I'm a bit late to the party, but first off, thanks Colin for arranging the get together - it was great to see everyone, and a good time was had by all.
Special thanks to the catering dept. (Lynne) too - despite having other arrangements and being elsewhere she had prepared sustenance for the troops in advance, which more than hit the spot.
I rather enjoyed the way that further improvement was wrought from the coaxial driver variant of the OB.
Sometimes the glaringly obvious gets overlooked, and Nick identified one area that might be improved on immediately, and that was to reduce the effects of rear reflection on the coaxial mid/bass driver by simply pulling the baffles away from the rear wall.
Pulling them forward did indeed clean the mids up.
The next bit entailed improvising side panel extensions, to try and improve the bass response of the 15" drivers, and it's surprising what can be accomplished by positioning LP sleeves in strategic places.
Lots of music was played and enjoyed, and it was only when a piece with a Mark Tree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_tree in it, that thoughts turned to the upper end of the tweeter response.
Colin's Fostex supertweeters were pressed into action, and integrated into the speaker array.
Once levels had been properly sorted out there was much more music played, and enjoyed by all. I'm talking full CDs being played.
The strongest point of the coaxial driver is its ability to bring detail to things in a mix that have always been there, but are generally masked to a greater or lesser extent by other speakers.
This was brought right home with a couple of tracks from the Bob Marley & The Wailers "Legend" CD.
"No Woman, No Cry" is a live recording, and there is a heightened sense of being there in the audience.
You hear the murmuring of people around, and their singing before the singers on stage begin.
The female backing singers, “I Three” were only two on this recording, and their close part harmonies at the start were very apparent, and very ably rendered.
Another song, “One Love/People Get Ready” has a piano in the intro, but it’s so well defined that you can hear it to be a cheap upright of the type most of us probably grew up hearing, in pubs, schools and church halls, one of the wooden framed pianos that have that “not quite there”, slightly discordant and slightly woolly quality to them.
The thing is the coaxial drivers have, to my ears, a very special cohesion and capability to them.
Much more good music was played, usually full albums, from start to end.
When one of the supertweeters fell off the top of the baffle (well, they were only held on with BluTack), it, and its partner were removed, and things still gelled.
As has been said, the supertweeters were the icing on the cake, and the remainder of the listening that night was without them.
For me, the OBs in this guise sound excellent, and they just play music in a very capable, involving and rhythmical manner.
They go down deep, and reach up high, and nothing stands out as being glaringly wrong in between.
I like ‘em a lot, but there is a downside for me. They’re too bloody big to live with in a tiny terraced house.
I'll post up a bit later about the compression tweeter experiments later.