Wondering about Panel Comparisons

[LL21]

Makes sense...good luck!

 

[bwraudio]

Still my choice

Magneplanar Tympani IV,s (modified) with Martin Logan Summits and the unbelievable
TRW-17 rotary woofer.

 

[DonH50]

Great system, but unfortunately the structural work to build in the rotary sub is not an option for me, and I haven't space for the Tympani panels...

Where do you cross over from the Summits to the Tymp panels, and then to the sub? Are you using the woofer in the MLs?

I heard a lot of Tympani systems through the years and was a little surprised Magnepan dropped them. They do take a large room and that may be the main reason sales were low, and/or perhaps they decided the 20's did the job fine.

I wish they would put magnets on both sides of the 3.x series as well.

 

[bwraudio]

Velodyne SMS-1 and Eminent Rotary woofer controller

I use a Velodyne SMS-1 with different xover frequencies and slopes and chose
180 hz for the Magneplanars. The rotary sub controller is set at 25 hz, 12 db per octave.
A Mark Levinson 380S preamp is used to control the level of the Maggies (.1db increments)
driving a Audio Research D400 MKII power amp. The Summits can be used with or without
the woofers.

 

[karma]

HI All,
I don't mean to derail this thread but I have a question. The term "subwoofer" appears often in this thread. This is true for any thread devoted to panel speakers because panels typically don't do bass well at all. As you know, subs are all over the place in term of performance. And I don't know what people buy or expect. So here is my question:

What bass performance do you expect from your subwoofer? Then, do you get the performance you expect?

Sparky

 

[DonH50]

That sounds like a question more suited to its own thread, Sparky...

What I expect/desire:

1. Seamless blend with the mains (implies good amplitude and phase control at the crossover point, and ideally variable crossover slopes);
2. Frequency extension to 20 Hz or below (mine is down about 3 dB at 14 Hz, 6 dB at 10 Hz) and well above the crossover point (perhaps an octave) to allow for finite LPF slope;
3. Sufficient amplifier power to not limit the system (important since bass often requires much more power than mid/treble);
4. Impulse (time-domain) response matching or better than the mains (particularly with low-distortion speakers, which encompasses most panels but also quite a few conventional designs these days). For me this has for decades required a servo design to be practical for me; as an aside I find that "speed" is meaningless in a sub, but a sub that rings well after the initial impulse sounds "slower" and "muddy" to most listeners; and,
5. Reasonable size, weight, feature (control) set (mine includes gain, continuous phase, and a single-band PEQ).

FWIWFM - Don

 

[karma]

HI Don,
Yes, you are right. This question should be another thread. Sorry I disrupted the flow but folks were describing their subs.

Sparky

 

[DonH50]

No worries. I think sub choice and integration is more critical for planers than conventional speakers but that's just me. Nobody here "owns" a thread, we just start it and hand it off to the ether, err, Internet.