LS3/5a
"Don Pearce" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 05:40:06 -0800, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:
Small speakers have a number of real advantages, of which reduced
diffraction and greater ease of postioning are two. The cabinetry, which
can
be a huge percentage of the price of a high-quality speaker, costs less.
But
a "serious" system that uses small speakers without a properly designed
woofer from the same manufacturer is not what I would consider a true
audiophile product.
Wouldn't you appreciate a speaker manufacturer who simply faced up to
the fact that subwoofers now exist, and are really very good? That
means they could forget attempts at bass extension and concentrate on
getting the upper bass right. That in turn would make integration of
the sub into the overall response vastly easier.
Good point.
Part of the problem is that speaker designers insist on efficiency and bass
extension above good transient response, and have switched back from
acoustic-suspension (2nd-order) designs to ported (4th-order) designs. This
does not help the quality of the mid-bass, nor does it make it easy to get a
good transition from the woofer to the satellite.
The "correct" way to design a woofer -- particularly if it's going to be
used with a matching subwoofer -- is an overdamped 1st-order design.
Overdamping gives superior transient response, _more_ output in the octaves
below the corner frequency, and permits phase-coherent mating with a
subwoofer having a simple 2nd-order low-pass rolloff.
By the way, the term "sub-woofer" is universally misused.
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