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In the Forum: Audio For Dummies ™
In the Thread: Trash your “full-rage”, single-driver acoustic systems.
Post Subject: Not completely ready to give up on the ideaPosted by Iraschwips on: 12/31/2018
 Romy the Cat wrote:
Also, I need to mention that a very small monitor made with a full range driver that I heard once was the most interesting sound the I even hear in audio. It was not the most interesting sound overall but there was one single aspect (transients) of it that was in my estimation unmatched by anything that I ever heard. It was at a show (surprised, surprise) and it was the only one time in my life when I was not able to distinct recording from life sound. I was literally was staying for very long time in a corridor next to the room and did not believe that the sound I hear was a recording. It was a simple recording of cause. The irony is that after that show I spoke with a few friends of my who had the same experience, it never made audio press however….

I would be interested to know to what you would attribute this critical dampening of the system, if you had to wager a guess?
I imagine this excellent transient response was limited to a narrow frequency band that was emphasized by the specific recording?

Around 15 years ago I only had a headphone amp and a single pair of headphones. I wanted to try my hands at building a speaker. So I put together a single driver speaker following precisely a design I found online. I think the whole thing cost me under $200. They did sound fundamentally different than any speakers I had heard at the time when listening to some very simple acoustic music, but completely fell apart on large symphonic music. At this they sounded no better than any home theater system from best buy. There were other issues too, they had a HF glare, constricted dynamics, thin tone, and an overall veiled sound. Some of these problems were contributed to by the associated electronics, but I believe most of the obvious faults were endemic to the speaker. I subsequently heard single driver systems which were simply unlistenable, even within a narrow range of chamber and jazz recordings. 

The best single driver system I heard was superb at what I would describe as "musical flow". A very intelligible rhythm and musical phrasing. I distinctly remember listening to Stern/Rose/Istomin playing Schubert and being completely drawn in, hanging on every note and experiencing each idea as perfectly following the prior. I've had other instances where listening to music on a "good" system informed me of the genius of a particular performance which I had previously and perhaps subsequently been ignorant to. I went on to youtube shortly after this experience and listened again to the performance and the magic was for whatever reason just not perceptible to me.         

I listened to other music through these single driver speakers which I would also describe as having excellent musical flow, not just this one performance. At the time I attributed the cartridge that was used as the key ingredient to the sound, and the speakers as a weak point which was competent enough not to muck up what was good about the system. However, maybe the speakers while imposing limitations, were part of what was right about the sound.

I don't have enough technical knowledge to follow all of what has been said in this thread but within my primitive understanding I'm not so sure I'm willing to completely give up on the idea of single driver systems having some unique properties which are worthwhile to study and perhaps learn from.             

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