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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Tweeter for Vitavox S2. High-sensitively ribbons?
Post Subject: Ribbon ManPosted by Paul S on: 12/20/2006
It is interesting indeed how people allow their attention to go from fixation to fixation without ever changing/adapting methodology, believing none the less that each single idea in turn is The Answer.  I remember the first time I heard the celebrated large Apogee speaker (the Crepetus Rex, or something like that), after first having heard nothing but praise for the thing.  Of course, it proved to be about as bad as it gets.   It is a tribute to human endurance that anyone could stay in a room with the thing, let alon hone in on any value it might have had.  That it was driven at the time by its electronic corollary - a giant "zero-distortion" SS amp - only made the experience worse, yet at the same time more educational, because here we had the then-current "State of the Art" - "Full-range Ribbons" and "Perfect Gain" - sounding much worse than old Hartsfields driven by, say, Scott tube amps, or even old KLH 9s or Quad 57s driven by Dynakits.

But who really would know from this that ribbons sucked as MF transducers?  Maybe (well, not maybe) it was just this particular implementation.  So I checked in with various ribbon offerings over the years, and I learned that big ribbons ribbons suck; that any ribbon sucks below about 8k; and that coated ribbons tend to sound coated.  Also, good luck with "linearity" from any ribbon over any extended frequency range (not even a full HF octave).

So more power to nice-guy Brian Cheney, and all the other stuck-on-a-trick designers.  It may even be that they do come up with a good idea every once in a while.  But the chances are as good as not that any good that comes from their efforts will do its best in a form somewhat altered from how they envisioned it, and also in a different context.

The inventors I like best are like Tesla, just way out there, with just the sparks from their ideas giving us so much at once that it takes decades, or longer, to digest and effectively realize them.

On the one hand I wish there was more good, fully implemented, affordable stuff out there.  OTOH, I am just as happy to stick by my own fixation:  Maybe if I give it just this one little tweak...

Best regards,
Paul

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