can gather right now is I really like the jbl 305mkii paper midrange driver and the Adam A7x glass/Kevlar bass woofer but hate its AMT tweeter.

That's why I am highly interested in the Triangle speakers design. Paper midrange and glass/Kevlar woofers and not an AMT tweeter.
I don't mind the horn design because I really liked the Klipsch 600m horn and it was a big horn covering half the midrange band unlike the smaller horn of the Triangles.

The question is what line of the Triangle should I consider to get comparable resolution to the Verite and so far it seems the most what can I afford .

@k4rstar I actually thought about going for the widebanders just for that reason!. Bass performance is really what's holding me back as I am doubling it for HT setup (that's why towers).

 

Interesting - the Triangles I would expect to be pretty forward and zippy in the treble, especially compared to the Dynaudios which tend to be a bit more neutral or laid back on the upper end, with the soft dome. I tend to like paper for bass drivers, and have really enjoyed the great poly mids I’ve heard, but I can’t say that I’ve heard a great paper mid really either so can’t really comment there.

 

I have two pairs of them - or, rather, I inherited two pairs of them from my father, and while they're safely stored in the UK, I live in the US, so I'm afraid I haven't heard them for a while. I should add that my living circumstances - being an apartment dweller - have prevented me from listening to a proper speaker setup in many years, so the following comments may not be as useful as I'd like them to be, for which I apologize in advance.

From what I remember, they're far from being the most versatile speakers. They work well for classical music and jazz, for the most part, but are probably best avoided if you listen to rock or modern electronic or popular music. As you'd expect, the bass rolls off pretty quickly. You really do need a subwoofer to go with them, even if your musical preferences extend no further than classical. They're not punchy, and I wouldn't put these at the top of your list if macro-dynamics are important to you.

Their strengths lie in their micro-dynamics, their midrange, their resolution, and - while I'm reluctant to use these terms - in their "transparency" or "clarity," which is to say that the sound is quite clean and clear, that there isn't much glare or haze, and, if memory serves, the treble is nice and smooth. I remember them being slightly on the warm side of neutral. They're wonderful at reproducing the timbre of string instruments, the piano, woodwind instruments, and others, but you won't get the full excitement of highly dynamic passages in large, orchestral works. My recollection of them is that they have a lovely, open, spacious sound - if placed just right, more on that in a minute - and that their imaging is precise and excellent.

For obvious reasons, I'd guess they ESLs would appeal to fans of Stax headphones (which from your sales ad today, I see you are - glws). I've not heard any of the modern Stax setups for long enough to be able to comment, but the Quads vaguely remind me of the older Stax models like the SR-3 New or the SR-5 in their soft but pristine sound. This comparison may well be doing a disservice to the qualities of the Quads, though; I couldn't fall in love with the old Stax headphones from the 70s; I did with the Quad ESLs.

The Quad ESLs can be a bit tricky to set up. Their placement away from walls is easy enough but they have only a narrow sweet spot, and you have to angle them just right. We had ours set up at a distance of some ten feet away, and they only really worked from the vantage of my dad's old armchair. Finally, amplification for them can be tricky. I'll defer to Christian Steingruber about this in an article here. You might also find this website useful.

One day I'd love to be able to set them up in a dedicated listening space. It would be even better if I could stack them!

 

I have a good room now, plenty of flexibility in setting these up. I had the same sweet-spot issue with my PAP Trio 15 Voxatives - laser sighting of the treble is required to get it right.

Amping shouldn't be a problem, I have several tube amps in the right range, something should click with them.

AND... as soon as I post this here Craigs List reminds me about the Klipsch LaScala's I have my eyes on. Thanks to this thread I know I would need to bid the guy down, I have to resist purchasing even more speakers right now. !

 

Commercial offerings, when you want bass that goes below 40 Hz with power, will probably start at 5k$.

Yeah, it depends. It can be the other way around.
Put a totl dedicated midrange drivers (or widebanders - good ones that do treble too are of course $$$) in an open baffle (that is a random pieces of blank wood) for 300..400 bucks a pair and it kills any headphone in resolution department.

Often people seem to neglect that the real soundstage that good speakers are able to produce is large chunk of 'resolution'.

Another big consideration is sensitivity. I have not personally heard a low sensitivity speaker matching resolving capability of a high sensitivity speaker yet.
The elephant in the room reason probably is amplifier. You can power high eff speakers from low power simple class A designs, like Firstwatt, JLHood or Aegir.. or even single ended triode, whereas probably these Triangle speakers need a beefy amp, and beefy amp that has the simple low power amp resolution is $$$$$.

A good compromise can be bi amping, where the mid-high usually has higher impedance modulus and can be powered by a weaker amp. For bass get a beefy class AB.

 

Recently I got the chance to listen to the Voxativ AC-2.6 in a small tractrix horn design.

The audition was limited. The owner only wanted me to hear the speakers with “audiophile approved tracks” at low volume. The sound was smooth, rolled-off and soft. But, looking at the gear in the room (47Labs clone NOS dac, DIY amp and preamp) I don’t think I could blame the drivers.

Nevertheless, there was enough “there” for me to get interested in a single-driver setup.

Since I am a Klipsch guy (former owner of Cornwalls, current owner of Heresy IIIs) I prefer to listen to my music much louder. Maybe too loud. The Klipsch sound is very different than what I heard with the AC-2.6.

My last experience with horn speakers was many years ago at Dave Slagle’s loft in NY. Dave was hosting an event to introduce Allen Wright’s new Push-Pull 300B amp with the black-box differential circuit.

The speakers were Lowthers in Oris horns with large bass bins. Sounded great. (As an aside: when everyone was preoccupied in small groups with conversation about circuits and tubes; and no one was actually listening to the music being played, I took it as an opportunity to play some cds I had brought with me. The first cd was Radiohead’s the bends. As soon as the first notes of High and Dry started to play, Allen sprinted to the CD player, stopped play, and returned the cd to me. He seemed a bit angered. To this day, I don’t know what Allen had against Radiohead... I think he only preferred classical music going through the circuit of his differential amplifier.)

Nevertheless, the experience with the Voxativ drivers has got me thinking about replacing my Heresys in my small room. But, most commercial offerings are just too big for my size room.

So, in my research for small BLH design that might work, I came across the Loth-X Troubadour which used the 10” Stamm drivers. I found someone’s mock-up of the cabinet plans for the Troubadour. I would have to re-design the plans for an 8” driver.

Question for those of you who have built BLH cabinets and who are more familiar with speaker building, is there a way for me to figure out the Qts, and other design variables for a cabinet from the plans, without knowing the the specifications of the Stamm drivers?

I don’t know whether I can just re-design the face of the cabinet for 8” drivers, and leave the rest as is, in order to make use of the Troubadour design for Lowthers or Voxativs, since the Qts for these drivers are so different.

I reached out to Taylor Speakers to ask if they were willing to build a single-driver cabinet if I provided them with the plans. Lee wrote back that yes they would, and mentioned he was currently building a transmission line pair.

If the Troubadour idea doesn’t work out, I may just fall back to the Voxativ Acousta or one of the Lowther cabinets (with Lowther drivers). (Not interested in Fostex, Markaudio, etc. I want hi-efficiency and the sound-quality I heard from the Voxativ.)

Also, are there resources for building BLH cabinets (other than diyaudio or audiocircle, etc.) so I can better understand what I need to do to re-design the Troubadour for my purpose?

 

is the guy a seller or something?
why cant he let you play music at the level you want with the music you need?
Im pretty sure I know why, crank the volume and they scream at you and you might want to leave the room.

looking at the drivers, Voxativ seem to be way overpriced. and the published measurements of their drivers (cannot find measurements of the 2.6) dont seem to match their asking price at all

also ime, yes you get better dynamics the bigger wideband you go, but the small wideband for low volume seem to be the most magical ime.