In the article “The MiniMe revived, Sound and the Lessons”    http://www.RomyTheCat.com/TreeItem.aspx?PostID=12341 

I wrote the following:

Romy the Cat wrote:

6)      If you do not do anything special with speaker’s tone then your speaker has no tone.

It might sound ridicules to most but to me it is very much encompasses a few year of my audio practice.

It is difficult to talk about audio tone and there are many reasons why. The majority of audio people is not familiar with the notion or has no interest to be familiar.  The small group of audio folks who dos recognize the concept has no ways to assess and collaborate the concept… even within themselves (this is VERY loaded statement). There are other reasons but this is not the main point of my aim.  The main point is that if a person even has interest, objectives and desire to do then thing with tone in loudspeaker then he has practically no framework of tools to do so.

The tone, or if you know what I mean “the Absolute Tone”, in loudspeakers is mostly accidental and exists as a byproduct of loudspeaker other duties. There is hardly ever any special thing done in loudspeaker to navigate it tone to a desirable location.  To a degree we learned and use different techniques to deal with tone in SET application. We “dye” sound with different passive or active elements and use tubes made by different materials. In loudspeaker however we are tone incapable and we inherit whatever tone comes with drivers and enclosure.

Among all loudspeakers that that I have seen/heard I recognize only two acoustic systems made an efforts in the direction. First - is a small community of “yellow drivers” users who practice to soak the cones of their drivers in different mixtures. From what I have seen 99% end up with absolutely horrible results but there are among them some successes. The second – is Macondo’s Injection Channel. The idea turns out to be immensely successful, so successful that I can’t envision a  serious and “offensive” acoustic system without a manageable Tonal Injection. Still, it might be some OTHER WAY to moderate tonal potency of acoustic systems and I would like to dedicate this there for collection of rumors about those other ways.

drdna wrote:

Maybe it is important to ask what the problem is that moving in this direction is addressing …

Yes, the 30 drivers approach will ruin anything else BUT…

When you are a painter and you just did a wonderful portrait using just 5 the most simplistic colors then you selected those specific 5 colors among all bandwidth of spectra and all color available. You made your selection based upon you artistic views. That is fine. However we do not do it in audio. Continuing the painter analogy I would say that in audio (particularly in loudspeakers) we are painters who have a need to paint a portrait but we have only few fortuitous colors on shop and no ways to by more colors. So, it is no surprise that most of our paintings are very alike and very much reminds the painting of the Dorian Gray.

The driver and speaker manufactures and designers to one way or another learned how to make drivers to have more or less acceptable sound that might be quantified: Phase, amplitude etc…. Tone however is very much out of control because of multiple reasons: not demands, do not know how to make, etc.  Pay attention, I probably talk about tone more anyone else but I also have no idea how to get tone from drivers. My methods of multi-driver insertion are absurdist in a way but it is only for somebody who never experienced how it might be done properly. Is it best way to moderate tone – absolutely not!  That was why I stated this thread.

There is however a catch in it – a better tonally driver does not address the problem as the problem in my view need to be in the MODERATION OF TONE. A given acoustic system need to be dialed into the right Absolute Tone in accordance to many characteristics of playback, including the personal demands of the system owner. A better driver does not address this problem – the insertion does. The S2 driver driven by YO186 has the most insane “coloratura” imaginable but it is not enough itself. It is like you are a very good sprinter but your friend is a very good hot dogs eater – you can’t eat 40 hot-dogs and then run a good sprint. So, probably together you would do a great hot-dogs swallowing fast running team…

Still, saying all of it I do presume that it might be some other ways to produce manageable tone and manageable acoustic pressure by other means then just using different transducers. The manageable is the key in here…

I wonder if the guys who play with Tom Danley’s idea of multi-entry horns might accommodate the notion of injection in the horn the same bandwidth from multiple drivers. The idea of drivers with multiple voice coils and multiple diaphragms is very good one. How to bring it all together, how to repress lobbing and other HF-nastiness I do not know…. It has to be another more elegant way….

The Danley idea -  or something quite like it - does look good for LF, but maybe less good for MF and up, I think.

Which takes me back to the whole "point" of the imaginary "single driver"...

Effing around with mix-n-match "systems" back in the day, I got stuck on the fact that the "better" a  given driver did at any one thing, the tougher it was to "match" that thing with preceding or succeeding drivers, in terms of sonic "character".  Is anything worse than obvious shifts in character as one ascends or descends the frequency and/or dynamic scales?

Of course, the more evolved idea is to have a system that can adopt/mimic myriad characters, seamlessly, FR; but the reality is that the various drivers are pretty much stuck on a trick or two, and that's that.  And once we home in on the range where a given driver offers the "most", it always winds up needing "support" on one or both "sides" of its offering.  We get stuck in this loop.

More and more, it looks very attractive to get LF "settled" first, since it is necessarily pretty large, and it eats so much power, and it has the big room issues.

And I think this is how some people wind up with the single drivers: they just shrug off LF and peak dynamics to get what they get, which includes a certain "sonic integrity", which in turn takes a certain mindset to fully exploit and appreciate.  Perhaps this approach could be understood as "the ultimate table radio approach".

The yellow drivers do have interesting tone capabilities, but without "doping" their spectrum is smeared upwards (and yes, I include the FH/BH in this; and good luck with the doping...).  Also, their "optimum dynamic range" covers only a couple of octaves (and it's not exactly optimal, in any case).  One possible "solution" I aim to try is high-passing them at, say, 400 - 800 Hz and then turning around and throttling them back a little above 2k.   We'll see, eventually.

Meanwhile, I am still playing with the "oops potential" of OB, along with its "bonus 3 dB".

One way or the other, all roads lead to Tone.

Paul S