The 102,62 & 82 Systems

I don't know of any other designer that makes speakers like I do.

Who would build speakers based on what they do instead of what they don't do after all? I read speaker designer journals once in a great while and sit here with my mouth open the whole time. Do people really think that a speaker is supposed to work independently from the room? If anyone reads this thinking your speaker has it's own sound I can guarantee that poor soul is listening to the absolute smallest part of a recording possible. In my world the room, amp speaker combo are one and the same, and if you design outside of this belief you are going to have a system that will be in "fix" mode your whole life. You will spend thousands if not hundreds of thousands of meaningless dollars. "But I'm stuck with what I have". Not so! If you build your system for and from what it is instead of what you might think a product based on a review or ad is telling you, you might get to absolute perfect system for your ears. If your depending on a passive plug and play setup get out your umbrella cause it's gonna pour before it is all over.

In my early days of speaker designing I depended more on the typical guidelines with the exception of the cabinet, which I knew was screwed up the first time I laid my ears on a box speaker. If someone can not hear that the sound is trapped by the box or out of control by using a panel they are deaf. It's actually very simple if you think about it. Amp drives a speaker, speaker stimulates the room. What is so difficult about this that we have had to make up a completely illogical science with more tech talk about pieces of ceramic, copper, plastic, wood and a few other ingredients? Plus we have had instruments around for how many years, the original speakers. It's a lot easier than all this garbo we see, but for some reason engineer types have taken this hobby to a level a unobtainable magical mysterious fantasy. For me after learning how a crossover worked and seeing that it was no big deal (or shouldn't be) I set out to make cabinets and drivers do most of the work (as they should) using as few limiters as possible.

The very first question I have to ask is why have drivers that are dependant on sound altering parts to make them work a part of my speaker design? Isn't life a lot easier sticking to the basics of mechanics and physics? What I am saying is, if I have a driver or drivers that cover the full range of music (and sound like music) without the use of other parts wouldn't I want to build around these parts? Stop a minute and look at what I'm saying. If you have to use so many parts isn't that telling you something? It does me. It's telling me the drive units don't work, or the designer hasn't found the right enclosure or housing parts to make them work. I set a driver on the table and turn it on. It does very little at this point that pleases me more than a tin can. How do I turn this moving part into a music maker? I give it a house. I try to make this house as musical as I can so that none of the driver's moving parts get distorted. This house within itself needs to produce a balanced full range construction of frequencies that complement the drivers room stimulator. If done, and room is put into balance with the whole unit I will have music. If not done, I will have a miniature model of music that sounds somewhere between that driver sitting on the table and the recorded material, at full size.

Michael?? your science is all wrong! that's not the function of the cabinet. I know, back wave bla bla bla. I challedge this idea as the back wave is every bit as much a part of the movement as the forward motion. Killing the back wave is what makes the distortion you hear resulting in a small stage. I have tested the back wave left untouched, burnt and tuned and have found that too much or too little burn leaves the wave incomplete. At the same time tuning the back wave to help the forward movement gave a great boost in balanced full range amplification to the speaker. With both the under burnt and over damped cabinet the amplifier had to work extra hard to control the driver. With the tuned cabinet (I'm not talking port tuning) the amp worked with ease and produced far more power to the driver. Very important note here: I tune a cabinet the same way I tune a room. If you have heard my product tune your room expect the same amount of improvement with my speaker design over others.

The 102 system,

is the biggest 2 way speaker system I dare to design without the aid of extra parts, at least for now. The challenge is getting the woofer to extended up into the higher frequencies without falling apart. I can tell you right up front, there is a secret to making this happen. Break the driver in full range. You will be surprised what a spider and coil can do if broken in properly. The coil/spider relationship is like a muscle, you have to stress it without permanently damaging it and give it the rest it needs. Cold starts on bigger drivers is a no no, but if you are patient you can shape the sound of a drive unit. Another important factor, good full range performers hate to be be forced by an amp. If you are having to over push your amp to drive a speaker it is the wrong amp and will do damage to the speakers long term stability and the same with the amp.

As I work on the 102 I'm going to post so you guys can get an inside look at how I design speakers. I know that my designing tech fly in the face of tradition and I have often thought about how to help people get over this. Well what better way than to take you through a step by step.

For me to design a speaker these days I need other speakers around. Remember that way back when my first rev designs were done I had a stereo store. This helped me to work on things like purity of tone which to me means a ton. It's easy to get lost in the design itself as if it were the only thing making sound and through particular listening test of mine I work on not introducing things into the speaker that shouldn't be there. One of those things is a locked in character that limits the speaker to only playing a few songs correctly and the rest of recordings some what off. If you had your own stereo store you would hear this a lot. One speaker does this good and the next that good. My goal is to make a speaker as much of a none speaker as I can but still adding a flavor. My particular flavor is a range of being able to go from big body to very analytical. This is done by tuning the materials inside and out side. So as you can guess one of the first steps in designing for me is to listen to each material to hear what it does.

This is my first big departure from other companies who usually use the cabinets as a space provider for air and think that if they kill the sound inbetween the driver and the cabinet and use the cabinet for volume they will create an optimum space for the driver to work in. I have tested this theory with about every driver I have ever come across and have found that there is no way to accomplish this. Drivers take on the sound or lack of sound from every thing they touch. Back in the early 80's I even built my own driver chambers to test the sound of drivers and their interaction with materials. After 30 years of doing this I have yet to see a driver that was immune to the effects of the environment. I could go on for ages talking about this one issue and break down all the fallacies in the theory of decoupling but it is so self explanatory that I am and always have been a little in shock that this is a science that the designer has never figured out. You can easily make your own driver chamber and test this out for yourself with any driver you wish and in every test you will hear the same results. A driver becomes what it touches. If people tell you that you are supposed to get rid of vibration cause it is distortion well here is your first test. If that is true than every driver ever made distorts cause in not one test did any driver not change when it touched another material and designers will tell you if the sound changes than this change is distortion.

So, lets say you make your own test chamber and find that what I am saying is true "drivers are effected by what they touch", what do you do about it? For me it was easy, find out how materials effect the drivers. This is where we need to look at a very important word that is the basis of all music reproduction, amplify. Amplifying has been so abused in high end audio that people are afraid to take the word for what it really is. They have made a witch hunt of sorts by saying anything outside of their understanding about amplification is distortion. Because of this they have set back the progress of music reproduction years. Where designers could have been embracing amplifying as a plus they became paranoid thinking anything that vibrates is distortion and have ruined the sound. People ask me why do I use lower cost items to listen to? It has nothing to do with cost my friends, but everything to do with quality of sound. There was a time when all things were equal component wise but this did not last for long as the manufactures started to try to out perform their most pure designs. This was an economic move to be able to sell more products and increase profits. These designers were successful in making things sound louder in a typical living room (not considering the contribution of acoustics) but the sound purity was lost in the proccess. Part of this problem came from trying to put too many parts too close together in a shipping container that we call the chassis. Drivers have gone through their same nightmere reducing vibration through dampening the materials on the units. These drivers became harder to push so their counterparts built amps to drive them and the cycle of music declined went out of control from there.

Most people in the industry have heard of the Michael Green thing. You know he's the guy who makes things so that they vibrate. And we all know that vibration is evil That is until you start to take apart your components and hear how much music is missing by not letting it breathe and vibrate. I have not met one listener yet who has tuned and not heard his components open up. I do it over and over again and listen to my results and the results of others who set their systems free to resonate. The comments all come back the same "what a huge difference". It's bad enough that people choke out their components but when they choke out something that is a vibrating room stimulator it makes my eyes roll Stupid as I am though, I'm going to go down this path once more and see if I can get speaker poly fill to make a beneficial change in the 102 and 82. To cut to the chase after 3 days of using poly every way I could think of and with every amount I could think of I could not find a listening where there was a plus. I even took the poly, put it in a box and set the box in the cabinet, and still it stuck out like a sore thumb. Who are these people that make these rules? Even without tuning up my boxes I am not getting the results they tell me I will. What I get is a dead sounding music missing lifeless presentation. Should I get my hearing checked ,or should I enjoy the lifesize piano that is sitting in my soundstage?

Is it possible that I don't get back wave when others do? This whole issue is again confusing to me. Are people saying that I'm suppose to be getting a back wave coming from these places between my basket frame and around my speaker spider and magnet? I'm sorry folks but does anyone see the back of this speaker producing the same ways as the front?



I know dyna whatever is going to send me a nasty letter and I will have to make my own drawing but while I'm waiting, do you guys see any way the back of this driver is sending out (according to our industry) the identical wave as the front causing a paralleled distortion? But don't think that I singled out these folks, there are tons of companies building rubber mats to throw on the back wall of speakers and I have never heard one of these products give more sound, ever.

Now what I have heard is speakers that are built too solid and the frequencies freak out because there is no tonal flex in the cabinet. Heavy tight overly built cabinets do not give you more bass, they merely shift the frequencies up ward and cancel out the lows. I have built my speaker models out of overly solid materials and every time have experienced the same thing, serious phase distortion.

As much as I love 10" 2 ways I must be realistic and confess that a 8" 2 way is far easier to build. 10's are usually right at that edge of needing an inductor and going with a first order even with the most forgiving of drive units. Part of it is the cone size but also the size of the frame. I don't like the sound of most cast frames over stamp but once you get past a certain size with stamped the metal can introduce it's own ring that if not very carefully coupling to the front board can be problematic. Of course I'm always open to materials and casting if done correctly and not just for reasons of dead.

Inching ever so close to my comfort zone with the new toys the blending of wood has been teaching me tons along with size and shapes. last night playing with the 82's I past the point of no walls and it was not that hard. In doing so I can begin to start thinking about the perfect size for each model. A friend of mine stopped by last night (a female) and gave her 5 cents (men get 2 cents, but women get 5). She looked over the products and my drawing/pics of some of the design thoughts. A little surprising to me she really got into the baffle board look. She said "speakers should look like instruments and not try to be something they are not". I found this interesting. To her speakers are ugly and have little purpose, but she sat in my listening room (she calls studio) for over an hour by herself before I peeked in to see how she was doing. "The small board is my piano and the big board my violin". I asked how she came up with that? "Once in a while I looked at these things cause no sound was coming from them, but when I got up and put my ear to them to hear if they were really playing that's the feeling I got". I thought how cool it would be if folks in this industry were that organic.

After listening she checked out the baffle boards and flipped over a set of 62's sitting there. I told her I could go a couple of ways with the series and this is the one she picked.



interesting

This week was interesting as the late monsoon hit very heavy this year. In the desert you can go from 80% humidity to 20% the next day, and the following day in the single digits. It ussually happens once or twice but this year it has been an off and on thing. This makes it very interesting for voicing a new speaker design. Why? Well, your creating something that has never been done before. I don't design by the rules of paper but by the rules of ears, and that means tons and tons of listening to every part and piece of music that you can find, and every material you are designing with.

Picture this in your mind. I have Redwood, Pine, Oak and Fur tuning bars curing, waiting to go inside of the 82/102 proto. I also have two types of Pine, ply, Oak, Poplar baffle inserts to use. That's just the being, there are tons of ways to voice all these parts giving their own signature. This is far different from your dead design folks who focus on killing the sound. I have tried their products using their thin or thick layers of vibration discouraging mounts and pads to find that tons of music comes up missing doing so. If you do find the right drivers as I have talked about the transfer of direct coupling can do miracles, bringing the sounds inbetween the keys on the piano or the roll of a cymbal to life instead of omitting the sound all together. it's a challedge because there is all of a sudden so much more music to bring to life or to mute. Because of this I spend almost all of my time in my little world listening to tonal shapes. And believe me this is just the beginning. I do the same with every other part like resistors . People say I don't want to spend all of my time tuning, they ought to live in my world. A world that while this is going on you have to understand the effects of humidity during burn-in and curing.

Would I trade this for the safe side of killing parts of the music through dampening? Not on your life! The rest of the industry can do this but when I hear "life on Mars?" in absolute theactric perfection it goes beyond words.

Amazing toys (Mr Green calls them) at TuneLand these days. I walked in and Genesis "trespass" was playing. Odd I never thought of this being all that audiophile but I had to sit down. Wow! that's a deep sound stage! Sound went on forever. He has a lot of older Genesis including two of my favorites "Selling England by the pound" and "Trick of the tail". The difference between these on my system and his is almost illegal or should be. I was telling Michael about Chesky's new binaural recordings and asking him if Chesky ever heard one of MGA's systems? The way Chesky describes his new recording technology is what I have been hearing at TuneLand since I started visiting.

Sitting outside Michael was modifying a 10 inch woofer that he said I could hear if I'm back over in the next few days. He also had sitting there what looked to be side panels to speakers but they were only 1/4" thick. Your kidding me, but then he showed me how they work with other wood ranging in thickness, finish and types. Next he had me listen to some wood (same type) at different lengths. OMG, he really is making speakers like instruments. He has stacks and stacks of wood curing. It almost looks like a small lumber yard.

I don't think people will ever know how much goes in to voicing. The world looks at stain as a color LOL. A comment from staining experts, "that will be completely dry in 24 hours". Boy, what would Stradivarius say? Fact is wood never stops curing and the sonic effect that stain has on wood will live on forever. So over the past month or so (lol, years) coming up with colors has left my hands deformed and has resulted in more formulas to shape the sound with. If you look at Robert's new toy it has the first generation of an old/new formula. Don't look too close "I did it", but instead of having him wait 4 more years as he has so patiently been great about I sent it out with it's brother here for me to listen to. Here's one of the secrets. With both Ply and solids there is a point when the pores are the most ripe. The only way you know is by listening. At this point is when I decide on voicing. It either means a light hand sand, then clean, then sit, then listen, then another coat or sand again with a different paper or grit or switch to a finish sander or what have you to make the flavor right for moving on to the next level. The final finish is almost always a water base but the inbetween prepping is sometimes a mixture and completely depends on the wood itself and where it is at in it's own maturity. I read sometimes of these companies that finish things a certain way and have built this into the speakers sound. Really Please Remember when the Chameleons had a slant to them? Well they were built by folks who did pianos, and as cool as this was the hand voiced ones ran circles around them and back again.

Now though, the voicing of the new speakers is about to get serious.