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morricab wrote:

Well Romy, IMO they are not just tonally different they are more tonally correct, ie. they simply have less coloration than other technologies.  Just listen to a recording sometime made with a ribbon microphone and you will understand what I mean. Since you don't "live" in this world I don't expect you to understand but my experiments with amps on my Apogees has shown that they work quite nicely with moderate power (in a moderate room of course).   This hybrid amp that Dmitri (I think that's who) made for example would work marvelously on them.   I have managed to get perfectly accpetable listening levels from them using a 20 watt SET amp.  Why?  three words. No thermal compression.  Also, being a line source, the sound level drops with distance more slowly than a point source.  So doubling of power really gives a true 3db increase in output.  Levels up to 95db are possible at 3.5 meteres with 20 watts.  The sound at 70db is still exquisite.  The truth is that the 18 watt Lamm ML2 in a moderate room size (say 20 square meters) would do the job and sound wonderful.  Perhaps you have never heard what it can do tonally??  Horns, regardless of how good, are always colored compared to a ribbon driver.   In addition, there is now a guy in Australia who will be making essentially an Apogee clone but with high efficiency ribbon drivers and should be getting horn like sensitivity (ie. > 95db/watt) without horns.  If you are not experienced with good ribbon designs I suggest you acquaint yourself (no Magnepan does not count).   In truth, I like the best horn designs I have heard...better than any conventional speaker. I don't hate you for misguided ramblings.  Its like talking with a little precocious child .  There is a reason microphones are either ribbon or electrostatic in nature.  Response linearity, senstivity to small signals, low coloration, uniformity of drive etc.   The speakers have the same advantages.  Again, there are good designs and not good designs but that doesn't mean the concept is flawed in fact it is the best concept but difficult to execute properly.

You argue about ribbons lower distortions, bring irrelevant analogies with ribbon microphones, forget the mention then unavoidable front wave modification with any ribbon loudspeaker, compare ribbons with horns, avoid the subject of ribbons compression, mention the arguable subject of less coloration with ribbons and advocate the topology generally. Yes, any concept should be properly executed,  and I presume that you did it right: I will be glad to be invited in your listening room to learn.

However, there is a catch in all of this.

We in audio do not really prove to themselves or each other topologies or render the benefit of some given concepts. For me in audio, is very important my very much egotistic adequacy of my own experiences. For instance I experienced a certain event and felt how a certain attribute of my visions, me feelings, my personality and my own inner me reacted to this musical even. The event might be whatever it might be: live, recorded or broadcasted, the whole symphony of huts a minute musical phrase, juts a simple combination of two notes pronounces in a certain way…. All that I need from audio would be to reinstate the very same impact to myself when I would like to… there are always distortions…

Under the distortion I do not mean luck of harmonic linearity or anything else that might be quantifiable by a limited science but rather a deviation from the normal listing experiences that I have from the performed music. So how the ribbons/electrostats relate to all of it? The problem is that they do not relate. My “live” music, or the FM broadcasts, or my recordings experience might be closer or further from what I would like to get but the ribbons/electrostats experiences were always completely different, at least for me. When I listen the ribbons/electrostats I always instead of dealing with the music (or more precisely with my own reaction to music) I deals with my own alertness, trying to justify and convince myself that whatever I’m perceiving should be “good”. I mean with dynamic drivers I listen reproduced music “as is”, good Sound or bad, but I become MUCH easily gullible and credulous regarding to what I ma hearing. In contrary, with ribbons/electrostats I always internally extrapolate and interrupt sound into something ELSE and then, I listen that “abstractive something else”. To me, my experiences with ribbons/electrostats are similar with the experience of a bird dissecting when looking at the bird’s cut up wigs I’m wing trying to visualize a freedom of flying.

We defiantly might argue about the pure audio shortcoming of ribbons/electrostats (dynamic range, problems with complex music, disability to handle dynamic stress, killed lower frequency harmonics, tonal depressurization and many many others) but since I personally did not experience with ribbons/electrostats any noble musical listening sensations, and the direction that the ribbons/electrostats people took me before did not turn out to be fruitful, I do not think that I might be a very an attentive student to learn something about ribbons topology.

BTW, the amp the Dima designed was explicitly designed for a project (that went to nowhere) to drive the full range electrostats loaded into acoustic lenses. Dima clams that his amp feels very comfortable to drive 2uF capacitor….

Rgs,
Romy the Cat

PS: Do you think we need to start another thread? :-)

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