[Trevor]

On 11/06/2017 9:11 PM, Scott Dorsey wrote:
In article , Trevor wrote:
On 11/06/2017 9:09 AM, gray_wolf wrote:
That's good point about the "wow" factor. I was in a high end
electronics store in the
mid '60s and they had a JBL Paragon on display. I had seen the magazine
ads and assumed
it would be an outstanding sounding speaker. Well it was, but not in the
way I expected.
I suppose I had expected it to dazzle me with an outstanding sonic wow
quality of some sort.
After the first few moments, what really impressed me was the fact that,
it seemed like the speaker had disappeared and all I heard was the
music. An orchestra piece, as I recall, very neutral and uncolored.

Interesting comment. I heard the Paragon many times in the 70's and
loved it. BUT "neutral and uncolored" is not something I'd call it. It
had plenty of bass ripple, and the mid horns had plenty of resonances
too. A waterfall plot would be very revealing I imagine. In fact I would
have said that was a good example of the "wow factor". So effortless in
producing a huge dynamic range, but far from "uncolored". OTOH I've
heard many "uncolored" speakers that had no dynamic range and no bass
that I wouldn't want to own.

Compared with what else was available in the mid-sixties, and especially
compared with most of the monkey box speakers designed in the era before
the thiele-small paper, the Paragon, honky as it was, was much more neutral.
It is amazing seeing how far we have come in the loudspeaker world.

Frankly I don't think we've come any where near as far with speaker
design as with most other areas of audio, excepting perhaps microphones.
As you say the Paragon was pretty good, as was the Hartsfeild before it.
Mid horn design and horn drivers have definitely improved since though.


Now, by the seventies people were starting to power those things with solid
state amps and discovering that when you put incredibly efficient speakers
on early solid state amps that were biased way down into class B, that the
crossover distortion swamped almost every other character of sound, and that
gave a lot of these high-efficiency speakers a bad reputation.

Listened to the Paragon *many* times, always powered by the JBL SA660,
which was pretty good for it's day.


But... the Paragons were one of those speakers that got used as home speakers,
as studio monitors, and even in small PA rigs. The narrow angle of radiation
reduced room reflection issues in bad rooms.

However any corner horn relies on the rooms walls to complete the horn
mouth. Unless your room was 9' wide, the Paragon had a far too small
horn mouth for anything like flat bass response, nor even a steady roll
off unfortunately. Still impressive however, but at a fairly substantial
price for the day. Most new cars were cheaper here than the Paragon at
the time. Hard to imagine it was more expensive to build.

Trevor.