(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...
duPont Corian is a cool and underutilized material as well. The
Japanese use it in some of their nifty, but too heavy to
cost-effectively import, cabs for classic coax drivers such as the
Altec 604, which I consider to be the "Marilyn Monroe of speakers".

What, you mean fat, slow and liable to die suddenly? :-)

No, glitzy, flashy but completely lacking in depth and substance.

The Altec is a real speaker with a 15" cone and some real build cost,
not like the stuff they sell at Madisound. We have this fantasy today
you can build a really first-rate speaker out of small drivers and
inexpensive crossovers, and while some of the "Speaker
Builder(magazine)mentality projects" sound pretty good for the cost,
and the high end stores sell very expensive versions of these same
products with little improvement, that doesn't make them the equal of
classic Altec and Lansing and a few other designs that cost a lot of
money to build.

For all the money it costs to build an Altec 604, let's see what you get:

1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching.

If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...
duPont Corian is a cool and underutilized material as well. The
Japanese use it in some of their nifty, but too heavy to
cost-effectively import, cabs for classic coax drivers such as the
Altec 604, which I consider to be the "Marilyn Monroe of speakers".

What, you mean fat, slow and liable to die suddenly? :-)

No, glitzy, flashy but completely lacking in depth and substance.

The Altec is a real speaker with a 15" cone and some real build cost,
not like the stuff they sell at Madisound. We have this fantasy today
you can build a really first-rate speaker out of small drivers and
inexpensive crossovers, and while some of the "Speaker
Builder(magazine)mentality projects" sound pretty good for the cost,
and the high end stores sell very expensive versions of these same
products with little improvement, that doesn't make them the equal of
classic Altec and Lansing and a few other designs that cost a lot of
money to build.

For all the money it costs to build an Altec 604, let's see what you get:

1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching.

If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...
duPont Corian is a cool and underutilized material as well. The
Japanese use it in some of their nifty, but too heavy to
cost-effectively import, cabs for classic coax drivers such as the
Altec 604, which I consider to be the "Marilyn Monroe of speakers".

What, you mean fat, slow and liable to die suddenly? :-)

No, glitzy, flashy but completely lacking in depth and substance.

The Altec is a real speaker with a 15" cone and some real build cost,
not like the stuff they sell at Madisound. We have this fantasy today
you can build a really first-rate speaker out of small drivers and
inexpensive crossovers, and while some of the "Speaker
Builder(magazine)mentality projects" sound pretty good for the cost,
and the high end stores sell very expensive versions of these same
products with little improvement, that doesn't make them the equal of
classic Altec and Lansing and a few other designs that cost a lot of
money to build.

For all the money it costs to build an Altec 604, let's see what you get:

1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching.

If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.

1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.


Many enclosures were available for the 604, which is the driver
proper, and the old ones are crude by modern standards. The Japanese
have built several commercially, they tend to be really big and heavy.
Big and heavy is good until you have to ship it from Japan.




2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.






If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.


I have a pair of late (Mantaray) 604s with Mastering Labs x/o in some
cement cabs. I like them but they are not perfect. Improved cab design
and biamping will lead to substantial improvement, I think.

As a general rule, I like well-designed coaxes. I don't think they
are the only good technology, but they make life simpler. The Tannoys
are apparently no longer available commercially, no is the 12" used in
Urei studio monitors.

1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.


Many enclosures were available for the 604, which is the driver
proper, and the old ones are crude by modern standards. The Japanese
have built several commercially, they tend to be really big and heavy.
Big and heavy is good until you have to ship it from Japan.




2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.






If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.


I have a pair of late (Mantaray) 604s with Mastering Labs x/o in some
cement cabs. I like them but they are not perfect. Improved cab design
and biamping will lead to substantial improvement, I think.

As a general rule, I like well-designed coaxes. I don't think they
are the only good technology, but they make life simpler. The Tannoys
are apparently no longer available commercially, no is the 12" used in
Urei studio monitors.

1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.


Many enclosures were available for the 604, which is the driver
proper, and the old ones are crude by modern standards. The Japanese
have built several commercially, they tend to be really big and heavy.
Big and heavy is good until you have to ship it from Japan.




2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.






If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.


I have a pair of late (Mantaray) 604s with Mastering Labs x/o in some
cement cabs. I like them but they are not perfect. Improved cab design
and biamping will lead to substantial improvement, I think.

As a general rule, I like well-designed coaxes. I don't think they
are the only good technology, but they make life simpler. The Tannoys
are apparently no longer available commercially, no is the 12" used in
Urei studio monitors.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...
1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.


Many enclosures were available for the 604, which is the driver
proper, and the old ones are crude by modern standards. The Japanese
have built several commercially, they tend to be really big and heavy.
Big and heavy is good until you have to ship it from Japan.

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

A number of variations of the 604 exist, but typical T/S figures
on them run something like:

Fs 27 Hz
Vas 450 L
Qms 2.32
Qes 0.22
Qts 0.20
Xmax 3 mm

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.

Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

In the more typical cabinet used for these drivers, which is an excessively
large cabinet tuned with large ports at a very high frequency, the response
of the system is, well, abyssmal. How about an 11 dB peak at 80 Hz, with
a response that plummets like a rock below that.

And the horn is such that crossover frequencies like 900 Hz are a
bare minimum. That's asking an awful lot of an untreated paper cone.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

With an excursion of all of about 3 mm, despite its enormous magnet
and underhung voice coil, this 15" driver has no more output capability
than one of those "cheap" 10" drivers you go about.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.

But the basic item is SO handicapped by its fundamental limitations. It
was an amazing driver in its time. But it's time was 1945. That's almost
SIXTY years ago, my friend. Event ignoring your rather biased and poorly
constructed remark about "cheap" drivers, pretty much EVERYTHING that's
understood about the interaction of cabinets and drivers, system
integration, crossover design, driver design, EVERYTHING occured
significantly AFTER the 604.

You take ALL of that knowledge, lump it into a single pile, call it
"the stuff they sell at Madisound" and "Speaker Builder mentality
projects" as if that represented the Parnassus of loudspeaker knowledge
and proceed to tilt against it like some evil windmill. Well, there's a
much larger world of knowledge about loudspeakers than that, I would
hesitate to suggest. And the Altec 604 is NOT part of it, because it
was born 25 years too early.

If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.

I have a pair of late (Mantaray) 604s with Mastering Labs x/o in some
cement cabs. I like them but they are not perfect. Improved cab design
and biamping will lead to substantial improvement, I think.

No, you have already run up against the unresolvabel fundamental
design limitations of the the beast. Theya re intrinsically what
they are, and NO amount of fiddling will get them beyond that point.

Appreciate them for what they a probably one of the best examples
of the black art of speaker from 6 decades ago, a period where more
witchcraft and alchemy and kitchen-sink fiddling then science and
understanding and real engineering ruled.

604's, like T. Rex, is a magnificent specimen of a time long past.
We can admire them, study them, marvel at their anachronistic
magnificence.

But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...
1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.


Many enclosures were available for the 604, which is the driver
proper, and the old ones are crude by modern standards. The Japanese
have built several commercially, they tend to be really big and heavy.
Big and heavy is good until you have to ship it from Japan.

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

A number of variations of the 604 exist, but typical T/S figures
on them run something like:

Fs 27 Hz
Vas 450 L
Qms 2.32
Qes 0.22
Qts 0.20
Xmax 3 mm

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.

Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

In the more typical cabinet used for these drivers, which is an excessively
large cabinet tuned with large ports at a very high frequency, the response
of the system is, well, abyssmal. How about an 11 dB peak at 80 Hz, with
a response that plummets like a rock below that.

And the horn is such that crossover frequencies like 900 Hz are a
bare minimum. That's asking an awful lot of an untreated paper cone.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

With an excursion of all of about 3 mm, despite its enormous magnet
and underhung voice coil, this 15" driver has no more output capability
than one of those "cheap" 10" drivers you go about.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.

But the basic item is SO handicapped by its fundamental limitations. It
was an amazing driver in its time. But it's time was 1945. That's almost
SIXTY years ago, my friend. Event ignoring your rather biased and poorly
constructed remark about "cheap" drivers, pretty much EVERYTHING that's
understood about the interaction of cabinets and drivers, system
integration, crossover design, driver design, EVERYTHING occured
significantly AFTER the 604.

You take ALL of that knowledge, lump it into a single pile, call it
"the stuff they sell at Madisound" and "Speaker Builder mentality
projects" as if that represented the Parnassus of loudspeaker knowledge
and proceed to tilt against it like some evil windmill. Well, there's a
much larger world of knowledge about loudspeakers than that, I would
hesitate to suggest. And the Altec 604 is NOT part of it, because it
was born 25 years too early.

If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.

I have a pair of late (Mantaray) 604s with Mastering Labs x/o in some
cement cabs. I like them but they are not perfect. Improved cab design
and biamping will lead to substantial improvement, I think.

No, you have already run up against the unresolvabel fundamental
design limitations of the the beast. Theya re intrinsically what
they are, and NO amount of fiddling will get them beyond that point.

Appreciate them for what they a probably one of the best examples
of the black art of speaker from 6 decades ago, a period where more
witchcraft and alchemy and kitchen-sink fiddling then science and
understanding and real engineering ruled.

604's, like T. Rex, is a magnificent specimen of a time long past.
We can admire them, study them, marvel at their anachronistic
magnificence.

But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...
1. A system built before and, subsequently, in effective ignorance
of the comprehensive Thiele-Small model. Thus, as a result, a
misdesigned, mistuned conglomeration of poorly integrated parts
and, well, "concepts" to be generous, that misses the theoretical
capabilities of a cabinet that large and a woofer that big by a
VERY wide margin.


Many enclosures were available for the 604, which is the driver
proper, and the old ones are crude by modern standards. The Japanese
have built several commercially, they tend to be really big and heavy.
Big and heavy is good until you have to ship it from Japan.

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

A number of variations of the 604 exist, but typical T/S figures
on them run something like:

Fs 27 Hz
Vas 450 L
Qms 2.32
Qes 0.22
Qts 0.20
Xmax 3 mm

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.

Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

In the more typical cabinet used for these drivers, which is an excessively
large cabinet tuned with large ports at a very high frequency, the response
of the system is, well, abyssmal. How about an 11 dB peak at 80 Hz, with
a response that plummets like a rock below that.

And the horn is such that crossover frequencies like 900 Hz are a
bare minimum. That's asking an awful lot of an untreated paper cone.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

With an excursion of all of about 3 mm, despite its enormous magnet
and underhung voice coil, this 15" driver has no more output capability
than one of those "cheap" 10" drivers you go about.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.

But the basic item is SO handicapped by its fundamental limitations. It
was an amazing driver in its time. But it's time was 1945. That's almost
SIXTY years ago, my friend. Event ignoring your rather biased and poorly
constructed remark about "cheap" drivers, pretty much EVERYTHING that's
understood about the interaction of cabinets and drivers, system
integration, crossover design, driver design, EVERYTHING occured
significantly AFTER the 604.

You take ALL of that knowledge, lump it into a single pile, call it
"the stuff they sell at Madisound" and "Speaker Builder mentality
projects" as if that represented the Parnassus of loudspeaker knowledge
and proceed to tilt against it like some evil windmill. Well, there's a
much larger world of knowledge about loudspeakers than that, I would
hesitate to suggest. And the Altec 604 is NOT part of it, because it
was born 25 years too early.

If you like the Altecs, fine. But holding them up as a paragon of
design acumen, as shining examples of how to design a well-performing
speaker in any reasonable objective sense is, well, amusing.

I have a pair of late (Mantaray) 604s with Mastering Labs x/o in some
cement cabs. I like them but they are not perfect. Improved cab design
and biamping will lead to substantial improvement, I think.

No, you have already run up against the unresolvabel fundamental
design limitations of the the beast. Theya re intrinsically what
they are, and NO amount of fiddling will get them beyond that point.

Appreciate them for what they a probably one of the best examples
of the black art of speaker from 6 decades ago, a period where more
witchcraft and alchemy and kitchen-sink fiddling then science and
understanding and real engineering ruled.

604's, like T. Rex, is a magnificent specimen of a time long past.
We can admire them, study them, marvel at their anachronistic
magnificence.

But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

Well, to a substantial extent, I did. I have a reasonable electronic
background, but I don't claim to be a speaker designer. That said, and
not as a dig, a lot of those who do apparently don't know very much
either.

A number of variations of the 604 exist, but typical T/S figures
on them run something like:

Fs 27 Hz
Vas 450 L
Qms 2.32
Qes 0.22
Qts 0.20
Xmax 3 mm

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.

Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

In the more typical cabinet used for these drivers, which is an excessively
large cabinet tuned with large ports at a very high frequency, the response
of the system is, well, abyssmal. How about an 11 dB peak at 80 Hz, with
a response that plummets like a rock below that.

And the horn is such that crossover frequencies like 900 Hz are a
bare minimum. That's asking an awful lot of an untreated paper cone.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

With an excursion of all of about 3 mm, despite its enormous magnet
and underhung voice coil, this 15" driver has no more output capability
than one of those "cheap" 10" drivers you go about.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.

But the basic item is SO handicapped by its fundamental limitations. It
was an amazing driver in its time. But it's time was 1945. That's almost
SIXTY years ago, my friend. Event ignoring your rather biased and poorly
constructed remark about "cheap" drivers, pretty much EVERYTHING that's
understood about the interaction of cabinets and drivers, system
integration, crossover design, driver design, EVERYTHING occured
significantly AFTER the 604.

You take ALL of that knowledge, lump it into a single pile, call it
"the stuff they sell at Madisound" and "Speaker Builder mentality
projects" as if that represented the Parnassus of loudspeaker knowledge
and proceed to tilt against it like some evil windmill. Well, there's a
much larger world of knowledge about loudspeakers than that, I would
hesitate to suggest. And the Altec 604 is NOT part of it, because it
was born 25 years too early.

I rail against the attitude of many hobbyists and High End Swinging
Dicks (hobbyists with money and ego who go in the high-end audio
business, selling their hobby projects-which might be well and fine as
hobby projects-for huge sums through chichi dealers with arrogant snob
salespunks that can't solder and wouldn't be allowed to clean the
toilet at Sear Sound) that they can throw something together cheaply,
package it in a form factor straight out of a Fifties cheesy sci-fi
movie or "The Wild, Wild West", and trendies form a conga line to buy
it. Look at that goofy thing on the cover of this month's Stereopile.
Would Hewlett, Packard, or Vollum have built anything that goofy
looking? And it's conservative compared to a lot of this crap. That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.) The only other industry I know where
building in the basement is cheaper is in light aircraft, where you
have huge overheads with type certification and (allegedly) product
liability insurrance.

I don't mean to insult Madisound, who are probably a decent vendor,
or Speaker Builder-now AudioXPress-who can only publish what people
submit, and from the looks of the magazine in the last few years the
submissions are getting lean.



No, you have already run up against the unresolvabel fundamental
design limitations of the the beast. Theya re intrinsically what
they are, and NO amount of fiddling will get them beyond that point.

Appreciate them for what they a probably one of the best examples
of the black art of speaker from 6 decades ago, a period where more
witchcraft and alchemy and kitchen-sink fiddling then science and
understanding and real engineering ruled.

604's, like T. Rex, is a magnificent specimen of a time long past.
We can admire them, study them, marvel at their anachronistic
magnificence.

The 604 was in volume manufacture for over 45 years, until corporate
acquisition made it (and several other Altec products) a red-headed
stepchild. It cost money to build and "overlapping" products in the
line cost less, apparently much less, to build. I had a phone
conversation with "the new guys" wherein the marketing manager
explained, with glee, that they had Dumpstered the tooling, that they
had happily walked away from hundreds of thousands of dollars per year
from Japanese and other overseas orders , that they could have sold
even more and/or jacked the price higher if they'd been willing to
build earlier versions-particularly with Alnico magnets, which would
have added $100 to the build cost of each unit, and finally that Les
Paul had been after them for 20 years to do a LP signature 604 which
they had diligently ignored.

Profitable legacy products are often killed,laying off workers and
idling plants, in corporate acquisitions no matter the demand. The New
Management has to show they have a bigger-on paper, it's ROI, but it's
just the age-old instinct for measuring penis size. The new one costs
less to build. Not only that, it probably has firmware, which is the
sacred god Intellectual Property and, costing nothing to copy, is of
infinite value. Why do you think all the new subsonic airliners have
FBW, even though, in a rare episode of sanity, the FAA requires they
still be aerodynamically stable?


But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

And yet: they sound better than many, many later efforts (although
I'd never say all.) Is there such a thing as "a good sounding driver"?
Apparently so.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

Well, to a substantial extent, I did. I have a reasonable electronic
background, but I don't claim to be a speaker designer. That said, and
not as a dig, a lot of those who do apparently don't know very much
either.

A number of variations of the 604 exist, but typical T/S figures
on them run something like:

Fs 27 Hz
Vas 450 L
Qms 2.32
Qes 0.22
Qts 0.20
Xmax 3 mm

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.

Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

In the more typical cabinet used for these drivers, which is an excessively
large cabinet tuned with large ports at a very high frequency, the response
of the system is, well, abyssmal. How about an 11 dB peak at 80 Hz, with
a response that plummets like a rock below that.

And the horn is such that crossover frequencies like 900 Hz are a
bare minimum. That's asking an awful lot of an untreated paper cone.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

With an excursion of all of about 3 mm, despite its enormous magnet
and underhung voice coil, this 15" driver has no more output capability
than one of those "cheap" 10" drivers you go about.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.

But the basic item is SO handicapped by its fundamental limitations. It
was an amazing driver in its time. But it's time was 1945. That's almost
SIXTY years ago, my friend. Event ignoring your rather biased and poorly
constructed remark about "cheap" drivers, pretty much EVERYTHING that's
understood about the interaction of cabinets and drivers, system
integration, crossover design, driver design, EVERYTHING occured
significantly AFTER the 604.

You take ALL of that knowledge, lump it into a single pile, call it
"the stuff they sell at Madisound" and "Speaker Builder mentality
projects" as if that represented the Parnassus of loudspeaker knowledge
and proceed to tilt against it like some evil windmill. Well, there's a
much larger world of knowledge about loudspeakers than that, I would
hesitate to suggest. And the Altec 604 is NOT part of it, because it
was born 25 years too early.

I rail against the attitude of many hobbyists and High End Swinging
Dicks (hobbyists with money and ego who go in the high-end audio
business, selling their hobby projects-which might be well and fine as
hobby projects-for huge sums through chichi dealers with arrogant snob
salespunks that can't solder and wouldn't be allowed to clean the
toilet at Sear Sound) that they can throw something together cheaply,
package it in a form factor straight out of a Fifties cheesy sci-fi
movie or "The Wild, Wild West", and trendies form a conga line to buy
it. Look at that goofy thing on the cover of this month's Stereopile.
Would Hewlett, Packard, or Vollum have built anything that goofy
looking? And it's conservative compared to a lot of this crap. That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.) The only other industry I know where
building in the basement is cheaper is in light aircraft, where you
have huge overheads with type certification and (allegedly) product
liability insurrance.

I don't mean to insult Madisound, who are probably a decent vendor,
or Speaker Builder-now AudioXPress-who can only publish what people
submit, and from the looks of the magazine in the last few years the
submissions are getting lean.



No, you have already run up against the unresolvabel fundamental
design limitations of the the beast. Theya re intrinsically what
they are, and NO amount of fiddling will get them beyond that point.

Appreciate them for what they a probably one of the best examples
of the black art of speaker from 6 decades ago, a period where more
witchcraft and alchemy and kitchen-sink fiddling then science and
understanding and real engineering ruled.

604's, like T. Rex, is a magnificent specimen of a time long past.
We can admire them, study them, marvel at their anachronistic
magnificence.

The 604 was in volume manufacture for over 45 years, until corporate
acquisition made it (and several other Altec products) a red-headed
stepchild. It cost money to build and "overlapping" products in the
line cost less, apparently much less, to build. I had a phone
conversation with "the new guys" wherein the marketing manager
explained, with glee, that they had Dumpstered the tooling, that they
had happily walked away from hundreds of thousands of dollars per year
from Japanese and other overseas orders , that they could have sold
even more and/or jacked the price higher if they'd been willing to
build earlier versions-particularly with Alnico magnets, which would
have added $100 to the build cost of each unit, and finally that Les
Paul had been after them for 20 years to do a LP signature 604 which
they had diligently ignored.

Profitable legacy products are often killed,laying off workers and
idling plants, in corporate acquisitions no matter the demand. The New
Management has to show they have a bigger-on paper, it's ROI, but it's
just the age-old instinct for measuring penis size. The new one costs
less to build. Not only that, it probably has firmware, which is the
sacred god Intellectual Property and, costing nothing to copy, is of
infinite value. Why do you think all the new subsonic airliners have
FBW, even though, in a rare episode of sanity, the FAA requires they
still be aerodynamically stable?


But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

And yet: they sound better than many, many later efforts (although
I'd never say all.) Is there such a thing as "a good sounding driver"?
Apparently so.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

Well, to a substantial extent, I did. I have a reasonable electronic
background, but I don't claim to be a speaker designer. That said, and
not as a dig, a lot of those who do apparently don't know very much
either.

A number of variations of the 604 exist, but typical T/S figures
on them run something like:

Fs 27 Hz
Vas 450 L
Qms 2.32
Qes 0.22
Qts 0.20
Xmax 3 mm

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.

Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

In the more typical cabinet used for these drivers, which is an excessively
large cabinet tuned with large ports at a very high frequency, the response
of the system is, well, abyssmal. How about an 11 dB peak at 80 Hz, with
a response that plummets like a rock below that.

And the horn is such that crossover frequencies like 900 Hz are a
bare minimum. That's asking an awful lot of an untreated paper cone.

2. A "real" large driver with very poor linearity that has no better
linear volume displacement than your alledged "cheap" smaller
drivers, with a stiff and VERY non-linear suspension.

With an excursion of all of about 3 mm, despite its enormous magnet
and underhung voice coil, this 15" driver has no more output capability
than one of those "cheap" 10" drivers you go about.

3. A "real" expensive crossover that was designed without any
consideration of conjugate load matching

Doug Sax of Mastering Labs designed a much better x/o but although
it's still available to order I think even he would admit biamping is
better.

But the basic item is SO handicapped by its fundamental limitations. It
was an amazing driver in its time. But it's time was 1945. That's almost
SIXTY years ago, my friend. Event ignoring your rather biased and poorly
constructed remark about "cheap" drivers, pretty much EVERYTHING that's
understood about the interaction of cabinets and drivers, system
integration, crossover design, driver design, EVERYTHING occured
significantly AFTER the 604.

You take ALL of that knowledge, lump it into a single pile, call it
"the stuff they sell at Madisound" and "Speaker Builder mentality
projects" as if that represented the Parnassus of loudspeaker knowledge
and proceed to tilt against it like some evil windmill. Well, there's a
much larger world of knowledge about loudspeakers than that, I would
hesitate to suggest. And the Altec 604 is NOT part of it, because it
was born 25 years too early.

I rail against the attitude of many hobbyists and High End Swinging
Dicks (hobbyists with money and ego who go in the high-end audio
business, selling their hobby projects-which might be well and fine as
hobby projects-for huge sums through chichi dealers with arrogant snob
salespunks that can't solder and wouldn't be allowed to clean the
toilet at Sear Sound) that they can throw something together cheaply,
package it in a form factor straight out of a Fifties cheesy sci-fi
movie or "The Wild, Wild West", and trendies form a conga line to buy
it. Look at that goofy thing on the cover of this month's Stereopile.
Would Hewlett, Packard, or Vollum have built anything that goofy
looking? And it's conservative compared to a lot of this crap. That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.) The only other industry I know where
building in the basement is cheaper is in light aircraft, where you
have huge overheads with type certification and (allegedly) product
liability insurrance.

I don't mean to insult Madisound, who are probably a decent vendor,
or Speaker Builder-now AudioXPress-who can only publish what people
submit, and from the looks of the magazine in the last few years the
submissions are getting lean.



No, you have already run up against the unresolvabel fundamental
design limitations of the the beast. Theya re intrinsically what
they are, and NO amount of fiddling will get them beyond that point.

Appreciate them for what they a probably one of the best examples
of the black art of speaker from 6 decades ago, a period where more
witchcraft and alchemy and kitchen-sink fiddling then science and
understanding and real engineering ruled.

604's, like T. Rex, is a magnificent specimen of a time long past.
We can admire them, study them, marvel at their anachronistic
magnificence.

The 604 was in volume manufacture for over 45 years, until corporate
acquisition made it (and several other Altec products) a red-headed
stepchild. It cost money to build and "overlapping" products in the
line cost less, apparently much less, to build. I had a phone
conversation with "the new guys" wherein the marketing manager
explained, with glee, that they had Dumpstered the tooling, that they
had happily walked away from hundreds of thousands of dollars per year
from Japanese and other overseas orders , that they could have sold
even more and/or jacked the price higher if they'd been willing to
build earlier versions-particularly with Alnico magnets, which would
have added $100 to the build cost of each unit, and finally that Les
Paul had been after them for 20 years to do a LP signature 604 which
they had diligently ignored.

Profitable legacy products are often killed,laying off workers and
idling plants, in corporate acquisitions no matter the demand. The New
Management has to show they have a bigger-on paper, it's ROI, but it's
just the age-old instinct for measuring penis size. The new one costs
less to build. Not only that, it probably has firmware, which is the
sacred god Intellectual Property and, costing nothing to copy, is of
infinite value. Why do you think all the new subsonic airliners have
FBW, even though, in a rare episode of sanity, the FAA requires they
still be aerodynamically stable?


But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

And yet: they sound better than many, many later efforts (although
I'd never say all.) Is there such a thing as "a good sounding driver"?
Apparently so.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message om...

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

Well, to a substantial extent, I did. I have a reasonable electronic
background, but I don't claim to be a speaker designer. That said, and
not as a dig, a lot of those who do apparently don't know very much
either.

I rail against the attitude of many hobbyists and High End Swinging

A LOT of utter irrelvancies deleted

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.


But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

And yet: they sound better than many, many later efforts (although
I'd never say all.)

You mean to say, you LIKE that driver. To YOU, it sound better.

That's a great argument for YOU, one for which I will nor can provide
no technical rejoinder. But you have taken your preference for the
driver and elevated it almost to the level of physical fact. In the
process, you failed to address every single technical point I raised.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.

You brought up the example of how, in your mind, 40 and 50 year old
engine technologgy was, fro some reasons, superior to that which prevails
now. I suggest your example, as applied to the 604, is a highly flawed
example. I would suggest a more apt example would be the comparison
between the internal combustion engine and rickshaws.

Had Altec known 10% of what is known about the intergration of drivers
and cabinets and the resulting determination of driver electromechanical
parameters, the 604 would have had to have been a VERY different driver.
The fundamental physics dictates so. That physics has not changed one
wit in the intervening 60 years. Our knowledge of it has.

In counter to this, you bring up utter irrelevancies about Madisound
and "singing dick high enders" and stuff which has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
to do with the fact that th 604 is a BAD DESIGN, and its BAD DESIGN
stands on its own, and need not be compared to anything else, other
than the fundamental operation of physics, electronics and acoustics,
to be judged as bad.

You seem to continue to miss the point that it's not that SPEAKERS
have changed, it's that our UNDERSTANDING of speakers have changed,
and because of THAT, we now know how to change the speakers. Altec
knew NONE of this, NOTHING.

Yoe are certainly correct in that the 604 is unlike anything available
today. I know of now manufacturer of any repute who would knowlingly
design and market a system with such miserable low-frequency performance
as exhibited by the 604 with its typically awful low-frequency alignment.

How wel do you think a system with a whopping 15" driver would sell
if its designers were to admit that it can't go below 50 Hz? And what
sort of reception do you think an 11.3 dB peak at 80 Hz will receive?

That's your 604 in all it's glory, in all it's naive, ignorant of
modern low-frequency design principles, 60-year-old-booming-mid-
bass, absolutely-no-low-bass magnificence.

As I said near the outset of this thread, you may like the 604 and what
it does. But do NOT hold it up as a paragon of loudspeaker design. Having
now investigated it in more detail, I no longer think doing so is
laughable, it's embarrisngly ridiculous. It's a joke. A 60 year old
quaint, if not somewhat unfortunate, joke.

If you want do deal with the technical issues raised in this thread,
I'd be happy to continue. However, you seem to want to raise any number
of totally irrelevant proxy issues that, to me, merely underscore the
gross technical failings of the 604. Such a pursuit is unproductive,
though certainly more so for you than I. I don't know what other readers
can get from this thread, hopefully some of my technical points could
be of some value. But irrelavancies like kit airplanes and demonstrably
misrepresentative views of kit magazines and retail vendors and quite
unsupportable claims of what the current state of the art is have, in
this person's view, no value other than to diminish whatever is left
of any veracity of the foundational basis for your position.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message om...

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

Well, to a substantial extent, I did. I have a reasonable electronic
background, but I don't claim to be a speaker designer. That said, and
not as a dig, a lot of those who do apparently don't know very much
either.

I rail against the attitude of many hobbyists and High End Swinging

A LOT of utter irrelvancies deleted

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.


But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

And yet: they sound better than many, many later efforts (although
I'd never say all.)

You mean to say, you LIKE that driver. To YOU, it sound better.

That's a great argument for YOU, one for which I will nor can provide
no technical rejoinder. But you have taken your preference for the
driver and elevated it almost to the level of physical fact. In the
process, you failed to address every single technical point I raised.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.

You brought up the example of how, in your mind, 40 and 50 year old
engine technologgy was, fro some reasons, superior to that which prevails
now. I suggest your example, as applied to the 604, is a highly flawed
example. I would suggest a more apt example would be the comparison
between the internal combustion engine and rickshaws.

Had Altec known 10% of what is known about the intergration of drivers
and cabinets and the resulting determination of driver electromechanical
parameters, the 604 would have had to have been a VERY different driver.
The fundamental physics dictates so. That physics has not changed one
wit in the intervening 60 years. Our knowledge of it has.

In counter to this, you bring up utter irrelevancies about Madisound
and "singing dick high enders" and stuff which has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
to do with the fact that th 604 is a BAD DESIGN, and its BAD DESIGN
stands on its own, and need not be compared to anything else, other
than the fundamental operation of physics, electronics and acoustics,
to be judged as bad.

You seem to continue to miss the point that it's not that SPEAKERS
have changed, it's that our UNDERSTANDING of speakers have changed,
and because of THAT, we now know how to change the speakers. Altec
knew NONE of this, NOTHING.

Yoe are certainly correct in that the 604 is unlike anything available
today. I know of now manufacturer of any repute who would knowlingly
design and market a system with such miserable low-frequency performance
as exhibited by the 604 with its typically awful low-frequency alignment.

How wel do you think a system with a whopping 15" driver would sell
if its designers were to admit that it can't go below 50 Hz? And what
sort of reception do you think an 11.3 dB peak at 80 Hz will receive?

That's your 604 in all it's glory, in all it's naive, ignorant of
modern low-frequency design principles, 60-year-old-booming-mid-
bass, absolutely-no-low-bass magnificence.

As I said near the outset of this thread, you may like the 604 and what
it does. But do NOT hold it up as a paragon of loudspeaker design. Having
now investigated it in more detail, I no longer think doing so is
laughable, it's embarrisngly ridiculous. It's a joke. A 60 year old
quaint, if not somewhat unfortunate, joke.

If you want do deal with the technical issues raised in this thread,
I'd be happy to continue. However, you seem to want to raise any number
of totally irrelevant proxy issues that, to me, merely underscore the
gross technical failings of the 604. Such a pursuit is unproductive,
though certainly more so for you than I. I don't know what other readers
can get from this thread, hopefully some of my technical points could
be of some value. But irrelavancies like kit airplanes and demonstrably
misrepresentative views of kit magazines and retail vendors and quite
unsupportable claims of what the current state of the art is have, in
this person's view, no value other than to diminish whatever is left
of any veracity of the foundational basis for your position.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message om...

Maybe you missed the point of my remarks. The 604 design comes from
an era when no one new how to design a box suited to a driver, and
no one new how to design a driver to fit in a box. People couldn't
do reasonable driver/enclosure and thus system designs because no one
knew, back in the middle 1940's what any of this stuff meant.

Well, to a substantial extent, I did. I have a reasonable electronic
background, but I don't claim to be a speaker designer. That said, and
not as a dig, a lot of those who do apparently don't know very much
either.

I rail against the attitude of many hobbyists and High End Swinging

A LOT of utter irrelvancies deleted

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.


But, like T. Rex, they're STILL extinct. Their time has come, and
their time has gone. R. I. P.

And yet: they sound better than many, many later efforts (although
I'd never say all.)

You mean to say, you LIKE that driver. To YOU, it sound better.

That's a great argument for YOU, one for which I will nor can provide
no technical rejoinder. But you have taken your preference for the
driver and elevated it almost to the level of physical fact. In the
process, you failed to address every single technical point I raised.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.

You brought up the example of how, in your mind, 40 and 50 year old
engine technologgy was, fro some reasons, superior to that which prevails
now. I suggest your example, as applied to the 604, is a highly flawed
example. I would suggest a more apt example would be the comparison
between the internal combustion engine and rickshaws.

Had Altec known 10% of what is known about the intergration of drivers
and cabinets and the resulting determination of driver electromechanical
parameters, the 604 would have had to have been a VERY different driver.
The fundamental physics dictates so. That physics has not changed one
wit in the intervening 60 years. Our knowledge of it has.

In counter to this, you bring up utter irrelevancies about Madisound
and "singing dick high enders" and stuff which has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
to do with the fact that th 604 is a BAD DESIGN, and its BAD DESIGN
stands on its own, and need not be compared to anything else, other
than the fundamental operation of physics, electronics and acoustics,
to be judged as bad.

You seem to continue to miss the point that it's not that SPEAKERS
have changed, it's that our UNDERSTANDING of speakers have changed,
and because of THAT, we now know how to change the speakers. Altec
knew NONE of this, NOTHING.

Yoe are certainly correct in that the 604 is unlike anything available
today. I know of now manufacturer of any repute who would knowlingly
design and market a system with such miserable low-frequency performance
as exhibited by the 604 with its typically awful low-frequency alignment.

How wel do you think a system with a whopping 15" driver would sell
if its designers were to admit that it can't go below 50 Hz? And what
sort of reception do you think an 11.3 dB peak at 80 Hz will receive?

That's your 604 in all it's glory, in all it's naive, ignorant of
modern low-frequency design principles, 60-year-old-booming-mid-
bass, absolutely-no-low-bass magnificence.

As I said near the outset of this thread, you may like the 604 and what
it does. But do NOT hold it up as a paragon of loudspeaker design. Having
now investigated it in more detail, I no longer think doing so is
laughable, it's embarrisngly ridiculous. It's a joke. A 60 year old
quaint, if not somewhat unfortunate, joke.

If you want do deal with the technical issues raised in this thread,
I'd be happy to continue. However, you seem to want to raise any number
of totally irrelevant proxy issues that, to me, merely underscore the
gross technical failings of the 604. Such a pursuit is unproductive,
though certainly more so for you than I. I don't know what other readers
can get from this thread, hopefully some of my technical points could
be of some value. But irrelavancies like kit airplanes and demonstrably
misrepresentative views of kit magazines and retail vendors and quite
unsupportable claims of what the current state of the art is have, in
this person's view, no value other than to diminish whatever is left
of any veracity of the foundational basis for your position.

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.

In the case of the amplifiers, it would be easy to settle the matter
with an AP box, a couple of fat Dale noninductive resistors, and the
needed test leads.In the case of the speakers, I'd say you need an
anechoic chamber, but it's no secret that the more determined hobby
guys are very competitive with some of the High End factory stuff.
Whether this means the hobbyists are good or that a lot of the High
end stuff is not-and I suspect it's both-I don't know.




Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant. Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then? Does it matter?
Judgment, I'd say.

You are right, I didn't rebut your technical arguments because you
probably have the numbers completely right-I could look them up, I
trust your citations-although I don't really have enough speaker
design background to intelligently deal with this. Yes, I'm ignorant
of some things. My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it, just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them. (And laid off
all those old broads in Lee's Summit, who knows, Pat Metheny's mom
maybe.)

So how do you feel about Klipschhorns and la Scalas? ;-)

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.

In the case of the amplifiers, it would be easy to settle the matter
with an AP box, a couple of fat Dale noninductive resistors, and the
needed test leads.In the case of the speakers, I'd say you need an
anechoic chamber, but it's no secret that the more determined hobby
guys are very competitive with some of the High End factory stuff.
Whether this means the hobbyists are good or that a lot of the High
end stuff is not-and I suspect it's both-I don't know.




Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant. Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then? Does it matter?
Judgment, I'd say.

You are right, I didn't rebut your technical arguments because you
probably have the numbers completely right-I could look them up, I
trust your citations-although I don't really have enough speaker
design background to intelligently deal with this. Yes, I'm ignorant
of some things. My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it, just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them. (And laid off
all those old broads in Lee's Summit, who knows, Pat Metheny's mom
maybe.)

So how do you feel about Klipschhorns and la Scalas? ;-)

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.

In the case of the amplifiers, it would be easy to settle the matter
with an AP box, a couple of fat Dale noninductive resistors, and the
needed test leads.In the case of the speakers, I'd say you need an
anechoic chamber, but it's no secret that the more determined hobby
guys are very competitive with some of the High End factory stuff.
Whether this means the hobbyists are good or that a lot of the High
end stuff is not-and I suspect it's both-I don't know.




Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant. Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then? Does it matter?
Judgment, I'd say.

You are right, I didn't rebut your technical arguments because you
probably have the numbers completely right-I could look them up, I
trust your citations-although I don't really have enough speaker
design background to intelligently deal with this. Yes, I'm ignorant
of some things. My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it, just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them. (And laid off
all those old broads in Lee's Summit, who knows, Pat Metheny's mom
maybe.)

So how do you feel about Klipschhorns and la Scalas? ;-)

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.

In the case of the amplifiers, it would be easy to settle the matter
with an AP box, a couple of fat Dale noninductive resistors, and the
needed test leads.

In which case, it's clear that you'd have a woefully incomplete
test. Most of us gave up testing amplifiers in such an incredibly
crude and anachronistic way several decades ago. Fat Dale non-
inductive resistors and the typical sort of measurements do not
a comprehensive set of measurements make.

In the case of the speakers, I'd say you need an anechoic chamber,

Again, your comment speaks volumes to, no disrespect intended, how
far out of date your notions of the state of the art of loudspeakers
are. Back 60 years ago, people like Altec new they were lucky if they
knew someone whose uncle worked at a place that ahd an anechoic chamber.
Now, we're 30 years paste the time when they were a requirement.

but it's no secret that the more determined hobby
guys are very competitive with some of the High End factory stuff.

But, that's your opinion. And, thus far, we haven't seen single
shred of credible data to suggest that it has any veracity. I'm
not defending the so-called "high-end;" anyone who has seen my
comments on them would know better. But I would hazard to suggest
that your opinion of the technical merits of the ancient 604 are as
wildly out of touch with physical reality as is your opinion of the
current state of the art, which is NOT represented by the hobbyist
market, not by a long shot.

Your raising of that hobbyist market is nothin but a strawman: it;s
easy to knock down. So what? The hobbyist market has NOTHING to do
with the state of knowledge in acoustics and loudspeaker design. Why,
then, do you insist on raising it, other thna as a purely argumentative
strawman?

Whether this means the hobbyists are good or that a lot of the High
end stuff is not-and I suspect it's both-I don't know.

Well, all due respect, these last 3 words are the answer.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.

Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that. Hardly neutral,
hardly what competent mastering engineers would call a true monitoring
and verification tool. It may have been all they had at the time, but
that's no excuse for today.

You are right, I didn't rebut your technical arguments because you
probably have the numbers completely right-I could look them up, I
trust your citations-although I don't really have enough speaker
design background to intelligently deal with this.

But, you DID hold forth on the topic as if you DID.

Yes, I'm ignorant of some things.

Indeed. I would respectfully point out you are ignorant of the vast
majority of imformation about the last 60 years of loudspeaker
research and technology, and you allowed what was left be colored by
a preference for what is one of the poorer examples of loudspeaker
design in the last half century, taken in any reasonably modern context.

My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it,

No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?

They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.

In the case of the amplifiers, it would be easy to settle the matter
with an AP box, a couple of fat Dale noninductive resistors, and the
needed test leads.

In which case, it's clear that you'd have a woefully incomplete
test. Most of us gave up testing amplifiers in such an incredibly
crude and anachronistic way several decades ago. Fat Dale non-
inductive resistors and the typical sort of measurements do not
a comprehensive set of measurements make.

In the case of the speakers, I'd say you need an anechoic chamber,

Again, your comment speaks volumes to, no disrespect intended, how
far out of date your notions of the state of the art of loudspeakers
are. Back 60 years ago, people like Altec new they were lucky if they
knew someone whose uncle worked at a place that ahd an anechoic chamber.
Now, we're 30 years paste the time when they were a requirement.

but it's no secret that the more determined hobby
guys are very competitive with some of the High End factory stuff.

But, that's your opinion. And, thus far, we haven't seen single
shred of credible data to suggest that it has any veracity. I'm
not defending the so-called "high-end;" anyone who has seen my
comments on them would know better. But I would hazard to suggest
that your opinion of the technical merits of the ancient 604 are as
wildly out of touch with physical reality as is your opinion of the
current state of the art, which is NOT represented by the hobbyist
market, not by a long shot.

Your raising of that hobbyist market is nothin but a strawman: it;s
easy to knock down. So what? The hobbyist market has NOTHING to do
with the state of knowledge in acoustics and loudspeaker design. Why,
then, do you insist on raising it, other thna as a purely argumentative
strawman?

Whether this means the hobbyists are good or that a lot of the High
end stuff is not-and I suspect it's both-I don't know.

Well, all due respect, these last 3 words are the answer.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.

Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that. Hardly neutral,
hardly what competent mastering engineers would call a true monitoring
and verification tool. It may have been all they had at the time, but
that's no excuse for today.

You are right, I didn't rebut your technical arguments because you
probably have the numbers completely right-I could look them up, I
trust your citations-although I don't really have enough speaker
design background to intelligently deal with this.

But, you DID hold forth on the topic as if you DID.

Yes, I'm ignorant of some things.

Indeed. I would respectfully point out you are ignorant of the vast
majority of imformation about the last 60 years of loudspeaker
research and technology, and you allowed what was left be colored by
a preference for what is one of the poorer examples of loudspeaker
design in the last half century, taken in any reasonably modern context.

My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it,

No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?

They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...

That a
hobbyist can build an amp as good as a c-j, Audio Research, or VTL, or
a speaker as good as a Thiel or Vandersteen for a fraction even
counting his own time at market technician/assembler rates, is
ludicrous. (But very true.)

But very FALSE. I would be interested in seeing but a single example
of your assertion demonstrated as such with a reasonable acceptable
auite of measurements.

In the case of the amplifiers, it would be easy to settle the matter
with an AP box, a couple of fat Dale noninductive resistors, and the
needed test leads.

In which case, it's clear that you'd have a woefully incomplete
test. Most of us gave up testing amplifiers in such an incredibly
crude and anachronistic way several decades ago. Fat Dale non-
inductive resistors and the typical sort of measurements do not
a comprehensive set of measurements make.

In the case of the speakers, I'd say you need an anechoic chamber,

Again, your comment speaks volumes to, no disrespect intended, how
far out of date your notions of the state of the art of loudspeakers
are. Back 60 years ago, people like Altec new they were lucky if they
knew someone whose uncle worked at a place that ahd an anechoic chamber.
Now, we're 30 years paste the time when they were a requirement.

but it's no secret that the more determined hobby
guys are very competitive with some of the High End factory stuff.

But, that's your opinion. And, thus far, we haven't seen single
shred of credible data to suggest that it has any veracity. I'm
not defending the so-called "high-end;" anyone who has seen my
comments on them would know better. But I would hazard to suggest
that your opinion of the technical merits of the ancient 604 are as
wildly out of touch with physical reality as is your opinion of the
current state of the art, which is NOT represented by the hobbyist
market, not by a long shot.

Your raising of that hobbyist market is nothin but a strawman: it;s
easy to knock down. So what? The hobbyist market has NOTHING to do
with the state of knowledge in acoustics and loudspeaker design. Why,
then, do you insist on raising it, other thna as a purely argumentative
strawman?

Whether this means the hobbyists are good or that a lot of the High
end stuff is not-and I suspect it's both-I don't know.

Well, all due respect, these last 3 words are the answer.

Can we do better today? You'd think so. But I think it would mean
spending money, and the audio industry seems allergic to this.

We HAVE done better today. As I said, you chose to ignore the very gross
technical failings of the 604 in the points I rasied, just from the fact
that on the basis of it's electromechanical parameters alaone, it is
a product desgined in an era when, quite literally, the people at Altec
and elseqhere were essentially clueless as to how drivers and cabinets
integrated into systems. The cabinets recommended and manufactured at
the time resulted in, as I said, abysmally poor low-frequency response.
"Redesigning" these cabinets using concrete changes an abysmally poor
system into a heacy, hard-to-manage abysmally poor system.


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.

Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that. Hardly neutral,
hardly what competent mastering engineers would call a true monitoring
and verification tool. It may have been all they had at the time, but
that's no excuse for today.

You are right, I didn't rebut your technical arguments because you
probably have the numbers completely right-I could look them up, I
trust your citations-although I don't really have enough speaker
design background to intelligently deal with this.

But, you DID hold forth on the topic as if you DID.

Yes, I'm ignorant of some things.

Indeed. I would respectfully point out you are ignorant of the vast
majority of imformation about the last 60 years of loudspeaker
research and technology, and you allowed what was left be colored by
a preference for what is one of the poorer examples of loudspeaker
design in the last half century, taken in any reasonably modern context.

My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it,

No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?

They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.


What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?


Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that.


Well may have!




Indeed. I would respectfully point out you are ignorant of the vast
majority of imformation about the last 60 years of loudspeaker
research and technology, and you allowed what was left be colored by
a preference for what is one of the poorer examples of loudspeaker
design in the last half century, taken in any reasonably modern context.

My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it,

No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?


Assuming you meant "product generating a profit"-yes, I do,
absolutely, which is what I said. Unless the product is generating SO
MUCH net spendable as to make it politically unassailable, the small
cash cows are vulnerable not to accountants per se, but accountants
made managers, who then have to "make their bones". I said that as
clearly as I could, in fact. Ask Arctic users of Spilsbury HF radios,
or vintage motorcycle racers running Castrol R.




They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

Probably the market from Japanese audiophiles for the 300B was ten
times or more larger than the existing market, which apparently had
been a few foreign phone exchanges and, bizarrely, NASA. In fact I
sort of suspect the prospect of newly rejuvenated sales to the
vintage/cult audio market was a prime factor in the Lee's Summit tube
line being shut down when it was. A cash cow that management didn't
come up with in the first place is destabilizing, particularly in the
very corporate environment that Deming, a prime contributor to the
Japanese audio cult mentality, engineered in the first place! (One
supplier for any given class of product, and all that.)

In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.


What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?


Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that.


Well may have!




Indeed. I would respectfully point out you are ignorant of the vast
majority of imformation about the last 60 years of loudspeaker
research and technology, and you allowed what was left be colored by
a preference for what is one of the poorer examples of loudspeaker
design in the last half century, taken in any reasonably modern context.

My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it,

No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?


Assuming you meant "product generating a profit"-yes, I do,
absolutely, which is what I said. Unless the product is generating SO
MUCH net spendable as to make it politically unassailable, the small
cash cows are vulnerable not to accountants per se, but accountants
made managers, who then have to "make their bones". I said that as
clearly as I could, in fact. Ask Arctic users of Spilsbury HF radios,
or vintage motorcycle racers running Castrol R.




They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

Probably the market from Japanese audiophiles for the 300B was ten
times or more larger than the existing market, which apparently had
been a few foreign phone exchanges and, bizarrely, NASA. In fact I
sort of suspect the prospect of newly rejuvenated sales to the
vintage/cult audio market was a prime factor in the Lee's Summit tube
line being shut down when it was. A cash cow that management didn't
come up with in the first place is destabilizing, particularly in the
very corporate environment that Deming, a prime contributor to the
Japanese audio cult mentality, engineered in the first place! (One
supplier for any given class of product, and all that.)

In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.


What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?


Are the active Genelecs bad
speakers? No. If you listen to a Jimi Hendrix record on Genelecs or on
604s, which is more likely to replicate what Eddie Kramer-or whoever
mixed it down in 1969-heard in the room back then?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that.


Well may have!




Indeed. I would respectfully point out you are ignorant of the vast
majority of imformation about the last 60 years of loudspeaker
research and technology, and you allowed what was left be colored by
a preference for what is one of the poorer examples of loudspeaker
design in the last half century, taken in any reasonably modern context.

My rant was, and is, not against modern speaker design
per se but more against the corporate behavior of those who gave the
604 the Nembutal enema. Good or not, people wanted it,

No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?


Assuming you meant "product generating a profit"-yes, I do,
absolutely, which is what I said. Unless the product is generating SO
MUCH net spendable as to make it politically unassailable, the small
cash cows are vulnerable not to accountants per se, but accountants
made managers, who then have to "make their bones". I said that as
clearly as I could, in fact. Ask Arctic users of Spilsbury HF radios,
or vintage motorcycle racers running Castrol R.




They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

Probably the market from Japanese audiophiles for the 300B was ten
times or more larger than the existing market, which apparently had
been a few foreign phone exchanges and, bizarrely, NASA. In fact I
sort of suspect the prospect of newly rejuvenated sales to the
vintage/cult audio market was a prime factor in the Lee's Summit tube
line being shut down when it was. A cash cow that management didn't
come up with in the first place is destabilizing, particularly in the
very corporate environment that Deming, a prime contributor to the
Japanese audio cult mentality, engineered in the first place! (One
supplier for any given class of product, and all that.)

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.

What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?

My goodness, how out of touch are we? There are MANY mastering
systems in use: even what defines "mastering" is quite varied.
Mastering what? I counter.

WHat's in use runs the gamut from Aurotone boxes through grim little
POS like Yamaho NS-10 up through the rarified atmosphere of Wilson
and such. WOuld you contemplate using the same thing for monitoring
in a classical orchestral mastering suite as for top-ten pop?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that.

Well may have!

Well did. They were pretty, uhm, "colored."


No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?

Assuming you meant "product generating a profit"-yes, I do,
absolutely, which is what I said. Unless the product is generating SO
MUCH net spendable as to make it politically unassailable, the small
cash cows are vulnerable not to accountants per se, but accountants
made managers, who then have to "make their bones". I said that as
clearly as I could, in fact.

And, in doing so, you demonstrated a rather unrealistic and nostalgic
view of the economics. when they were killed, 604's were no "cash cow."
Alnico was becoming frightfully expesivem the toolling was wearing out,
the machinery was old and tired and the whole line was a money loser.

They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

And you clearly missed this pojnt. Things like the 604 were killed
because they were LOSING money.


just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

Probably the market from Japanese audiophiles for the 300B was ten
times or more larger than the existing market,

Right, what's ten times utter insignificance? More utter insignificance.
The total market for such today is extraordinarily TINY. How big do you
think it really is?

Hnoestly, I think you have gone from a nostalgic but unrealistic
technical standpoint to an equally nostalgic but unrealistic
economic one. The 604, by ANY objective technical measure, is a dog.
In addition, it become nearly impossible to manufacture because of
it's very age. And because of that, it was no cash cow, it was a dead
mule and was given the ignominious burial it so richly deserved.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.

What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?

My goodness, how out of touch are we? There are MANY mastering
systems in use: even what defines "mastering" is quite varied.
Mastering what? I counter.

WHat's in use runs the gamut from Aurotone boxes through grim little
POS like Yamaho NS-10 up through the rarified atmosphere of Wilson
and such. WOuld you contemplate using the same thing for monitoring
in a classical orchestral mastering suite as for top-ten pop?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that.

Well may have!

Well did. They were pretty, uhm, "colored."


No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?

Assuming you meant "product generating a profit"-yes, I do,
absolutely, which is what I said. Unless the product is generating SO
MUCH net spendable as to make it politically unassailable, the small
cash cows are vulnerable not to accountants per se, but accountants
made managers, who then have to "make their bones". I said that as
clearly as I could, in fact.

And, in doing so, you demonstrated a rather unrealistic and nostalgic
view of the economics. when they were killed, 604's were no "cash cow."
Alnico was becoming frightfully expesivem the toolling was wearing out,
the machinery was old and tired and the whole line was a money loser.

They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

And you clearly missed this pojnt. Things like the 604 were killed
because they were LOSING money.


just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

Probably the market from Japanese audiophiles for the 300B was ten
times or more larger than the existing market,

Right, what's ten times utter insignificance? More utter insignificance.
The total market for such today is extraordinarily TINY. How big do you
think it really is?

Hnoestly, I think you have gone from a nostalgic but unrealistic
technical standpoint to an equally nostalgic but unrealistic
economic one. The 604, by ANY objective technical measure, is a dog.
In addition, it become nearly impossible to manufacture because of
it's very age. And because of that, it was no cash cow, it was a dead
mule and was given the ignominious burial it so richly deserved.

(Sam Byrams) wrote in message . com...


In some cases we have. In others, we-actually "youse" since I don't
design speakers-have ****ed up really badly. FWIW not many people are
still mixing down or mastering on 604s, although several speakers are
in use the Genelec seems dominant.

If you think the mastering world consists of either 604s or Genelecs,
you ARE woefully out of touch.

What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?

My goodness, how out of touch are we? There are MANY mastering
systems in use: even what defines "mastering" is quite varied.
Mastering what? I counter.

WHat's in use runs the gamut from Aurotone boxes through grim little
POS like Yamaho NS-10 up through the rarified atmosphere of Wilson
and such. WOuld you contemplate using the same thing for monitoring
in a classical orchestral mastering suite as for top-ten pop?

If they used 604s in comething like UREI cabinets, then we can say
for certain, they heard something with a seriously bloated, woefully
underdamped, highly-distorted bottom end, a major midrange suckout as
that 15" struggled mightly to keep up with a tweeter that had a
monster peak at about 9 kHz and little above that.

Well may have!

Well did. They were pretty, uhm, "colored."


No, SOME people wanted. Not anywhere near enough to justify keeping
an inefficient, difficult-to-manage and money-losing manufacturing
line going. If you think there was ANY prayer ofthe product generating
a product, do you think ANY bean counter would kill it?

Assuming you meant "product generating a profit"-yes, I do,
absolutely, which is what I said. Unless the product is generating SO
MUCH net spendable as to make it politically unassailable, the small
cash cows are vulnerable not to accountants per se, but accountants
made managers, who then have to "make their bones". I said that as
clearly as I could, in fact.

And, in doing so, you demonstrated a rather unrealistic and nostalgic
view of the economics. when they were killed, 604's were no "cash cow."
Alnico was becoming frightfully expesivem the toolling was wearing out,
the machinery was old and tired and the whole line was a money loser.

They're not going to keep making them to do some tiny handful of people
a favor.

And you clearly missed this pojnt. Things like the 604 were killed
because they were LOSING money.


just as WE
willfully farted in the face of the Japanese who worship the 300B
triode and were willing to pay ridiculous sums for them.

As well we should. Have you any clue what the total annualized sales
of SE triode amplifiers are world-wide? Frankly, that fart is far more
substantial.

Probably the market from Japanese audiophiles for the 300B was ten
times or more larger than the existing market,

Right, what's ten times utter insignificance? More utter insignificance.
The total market for such today is extraordinarily TINY. How big do you
think it really is?

Hnoestly, I think you have gone from a nostalgic but unrealistic
technical standpoint to an equally nostalgic but unrealistic
economic one. The 604, by ANY objective technical measure, is a dog.
In addition, it become nearly impossible to manufacture because of
it's very age. And because of that, it was no cash cow, it was a dead
mule and was given the ignominious burial it so richly deserved.

Sam Byrams wrote:

What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?

Just about anything you can imagine. There are a number of market segments
for studio speakers. General monitoring, which can also be broken down into
narrower segments like tracking, mixing and mastering.

Each application. can be conceived of as needing a different type of
speaker. In some cases, there is a controversy over whether any of these
applications must be implemented using speakers, or whether headphones or
IEMs might be appropriate.

Non-loudspeaker monitoring approaches are particularly popular for tracking
and mixing. Mastering now arguably may include non-loudspeaker approaches,
since we now have ten of millions of listeners using portable players. Thay
are using headphones and increasingly, IEMs. Computer speakers are another
popular listening environment that may need to be considered.

A major trend over the past 30 years has been the ascendancy of small
monitor speakers, sometimes called "Near field" or "meter bridge" speakers.
Small studio monitors have been a trend going back as least as far back as
the BBC's LS3/5A. Over the years the bass extension and dynamic range of
small monitors has evolved and improved greatly.

Mastering itself can arguably be something that isn't best done with just
one set of speakers or a single listening environment. Instead, some (myself
included) tote recordings they produce around to different listening
environments, take some notes, and go back and make adjustments as it seems
appropriate.

During mastering, the major issues are dynamic range, balance between direct
and reverberant sound, imaging, and tonal balance. Hopefully these aspects
of the recording have been at least roughed-in during mixing. Tracking is
more about the quality of individual playing. There seems to be no end to
the possibilities for fine tuning at any step in production.

Very few recordings are targeted towards just a single narrow playback
environment so they should at least to be QCd in a number of different
sonic contexts.

I strongly agree with other poster's comments relating to the sonic
impoverishment of many once-widely respected legacy speaker systems. OTOH, a
few other legacy systems don't do badly when compared to modern systems,
particularly with a little adjustment, some careful eq, an added subwoofer,
etc.

Sam Byrams wrote:

What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?

Just about anything you can imagine. There are a number of market segments
for studio speakers. General monitoring, which can also be broken down into
narrower segments like tracking, mixing and mastering.

Each application. can be conceived of as needing a different type of
speaker. In some cases, there is a controversy over whether any of these
applications must be implemented using speakers, or whether headphones or
IEMs might be appropriate.

Non-loudspeaker monitoring approaches are particularly popular for tracking
and mixing. Mastering now arguably may include non-loudspeaker approaches,
since we now have ten of millions of listeners using portable players. Thay
are using headphones and increasingly, IEMs. Computer speakers are another
popular listening environment that may need to be considered.

A major trend over the past 30 years has been the ascendancy of small
monitor speakers, sometimes called "Near field" or "meter bridge" speakers.
Small studio monitors have been a trend going back as least as far back as
the BBC's LS3/5A. Over the years the bass extension and dynamic range of
small monitors has evolved and improved greatly.

Mastering itself can arguably be something that isn't best done with just
one set of speakers or a single listening environment. Instead, some (myself
included) tote recordings they produce around to different listening
environments, take some notes, and go back and make adjustments as it seems
appropriate.

During mastering, the major issues are dynamic range, balance between direct
and reverberant sound, imaging, and tonal balance. Hopefully these aspects
of the recording have been at least roughed-in during mixing. Tracking is
more about the quality of individual playing. There seems to be no end to
the possibilities for fine tuning at any step in production.

Very few recordings are targeted towards just a single narrow playback
environment so they should at least to be QCd in a number of different
sonic contexts.

I strongly agree with other poster's comments relating to the sonic
impoverishment of many once-widely respected legacy speaker systems. OTOH, a
few other legacy systems don't do badly when compared to modern systems,
particularly with a little adjustment, some careful eq, an added subwoofer,
etc.

Sam Byrams wrote:

What are the more popular mastering systems now? Who ( just a few
names) is using what?

Just about anything you can imagine. There are a number of market segments
for studio speakers. General monitoring, which can also be broken down into
narrower segments like tracking, mixing and mastering.

Each application. can be conceived of as needing a different type of
speaker. In some cases, there is a controversy over whether any of these
applications must be implemented using speakers, or whether headphones or
IEMs might be appropriate.

Non-loudspeaker monitoring approaches are particularly popular for tracking
and mixing. Mastering now arguably may include non-loudspeaker approaches,
since we now have ten of millions of listeners using portable players. Thay
are using headphones and increasingly, IEMs. Computer speakers are another
popular listening environment that may need to be considered.

A major trend over the past 30 years has been the ascendancy of small
monitor speakers, sometimes called "Near field" or "meter bridge" speakers.
Small studio monitors have been a trend going back as least as far back as
the BBC's LS3/5A. Over the years the bass extension and dynamic range of
small monitors has evolved and improved greatly.

Mastering itself can arguably be something that isn't best done with just
one set of speakers or a single listening environment. Instead, some (myself
included) tote recordings they produce around to different listening
environments, take some notes, and go back and make adjustments as it seems
appropriate.

During mastering, the major issues are dynamic range, balance between direct
and reverberant sound, imaging, and tonal balance. Hopefully these aspects
of the recording have been at least roughed-in during mixing. Tracking is
more about the quality of individual playing. There seems to be no end to
the possibilities for fine tuning at any step in production.

Very few recordings are targeted towards just a single narrow playback
environment so they should at least to be QCd in a number of different
sonic contexts.

I strongly agree with other poster's comments relating to the sonic
impoverishment of many once-widely respected legacy speaker systems. OTOH, a
few other legacy systems don't do badly when compared to modern systems,
particularly with a little adjustment, some careful eq, an added subwoofer,
etc.

"Dick Pierce" wrote in message
om...

Hnoestly, I think you have gone from a nostalgic but unrealistic
technical standpoint to an equally nostalgic but unrealistic
economic one. The 604, by ANY objective technical measure, is a dog.
In addition, it become nearly impossible to manufacture because of
it's very age. And because of that, it was no cash cow, it was a dead
mule and was given the ignominious burial it so richly deserved.

Whilst I agree with your general point Dick, I can't help but think you are
being a trifle unfair. The fact that some are still going after 50 years
proves the quality of construction at least. They were "magnetically
shielded" long before it became a design feature. They were dynamically "CD
ready", long before CD was invented, and from your earlier post :

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.
Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

A 50Hz cut off is considered quite normal these days for many speakers, but
how many of them can do 98dB/W/M? None that I know of.
So yes they were designed before the science had arrived, and yes it's easy
to produce a better design these days (but still many don't).
The biggest problem was the box design, which can and was fixed by many
people who liked the idea of high efficiency/high SPL at 50Hz up.

IMO the main reason they are obsolete is the cost of construction Vs the
existence of cheap megawatt amplifiers these days.
I totally agree a viable market no longer exists.

TonyP.

"Dick Pierce" wrote in message
om...

Hnoestly, I think you have gone from a nostalgic but unrealistic
technical standpoint to an equally nostalgic but unrealistic
economic one. The 604, by ANY objective technical measure, is a dog.
In addition, it become nearly impossible to manufacture because of
it's very age. And because of that, it was no cash cow, it was a dead
mule and was given the ignominious burial it so richly deserved.

Whilst I agree with your general point Dick, I can't help but think you are
being a trifle unfair. The fact that some are still going after 50 years
proves the quality of construction at least. They were "magnetically
shielded" long before it became a design feature. They were dynamically "CD
ready", long before CD was invented, and from your earlier post :

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.
Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

A 50Hz cut off is considered quite normal these days for many speakers, but
how many of them can do 98dB/W/M? None that I know of.
So yes they were designed before the science had arrived, and yes it's easy
to produce a better design these days (but still many don't).
The biggest problem was the box design, which can and was fixed by many
people who liked the idea of high efficiency/high SPL at 50Hz up.

IMO the main reason they are obsolete is the cost of construction Vs the
existence of cheap megawatt amplifiers these days.
I totally agree a viable market no longer exists.

TonyP.

"Dick Pierce" wrote in message
om...

Hnoestly, I think you have gone from a nostalgic but unrealistic
technical standpoint to an equally nostalgic but unrealistic
economic one. The 604, by ANY objective technical measure, is a dog.
In addition, it become nearly impossible to manufacture because of
it's very age. And because of that, it was no cash cow, it was a dead
mule and was given the ignominious burial it so richly deserved.

Whilst I agree with your general point Dick, I can't help but think you are
being a trifle unfair. The fact that some are still going after 50 years
proves the quality of construction at least. They were "magnetically
shielded" long before it became a design feature. They were dynamically "CD
ready", long before CD was invented, and from your earlier post :

Yes, it's got phenomenal efficiency at about 98 dB 1W @ 1m, but
at a pretty significant cost: look at the Qts figure of 0.2.
Aiming for a maximally flat response requires the speaker to be mounted
in a TINY box, on the order of 80 liters, tuned to about 50 Hz. The result
is impressively flat, less than 1 dB response variation (ignoring driver
response anomolies), but is hardly impressive bass-wise for a 15" driver,
struggling, as it does, to reach down to 53 Hz.

A 50Hz cut off is considered quite normal these days for many speakers, but
how many of them can do 98dB/W/M? None that I know of.
So yes they were designed before the science had arrived, and yes it's easy
to produce a better design these days (but still many don't).
The biggest problem was the box design, which can and was fixed by many
people who liked the idea of high efficiency/high SPL at 50Hz up.

IMO the main reason they are obsolete is the cost of construction Vs the
existence of cheap megawatt amplifiers these days.
I totally agree a viable market no longer exists.

TonyP.

[[email protected]]

On Tuesday, May 25, 2004 8:45:45 PM UTC-7, Chu Gai wrote:
A brief discussion on resolving systems with a gentleman who makes
single driver speakers in what appears to be a folded Voigt Pipe
design turned briefly to resonances. My general contention was that
since he was using alder as opposed to MDF, that it would result in
additional resonances which would color the sound. Some mild umbrage
was taken. The conversation went like this. Am I somehow missing
something here or is this a combination of spin coupled with some
factual errors regarding wood?

Him: Sure, it will resonate. So will wood, steel, micarta, MDF, and
ANYTHING ELSE that has any mechanical stiffness. How it resonates and
whether it's important depends upon its stiffness, it's internal
mechanical losses, how it's mounted and secured and how it's
mechanically loaded and acoustically excited.

Me: This should not be interpreted as the intentional use of materials
to impart resonances as opposed to MDF which has a more predictable
nature? In ways, it reminds me of the various woods that can be used
in the construction of guitars where I think MDF, apart from being
heavy, might not make for the most pleasing of sounds.

Him: No, you have interpreted incorrectly. A common misconception
though. But yes woods do flavor sound, for guitars and speakers. Part
of woods amazing quality is that it can be made to resonate more, as
in the case of a guitar or piano, but that same piano usues wood to
isolate the vibration (the case) so the most energy can be released to
the room (more music)
What solid wood does in the case of my speaker is resonate LESS. I use
solid wood for it's weight vs ridgidity, it is far more ridgid than
mdf. And contributes actually less in the form of self -resonance. In
addition we have have made this speaker from teak, oak, mdf, plywood,
pine, alder, maple and cherry. All have distinct sonic "flavors". The
solid wood particularly the maple extends bass and allows the very
absolute maximum energy transfer from driver cone to port to room
without imparting audible resonance of it's own. The mdf example
sounded muffled and lifeless. My designs pursue maximum energy
transfer from electrical to the room both from the front of the driver
and the rear.. I once made a xylephone from different species of wood,
the keys all the same size as an experiment. 5 octaves were covered
just from locally growing trees.
One really has to integrate decisions about grain orientation,
thicknesses of wood as well as joint strength to carry this discussion
comparing materials to any logical extent as it relates to
speakerbuilding.

Me: If it's your position that cabinet augmentation is desireable,
then we stand on opposite sides. If you feel that it gives your
speaker a characteristic sound that is pleasing, I can live with that.

Him: The concept that you propose I subscribe to is incorrect, you
mis-nterpret my intention of reducing resonance through the use of
solid wood. MDf does not eliminate resonance. It reduces it
drastically, such that it also reduces musical content via energy
absorption.

If you look at speakerbuilding from another angle, the anthropological
veiw, we see that as forests shrank and skilled labor was replaced
with machinery. The square box (usually sealed or ported0 became the
de-facto method of augmenting the bass drivers own free-air resonance
(fs) or limiting it in the case of sealed enclosures. I submit this
has every thing to do with the advent of high powered solid state
amplifiers as equally as declining skills in our labor pool. MDF was
not created for eliminating resonance in speaker boxes but rather to
utilize vast stretches of inadequate lumber stocks. From an acoustical
standpoint MDF is dampening. It absorbs sound due to it's mass and
weight.

I am trying to allow the energy that would be absorbed by MDF to be
better utilized re-creating acoustical energy in the room. Of course
you do not want your speakerbox to vibrate, but using a "dead" panel
is the easy way out and not neccesarily the best method. ANd I think
Franco Serbelin agrees.

MDF is the best for creating acoustical energy in any room

[Trevor]

MDF is the best for creating acoustical energy in any room

What a stupid statement. VERY few musical instruments use MDF, (when was
the last time you saw a Piano made from MDF?) and even many good speaker
boxes use plywood rather than MDF.
In any case the sound from a speaker should come from the cone, not the
box, and apart from it's obvious drawbacks, concrete is far better than
MDF for speakers, so MDF can hardly be "best" for anything.
Acceptable, perhaps.

Trevor.

[Peter Larsen[_3_]]

"Trevor" skrev i en meddelelse
...


MDF is the best for creating acoustical energy in any room

What a stupid statement. VERY few musical instruments use MDF, (when was
the last time you saw a Piano made from MDF?) and even many good speaker
boxes use plywood rather than MDF.
In any case the sound from a speaker should come from the cone, not the
box, and apart from it's obvious drawbacks, concrete is far better than
MDF for speakers, so MDF can hardly be "best" for anything.

Acceptable, perhaps.

No, it can not be said like that. It is not a rigid material, so it becomes
very much a matter of how the box is braced. The "best material" is quite
likely to be a composite structure.

Example: Briggs "Loudspeakers" has as an example of a good construction
concept a corner bass reflex box built of bricks and mortar with a 12"
loudspeaker mounted on a plywood panel for ease of fitting. It is many ears
ago I borrowed the book from Duelund and read it, but I tend to think that
Briggs expressed preference for bricks and mortar over concrete.

Trevor

Kind regards

Peter Larsen

[David Platt]

MDF is the best for creating acoustical energy in any room

*sigh*

Yet another person posting a reply to a query that was ten years old!
(The original request was posted back in 2004).


What a stupid statement. VERY few musical instruments use MDF, (when was
the last time you saw a Piano made from MDF?) and even many good speaker
boxes use plywood rather than MDF.
In any case the sound from a speaker should come from the cone, not the
box, and apart from it's obvious drawbacks, concrete is far better than
MDF for speakers, so MDF can hardly be "best" for anything.

Acceptable, perhaps.

No, it can not be said like that. It is not a rigid material, so it becomes
very much a matter of how the box is braced. The "best material" is quite
likely to be a composite structure.

Example: Briggs "Loudspeakers" has as an example of a good construction
concept a corner bass reflex box built of bricks and mortar with a 12"
loudspeaker mounted on a plywood panel for ease of fitting. It is many ears
ago I borrowed the book from Duelund and read it, but I tend to think that
Briggs expressed preference for bricks and mortar over concrete.

I'd put it this way: MDF is one of the better compromise materials
that's easily available to the speaker home-builder. It's got good
dimensional stability, it's not difficult to work with homeowner-grade
tools, it glues and screws together easily, it's easy to paint or
veneer, it's strong enough to be routed for a speaker-flange recess,
and (unlike some common plywood) it won't have hidden voids or
loosely-glued sublayers which could buzz at embarrassing moments.
It's available in convenient-sized sheets from your local homebuilding
store... easier to find and afford than void-free Baltic birch
marine-grade plywood (another favorite).

On the down side: it wears out tool-steel saw blades quickly (use
carbide!), it's heavy, it's not all that rigid (you're right, good
bracing is very important), and it can crumble at the corners if
struck. And, of course, Stradivarius didn't ever mill any of his
better violins out of it :-)

I put together a big floor-standing system a couple of decades ago,
made mostly out of MDF - still very happy with the results. I did do
a bunch of internal bracing, made the front baffle out of two sheets
glued together (with some damping between the layers), and damped the
whole interior of the box with an elastomer paste. The resulting box
is quite acoustically "dead"... but man, is it ever *heavy*!

I was tempted to try a more exotic composite design... thin walls of
something stiff, with an interposing layer of a gridded plastic
stiffener (e.g. fluorescent-light diffuser) filled with fine sand for
damping. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor,
though... putting something like that together for a fairly complex
cabinet shape was beyond my skill-and-equipment set.

I do remember seeing a picture of Ray Dolby's listening room years
ago. Five huge exponential horn systems (three in front, and two in
back) built into the building structure, composed of masonry of some
sort (I can't recall whether it was brick-and-mortar, or cinderblock
filled with sand). I think he used a whole rack full of Flame Linear
400 amps to power the drivers.

I'm sure that was a system that you didn't *need* to turn up to 11!

[geoff]

On 25/09/2014 6:46 a.m., David Platt wrote:

On the down side: it wears out tool-steel saw blades quickly (use
carbide!), it's heavy, it's not all that rigid (you're right, good
bracing is very important), and it can crumble at the corners if
struck. And, of course, Stradivarius didn't ever mill any of his
better violins out of it :-)


That's what makes MDF *great* for speakers. You DON'T WANT your cabinet
resonating and radiating sound - you want it as insert as possible,
exactly the opposite of the case with violins, guitars, pianos, drums, etc.

Except for Danelectro of course....

geoff

[Trevor]

On 25/09/2014 5:41 PM, geoff wrote:
On 25/09/2014 6:46 a.m., David Platt wrote:

On the down side: it wears out tool-steel saw blades quickly (use
carbide!), it's heavy, it's not all that rigid (you're right, good
bracing is very important), and it can crumble at the corners if
struck. And, of course, Stradivarius didn't ever mill any of his
better violins out of it :-)


That's what makes MDF *great* for speakers. You DON'T WANT your cabinet
resonating and radiating sound - you want it as insert as possible,
exactly the opposite of the case with violins, guitars, pianos, drums, etc.

Right, which makes MDF a good *compromise* for speaker boxes only.
Hardly best in any single parameter however.

Trevor.

[geoff]

On 27/09/2014 6:32 p.m., Trevor wrote:
On 25/09/2014 5:41 PM, geoff wrote:
On 25/09/2014 6:46 a.m., David Platt wrote:

On the down side: it wears out tool-steel saw blades quickly (use
carbide!), it's heavy, it's not all that rigid (you're right, good
bracing is very important), and it can crumble at the corners if
struck. And, of course, Stradivarius didn't ever mill any of his
better violins out of it :-)


That's what makes MDF *great* for speakers. You DON'T WANT your cabinet
resonating and radiating sound - you want it as insert as possible,
exactly the opposite of the case with violins, guitars, pianos, drums,
etc.

Right, which makes MDF a good *compromise* for speaker boxes only.
Hardly best in any single parameter however.

Trevor.




I wasn't suggesting making speaker chassis, cones, or magnets out of MDF
.....

geoff