Something stirs in the Undergrowth

[Paul Barker]

I've had no contact with James. I looked at mine today and saw the angle and position of the paper relative to the basket is a right booger. I may not try to fix mine at all. Too busy for now anyway. For the middle and top I'm quite pleased with the two drivers I now use, the field coil midrange and the saba green cone tweeter are pleasing me. Other people might want something beyond paper in the tweeter. I wouldn't turn down a plasma tweeter.

Might well transfer my package to OB and support the bass with the base helpers I put together with the 108's at Owston on plasterboard that time. Very nice combination.

[IslandPink]

Fun site :
http://www.hm-moreart.de/1.htm

[IslandPink]

Paul :
Just been trawling through Romy's knowledge tree and saw this , ( comments from Kerry Brown ) -

"The Titan is not a perfect speaker system ( you can tweak it endlessly ) but the performance/price ratio is very very good, compared to any other high performance speaker system ( I think the Edgar seismic subwoofer is the greatest bargain in audio ). Basically, Bruce is the only guy out there making/selling proper front-loading horn systems with high quality drivers... and the price is right ( regardless of ' high ' price quotes online etc. ).

I am a barbarian, of course, with unrefined taste, but my tweaked Edgarhorn system sounds very good ( to my uneducated ears/brain ) in my 17' x 15' room. I have a 10' semi-cathedral style ceiling which helps, but I think the horns would work even in small rooms with regular 8' flat ceilings.

The Titan mid bass/upper bass speakers are loaded by folded horns. I use Edgar's 100 Hz straight horns though, and I like them very much. They are too short and the throats are too big but they sound great.

Bruce says his folded upper bass horns work much better though - and he's usually right... he's almost always correct actually, in my experience. And he cares about doing things right... he's not laughing up his sleeve at suckers... like many " high end " designers/manufacturers. He's not a shark.

Kerry"
So Paul, specifically - the Titan you heard, was the upper bass horn a folded horn or a straight horn ? ( ie. could you see the driver or not ) . I always thought it was a straight & fairly short horn with a large throat and a 15" driver, but maybe he did more than one version.

[Paul Barker]

It was the folded one, big square box. No. boxy sound at all though, he said it was because of his bracing that it didn't make any sounds of it's own.

Romey talking so opositively about someone is very rare.

I still haven't heard anything that comes close to the edgarhorns.

The bass of the Westminster Cathedral Organ from when I photographed a wedding there, was the best artificial bass I ever heard in my life. The Edgar bass horn was as good. Before we got into edgars room in the rooms around I couldn't concentrate beacuse I heard this amaising bass from somewhere.

The humam voice was like the person was imaged in front and the biggest impression was that all other speakers are not fast enough. It was as if you need real time reproduction to get better than what we have. The attack of compression horns done right is the very best of all systems I have heard. The amt's are not the same and imho not as good, and not integrating well with other speakers essential because of their limited bandwidth.

I don't know how to do it myself though.

I can make a good OB. That's good enough for me.

[IslandPink]

Ooh, very very interesting Paul thanks . I always thought it was the normal sort of straight bass unit I'd seen on many pics, but if it's a folded horn that adds more certainty to me building a folded horn with the FE208Ez some time later this year ( as a prototype at least ) . The obvious problem with these sort of horns is that the bass driver is acoustically set back by up to a meter from the midrange driver ( if you unfold the horn ) . This seems like a big problem on paper but from all accounts the Living Voice Vox Olympian sounds Ace ( similar sort of upper bass horn ) and now your confirmation that Bruce's Titan has a folded horn helps a lot.
I was impressed to see Troels Gravensen listened to the V.O.'s at Munich and was surprised to find the vocals, particularly male vocals sounded really good - first time for a multi-horn system he'd heard that.

The advantage of the folded horn is you can have a longer line and get more easily below 100Hz without blocking the view of the mid-horn or taking up room space. Also the longer slow-opening horns favour light-coned drivers with Fs around 40Hz , like the FE208Ez. The treble peaks & dips can be 'lost' in the horn, especially with a phase plug just in front of the driver ( which I believe is used in the LV horns for the Vitavox driver ) .

Nice

[IslandPink]

Romy talking so positively about someone is very rare.

Well actually that was from Kerry Brown, but true, Romy has been quite approving of Bruce and his taste and knowledge of horns elsewhere.
He was somewhat dismissive of Living Voice#'s efforts until 2013 or 2014 when he came over to the UK and visited Definitvie Audio and listened and spoke to Kevin Scott - now he's a fan.

[IslandPink]

Currently thinking I might have to buy a pair of 288C compression drivers ( are in the long-term plan - swap-out the 288H's, the C's are easier to integrate with a ribbon ) in the near future before the pound drops any more. I'm already out of pocket by about £90 compared to a couple of weeks ago.

Other 'stuff' going on :
Test of FE208Ez on 120Hz tractrix horn ( listening now ) to check low-level performance for a later horn application. Pretty good so far .
Watch out for a forthcoming 'Horn Breadboard' ( I have identified a 80cmx60cm piece of 25mm MDF ) .

[IslandPink]

Couldn't quite ( yet ) decide whether the FE208Ez is better than the 8PE21 on the old 122Hz tractrix horn . More listening today/tomorrow required. Neither is properly loaded by that horn, but there were some promising tones coming out of the FE208Ez , and it works at low listening levels .

Meanwhile the Horn Breadboard ( aka 'JunkHorn' ) is starting.
The first stage was 'operation thankless task' ,shown below, which was plugging a hole in the big 25mm MDF baffle with another circular plug that came from a later project. There's a first time for everything I suppose. That required the router hole-cutter to be modified , then a larger hole cut around the existing one, with the aid of a temporary adaptor plate ( shown in situ ) to provide the centre-point for the router. Having done that and fettled the circle-piece to get it in the hole, I used some slow-setting epoxy to fix it in place. That's nearly cured now.
In the meantime ( yesterday ) I bought a piece of chipboard worktop off-cut about 5' long and had it trimmed to 38cm wide ( exactly ) at the wood-shop to provide one of the various pieces I'll need to make up the hon profile. There's plenty of 18mm birch and a few pieces of 25mm birch to provide all the other sections.

[Cressy Snr]

Sounds promising.

[andrew Ivimey]

I have a very soft spot for the 208. Having sold t'other Andrew a pair I did not sleep easily. I bought another pair and have never regretted the move. Alone in a good cabinet ( back loaded horn) they are magnificently effective. And playing with the bass end or the top splendour with many and diverse units it's all really splendid.

[IslandPink]

How did you use it, Andrew ?
It's an interesting driver and I haven't got the best out of it yet. In OB it has a troublesome rising response all the way from 500Hz to 3.5kHz but once you start using it in a horn, either BLH or front-horn the game changes. It certainly does Jaco's bass superbly when horn-loaded , as I found at Owston. Low Rms is very nice if you can work around the resulting problems.

[IslandPink]

Aaarg !! - I'm going to overshoot on the first corner.
Think I might have to go all Hyperbolic ...

[IslandPink]

Bit of a mind-bender this one ...

[jack]

You've stolen our rug!

[IslandPink]

Yes, & bad news - it's having a bit of a hard time here with all the speaker DIY !