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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: How difficult is it to achieve Vox Olympian sound
Post Subject: Sometimes I disagree with myself.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 1/4/2018
 martinshorn wrote:
But I replied assuming such a question is raised by someone who has experienced DIY background and basics how to „design sound“. This is of course a precondition. Of course we can’t list a „kit“ here. If we could, the VO would have a different price level (or should have)

I do not know what the original poster experienced with DIY. I do know however that horns is not so forgiving playground. If you glue boxes and throe the drivers in the whole then whatever you do you will have some kind of sound that will be “passable”. There are very few box speakers that are truly great…and to for the people who do them it takes dozen of year to figure out how to do it. With horns it is different. If you do not do great things then your horns truly sound bad. This is why the horn has such a bad reputation: because most of them are faulty and objectively rough sounding. I personally do not believe that a person with no horn experience could take some kind multi-driver horn installation and rebuild on his own. Partially it is because there is no place to learn anything about horns and people forced to do one of two things. Ether go over years to do own mistakes and to learn the things. Or listen the online idiots like me who very much might be clueless themselves. 
 
Also, there is another aspect that Newtohorn fellow might not realized. Most likely he heard the VO and was moved in Kevin’s listening room. The Kevin’s listening room is not the Olympian but an enormous array of very clever efforts to make the sound as Newtohorn heard. The mean runs his entire playback discounted rom Grid and from a huge battery arrays. For God sake! The only this would make the stupid Altec 19 to sound like a Roll Royce of sound! So, I do not question that Newtohorn like the Olympian and that he was moved but with no experience with horns it is very difficult to identify a single contribution that made sound great. The Olympian was fine but do not underestimate many other things that Kevin to put into the whole presentation.
 martinshorn wrote:
But in general i believe a bit less in personality of drivers. I do believe size, weight, flux, material, etc etc all do influence the sound yes. But i dont agree with the view that only the K151 sounds like a K151. If a construction using all relevant parameters same stuff (except of connector color or such) then, applying EQ to have same response, will give the same sound. 

I do not think that we need to agree on it. There is a great number of great 15” lower midbass drivers, all of them are unique in one way or another. It happens that the thing that I appreciate the most live in Vitavox 15 inchers. They do not have as low compression as 416. They do handle transitions as charming as KL405 and they do not smooth transiences as  best electromagnets would do but if sounds called to throw some color firework at upper/mid bass while maintaining the holistic skeleton of sound then to me the Vitavox 15 inchers is the place to be.

 martinshorn wrote:
Regarding the S2 above 5k... for me this dramatic distortion prohibits the use. The plot is quasi normalized. This distortion level is unacceptable. Its beyond charme and flavor. Its faulty.

Get better diaphragms, clean you driver gap, align the diaphragms, perhaps get another driver (I have seen, in fact had, faulty units) and tap the driver with an air coil at 10K with first order.  

 martinshorn wrote:
By the way, do you remember some fragments you could quote why Kevin chose his tweeters? Would be interesting. I still believe this is Important in the design. Though looking redicolous, as u say, like i thought, and many other probably too. But u experienced it yourself, it sounds good, and that is all that matters.

I do not remember now but the whole experience with him was quite pleasurable and he had zero attitude typical for the audio manufacturers. I told him that I am very much familiar with S2 and that the way how he used S2 and the twitters I find to be very outside of “best practice”. When I listened the VO I was surprised that it sound very nice, in fact from some perspectives it was at the very top octaves even better than my own installation. I told that I am surprised. Kevin in response just told me the story how and why he end up with what he ended up. It was his very lucid and very well organized though process.  At that time it did make a lot of sense to me. I still do not like the VO upper range solution and if I would do it then I would end up with bad results most likely. The HF resole of Olympian was Kevin with his experiences, his objectives and his journey to THAT sound that made the whole straggle Olympian’s twitters arrangement to work. It should not be imitated in my mind as it is his intellectual property. It is like Bruce Elgar who uses in his Titans that stupid Fane tweeter that in any playback, including mine sounds like hard ringing crap. Bruce made it to sound in his Titans soft, spongy and beautiful. Or like David Wilson that makes box speakers with mid 90dB sensitivity but his largest speakers looks like disobey the dynamic range and sound more dynamic then most of the horns out there.  I respect those moments and would like to let the people who deserve it to have own trade secrets and own intellectual privacy 

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