Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site

el`Ol wrote:

Hello Romy, have you searched for explainations for these observations? Are there others who made the same observations and tried to explain them? Does the damping factor play a role? From my limited experience I can say that a SS PP amp doesn´t eat details in combinations with this driver (obviously ceramic, but why two demodulation rings?) Apart from the details (comparable to vacuum tube / alnico) I find that there is more control/precision/stability, so is it the damping factor that plays a role?

Nope, I do not know anybody ever made such a claim and I have no explanation for it. Put in this way – I was not looking for an explanation. To me any “explanations” in audio are interested only as long they address my practical interests. Since I do not use for HF any drivers that are made with ceramic then I see no reasons to look deeper into the PP/ceramic compliance. I am a practitioner and I am very much not in the Moronic realm of the Lynn Olsons whom writes 34534 “War and Peace” books about a single fart that their VIRTUAL loudspeaker and VIRTUAL result.

Yes, in a way the “eating details” might not be a perfect description of the phenomena. The ceramic drivers at HF have not details deficiency but different type of the details. If we compare drivers with dog’s surface (fear, fire, fur, fair - I can’t spell this fucking word!) then Alnico sound like a dry, long-hear dog. The ceramic is the same dog with a wet skin – the shape is there but this [fear, fire, fur, fair] does not stick out.

I discovered this phenomenon in 2000-2002 when I was doing over a LOT of compression drivers, in fact I was buying all possible driver to try. In that time as was driving everything with Lamm ML2.0. Many ceramic drivers did not sound very exiting – in fact it was truly trashy sound.  One day I was drying it with Lamm M1.1 SS push-pull and I was very surprised how wonderful it was. I made a conclusion that it might be pattern in it. Sure in all my following experiments I got significantly and predictably better results driving ferrite and ceramic driver with SS push-pull.

Was it damping factor in play? Hm, I do not think so. The damping factor is a fact what you have a EMF (electro-moving force) returned from the driver. To have it the driver shall have excursion and powerful inductive coil. In case of compression driver there is no EMF returned back to amp, it is like a ribbon – an amp do not care about the drivers reactive existence.   It might be not the “damping factor” itself but the way how the high damping factor is accomplished in SS PP amps. That is a whole another subject and do not feel equipped to think about it. Do not forget that compression drivers are driver with ultra low currant. I use 100 mV for my 16R driver. So any conversations about problems with sound around the crossover distortions in PP amps might be negligible if you drive 15” roofer but what the amp outputs 1/8 watt and 1/10000 of the nominal gain then those “little things” become too critical…

Anyhow, with SS amp and compression driver I would never consider any PP amp and would experiment ONLY with single-ended SS amp, but it is me. What the purpose to use PP – to make the ferrite driver to sound better? Let do not use bad driver to begin with and it would not demand us to “fix” them with PP amplification….

Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site