Reading the Stefano Bertoncello's Blog about his trip to Japan I was trying to detect any signs of interesting Sound.  It looks like he Stefano was caught by  sound of ALE installation in Audio Tekne.

http://twogoodears.blogspot.com/2009/10/wjaas-audio-tekne-best-sound-i-ever.html

Unfortunately there was no further explanation, analyses, or a desire to look deeper (as usually on internet audio).  I was looking at the Audio Tekne site and did not find any interpretable data in there. The exception was the Audio Tekne’s “philosophy” section, which is 7 pages.

http://www.audiotekne.com/en/policy_index.html

Agree I or not with what Audio Tekne pitchers but I is their vision and I think it is useful read.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Unfortunately there was no further explanation, analyses, or a desire to look deeper (as usually on internet audio).

…and it is not just my paranoia but rather a competition of Special Olympics. There is absolutely nothing wrong in Special Olympics but when we assess the absolute records from the Special Olympics competitions then I would not think that their records are inductive above what is humanly possible. Yes, their hospitality is good. I for instance had the most expensive meal in my live while I was in Tokyo – over $13.000 for a single dinner, hey I did not pay for it, at least it was what I thought at this time….

The Cat

Ok, I like your illustration. Let look into it deeper.

Considering that God located very far from the boat then the individual streams of God’s blows departed from a single infinitely-far located point (the God mouth) are parallel, as it is depicted.  So, the sailors raise a sail, exposing it to the force of the Gods blows. Since the God’s individual streams are parallel and with equal forces then the right and left side of the sail’s surfaces are experience the same force. Positioning the sail under a specific angle the sailors generate a predicable thrust.

Now, let pretend that the the leading edge of God’s blows are still parallel but the individual streams depicted above propel across air with different speed, introducing the arrival time delay. Now the God’s blows toward the right side of the sail experience arrival efect but the left side not yet "blessed" by God yet. This twists the sail and offset the relationship between the positioning of the sail and the predictable direction of the sailboat propulsion. Not pretend that strong and soft, wide and narrow God’s blows have different speed and different arrival time.

The Bermuda Triangle was made this way…

Twogoodears,

I am sorry, I do not know what you mean asking me to speculate on these pictures. I know very little about ALE drivers and I would not make any guesses. The system design that is presented on the picture is certainly not of my liking. Kevin Brooks from Utah, USA does something similar

http://www.kbrooksaudio.net/photo.html

I do not take it seriously.  Regardless how good or bad the drivers are the arrangements like this is an “amateur hour” in playback design.

The Cat

Stefano,

I do not have any strong objection regarding to what ALE do. Bent bass horn are more evil then straight horn but considering the small throat of the ALE drivers  and their desire to make it to work low the length of the horn become too high to keep it straight. So, if one does not want to get any higher frequencies out of horn then I do not see that bents are the problems, if ten are made properly. Under the properly made bents I imply the bend when the cross-section of the profile does not change across the bend. The first bass horn at your page, with 9 degree horn I would not recognize as interesting and I do not like it. The third picture, the view from behind, is the example of the proper bends, at least from how I can judge from outside. This system would need a complimentary LF section as I preams the bass hot will effectively go down to let say 50Hz in closed-bottom mode.

If close my main bitching from would be about the fact that none of those Japanese companies, GOTO, ALE and any other make no efforts for time-aliment I do not mean the bass horns).  I need to note that time-aliment is not some kind of panacea of mine. I did not learn it from book sand I never was told/taught about time-aliment by anybody. I absolutely single-handedly discovered it and developed all necessary for myself evidences about the time-aliment’s topmost importance in context of auditable experiences. If you read my Macondo pages:

http://www.goodsoundclub.com/MacondoAcousticSystem.aspx

… then the time-aliment “invention” was during my “discovery period” that stats from the paragraph #4.

Well, I do not have a need to convince you in importance of time-aliment and explain what and how to evaluate the time-aliment benefits. We had a number of conversations before about the subject. What I do suggest is to think associatively about the subject.

Let visualize an internal combustion engine, let say multi-cylinder four-stroke engine.  The cylinder’s valves must be opens and closed once every other revolution of the crankshaft and in the very specific crankshaft position. There are different ways of synchronization of crankshaft that drive cylinder and the camshafts that driver intake and outtake valves. I am not knowledgeable in engines but at the level of visualization from 5.000 feet it would do. So, what have multi-cylinder engine and each cylinder needs to have valves open and close and the spark applied at the very define position of the cylinder compression. If all 4, 6 or 8 cylinders work in unison, creating on the crankshaft identical thrust then the engine does fine.  Now pretend that we have an engine where the in the cylinder #1 the ignition is applied not at the time when the combustible mixture is compressed and in the cylinder #2 ignition applied with open output valve.  The engine still might be running and someone would sit in their Lamborghini and demonstrate to you how great this automobile is and how experience he is as a driver. Still, knowing that two cylinders are limping in their time actions you truly question if the person might be such a great driver that if he driver the badly performing Lamborghini and has no feeling that anything is wrong.

The very same is with playback systems. There is nothing wrong with having drivers in not time-aligned position. Just for the people who know how the things work and how the time-alignment “sound” it is very self-evident that the playback doe not sound as good as they might be.  There are huge amount of problems deriving from time-misalignment, particularly in velocity-centric systems as horns are. So, when people show to me the exotic drivers organized in time-misaligned arrangement, I feel very mach as somebody shows me a Lamborghini with two dead cylinders.  It is not necessary indicate that the drivers are bad or the Lamborghini is bad car or has bad engine. It however indicates the audio reference points of the people who design the playback system or the driving reference points of the car driver and how much this driver truly needs a car of this level

To listen a horn installation with time-misaligned channels to me is like tasting a fancy cooked Filet Mignon in duty restroom.  It is not necessary indicate that the steak was not cooked well but ingestion of food is not just the objective of cooking but to have a pleasant quality time during the entire eating ceremony….