Steve Deckert
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As a followup to the bass performance... you will hear me talk about this a lot with reference to this speaker and it's not because that's it's main sales feature - not by a long shot. What it IS though, is a unique bass performance that you're not going to get out of a subwoofer or most large multi-driver hi-fi speakers of today. Let me expand on this a bit...
When you want good bass, there is no substitute for a large cabinet.
Subwoofers you buy at the store are basically the opposite of that. They are in contrast a small box, a woofer that moves in and out so far you can see it from across the room, lots of power to drive it thus requiring solid state amplification to keep it affordable and a crossover component. This approach has been and always will be a bandaid on what we can think of as a wounded sound by speakers too small to have any real bass on their own.
A large cabinet means a large cabinet per driver.
Shoving 4 woofers in a large tower doesn't count. That's because each woofer divides the box volume by four making it exactly the same as a stack of small subwoofers in small boxes. A large cabinet is to the driver what a cathedral is to a pipe organ. What would a pipe organ sound like dismantled and re-assembled in your listening room? It's the same thing.
To require a large box to hit the resonance point of a driver means that the driver is not going to be moving much to create that huge deep bass, while in contrast the comparatively tiny subwoofer cube driver is going to have to flop all over the place just to keep up.
The 100dB efficiency you get in the large enclosure means that you get deep, low, powerful and effortless bass without noticeable cone movement. It is the most realistic, cohesive bass you can hear from a loudspeaker for home use.
In the USA, speakers like this are no longer popular because it's 1950 technology, too big, hard to market in the flashy world of multi-driver loudspeakers, and because every generation is convinced they're smarter than the last generation, few people have even heard such a thing. That said, I can tell you the only thing that has happened since the 1950's in hi-fi is that it is has shrunk and developed it's own fashion industry element that drives the price up. I mean if you're going to spend upwards of $150,000 on a pair of speakers, it goes without saying they are going to be big, but at the same time, someone might laugh at you if it only has one driver, so you can be pretty sure it's going to have as many as will fit.
Steve
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