Zero Distortion: Leif's System with TAD 4003 based dual FLH

[Tango]

mine or yours ?

Yours of course .

 

[christensenleif@msn.com]

todays recommendation!!!!!!!!

 

[awsmone]

My Cessaro has TAD drivers. I do not get an expanded sound like some diy horns and conventional speakers I heard. On Keith Jarrett Koen Concert, I heard from quite a few systems the piano is almost like you put your head in the housing. With TADs sometime I feel the sound is even narrow. Some time it goes beyond the walls without the feeling of zoom in. You have loads of experience on different drivers and horn types. Is this scaling that you find not blown out of proportion more a trait of TAD or how the horn was designed?

Tango Koln concert recording not good for piano sound as the piano used was a disaster, Jarrett nearly didn’t perform it was so bad ....https://www.npr.org/transcripts/719557642

 

[petavgeris]

Thank you for this fantastic report, Kedar! Congratulations to you for having the interest, determination and perseverance to drill down to the bottom of all of these questions and alternatives and figure it all out from the outside!

I also like the way you described the "Yoda" aspects of these true experts who experimented and educated themselves and honed their knowledge for years to arrive at the music reproduction systems and implementations they now enjoy.

1) Why so you feel open baffle does not sound as good as FLH? Couldn't you add drivers to the open baffle (three or even four 15" drivers) to match the sonic weight of dual FLH?

2) Which commercially available, current production speaker do you feel most closely duplicates (even if it does so with a totally different design or different parts and pieces and different implementation) the sound you like from Leif's DIY system?

3) Are TAD 4003s a good investment?

Hello from Athens.
I have several weeks, perhaps months to visit the forum. I would like to put a couple of comments here, related to my experience. You have posed nice questions.

1. Open baffle speakers are *completely* different than cabinet-enclosure speakers. The speakers that are proposed for sealed enclosures and open baffles have completely different characteristics than speakers proposed for vented boxes. It has to do with the requirements and design philosophy/characteristics. In order to have adequate bass response 100 Hz is a vary conservative limit, would dare to write 120Hz is the practical limit. But again some things are completely different (and not good of course). OB speakers make use of very loose suspension characteristics, high Qts, high Mms and low Fs. This makes the speakers have quite big Xmax and the sound quality really suffers. Each and every aspect of reproduction is worse and you sacrifice almost everything in order to get rid of the box. While this might seem as a good thing because the boxes have high impact of their own. it is not true. There existed enclosures with amazing sound quality and lack of boxiness, while our experience of modern loudspeakers seems to be pretty bad. Front Loaded Horn speakers are designed with a totally different perspective for sound reproduction. Low to very low Mms, very high Flux density of the magnetic system, very high sensitivity, low to very low Qts and higher Fs. They sound fast, well damped, speedy, incredibly dynamic, able to reproduce nuances of music and harmonic complexity that is really mind-blowing. You sacrifice something out of very low freq reproduction but all the rest is much better.

2. IMHO there exists no speaker currently available (with only one exception) that is able to reproduce music like vintage gear. Live, dynamic, fresh, amazingly fast, coherent and calm, natural at the same time. I have listened to *ALL* the commercially available speakers at various shows or privately, and nothing comes close, even at a distance, to old Altec designs (with one exception). You must go the DIY way.

3. TADs are by all means a good investment, as everything else on earth might well be. A good investment retains its value as soon as there exist several potential buyers that keep offering (ridiculous amounts of) money. This is not related to their performance but their cult status and the willingness of potential buyers to throw tons of money on the table. So, if you consider the possibility of buying a TAD 4003 as a viable option for you, considering this approach as an investment for the future, they seem to be safe, at least for the moment. However, in terms of sound quality, well, things are quite different. They surely don't belong to the elite club of 3-4" compression drivers. Far from it. They don't sound bad but please don't compare them to the elite of field coil compression drivers. You won't need more than 3-5 seconds to break in tears if you ever listen to Altec 287s and WE594As. Even a decent 288B/C transformed to field coil unit sounds more resolving/neutral/magical than any of the TAD drivers.

I have listened to various videos of this nice guy n Norway. To my standards (and with the danger of being wrong - but chances are rather slim) the performance of this system is very highly exaggerated. It does not do justice to music as it should do, considering the caliber of the components that the system comprises of. Liquidity, calmness of slow passages, spatial information and timing are at least mediocre. To be honest, I have listened not even a single video of this system, revealing what we all are searching for. It is not long ago when a dear friend sent me a video of this system on Facebook, along with his proposal to listen to it. I forgot to do so because I had already listened to so many videos of this system. He was insisting a lot, so I tried. This time the performance was so dramatically different. It was not only better but dramatically better from what it was in the past. The single component that he upgraded was his phono cartridge. He upgraded to a field coil cartridge named DaVa. It was the only time when I listened with interest to this system, as the improvement in the performance was stunning. I do not know the manufacturer but I need to pass him my most sincere congratulations for his creation, just in case he reads this thread. Needless to mention that my friend bought the cartridge in no time. I am not a believer of the necessity to go to crazy solutions regarding the audio components but if someone wants to go to the end of the route, he definitely needs to start from the loudspeakers. The best I have listened to, so far, among all commercially released products, and by a big big margin, without the slightest hesitation of being wrong, is my friend's Pnoe loudspeakers equipped with the crazy and out-of-this-world flagship AER drivers. I have listened numerous times to this loudspeaker and for sure i consider that it is one of the very best 3-5 attempts that have been done so far, to reach the upper echelon of loudspeaker manufacturing. Enjoying music at his place through the big Pnoes is a revelation, an experience that you will never forget.

Just my two cents...

 

[petavgeris]

Regarding FLH, it is a very good solution to have really good low to high mid range performance. But for best performance you do not need FLH for woofers. Just stick to the classic solution, 2x 18" field coil woofers, paired with WE555 mounted on WE13a FL horns and couple with WE597a tweeters. Only one capacitor in the signal path, 2 power amps and you've got the ticket to heaven

 

[bonzo75]

The WE mirrophonic was a 4 woofer FLH and probably their best. The crossover can be made with or without capacitor for such FLHs too

 

[petavgeris]

The WE mirrophonic was a 4 woofer FLH and probably their best. The crossover can be made with or without capacitor for such FLHs too

Hello!
To my knowledge, Mirrophonic was built with 2x TA-4181As.
This is justified by numerous pictures around...

 

[bonzo75]

Sorry what do you think I am referring to by FLH? Are you saying mirrophonic is not a FLH

 

[bonzo75]

Hello!
To my knowledge, Mirrophonic was built with 2x TA-4181As.
This is justified by numerous pictures around...
View attachment 75989

This Link shows that mirrophonic model 2 is two woofer per channel and model 3 is 4 woofer per channel

404 Not Found