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Visitor sent me a link to the 6moons announcement of Living Voice new loudspeaker

http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/industryfeatures.html

“Coming in August 2009: Living Voice horn. The Vox Olympian is Living Voice's new time-aligned statement hornspeaker sculpture and the company's Lynn will give us the straight poop on what to expect. Asked how many audiophiles it will take to move one of these, she punned "at least three large ones"... We'll assume she meant folks and not pints.”

To say honest I read the Sarah’s note 5 times but I did not understood what he meant to say. Anyhow, I found the Living Voice new loudspeaker has some interesting design point that would be worst to point out.

(image is courtesy to 6moons)

The “time-aligned statement” – that is good, if it is true. The bass channel looks like use a variation of Karlson box, which is different type of port, what is fine as well.  They did the same in their former model and it looks like they like it. If it is not a play around Karlson and in fact a play around a horn then how it might be time-aligned?

 



(the lower image is courtesy to Living Voice)

Anyhow, as you understand the element that made me horny in this loudspeaker is the cupper or bronze cannon that they have in front to it. This is where I would like to sharp my attention. The audio people for years straggle with the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) and here is where the Living Voice made a major breakthrough – most of women will like how this speaker looks like. To be more serious I think what Living Voice did with tweeter is very questionable.

I understand the Living Voice intention to have a compact speaker and do not let the tweeters in it’s time-aligned position do not pollute with HF reflections the top of the MF horn. So, Living Voice used the old WE technique of horns for tweeter:  a long full size exponential horn. The WE curve ended to be perpendicular to axis, which was very important for HF but Living Voice do not care even about that. However, regardless the horn is used THAT TYPE of solution is in my view is absolutely NOT useable for HF. I have no idea what kind driver they use and how it being loaded but in such a deep horn sound will have very aggressive low pass effect. The HF will be attenuated and transients will be very muddy. In addition this type of horn will beam like hell – the Living Voice has a nice wide spreading MF and ultra narrow HF - why is it necessary? The Living Voice added apt another channel the looks to me like inverted cone. I do not know what it does – it might be what they call a super-tweeter or it might be another MF channel, I do not know. I do know that the channel with this pipe sticking in front of it shall not be there as what’ve is doe it will underperform.

There is a remote possibility that Living Voice picked my idea of Injection channel, found an interesting driver and tries to do something along those lines. I do not think so as the bandwidth of injection in this horn will be VERY narrow.  In my past I experimented with idea that I call a “distributed diffuser”.  The idea was to keep very aggressive tweeter in time- aligned position “behind” the MF but to make the tweeter fit to a surface near the MF mouth the will be a large diffuser. In this case, I though, the diffuser will be good wide diagram transducers but it still source the timing reference from a  time- aligned tweeter diaphragms. I was not successful with it and found that it messed up HF too much. If the Living Voice had a diffuser in the end of the pipe then I might think that they did something similar.

However it looks like they use a pipe instead of a HF horn. I wish them good luck with this approach.

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