Looking at Tekton Double impacts SE. Anybody have any experience with them?

[Swerd]

I agree the Joseph's were out of budget for me too. The ones I auditioned was the RM 25 and RM 33. They were both gorgeous, spent quite a bit of time listening. The 25 was closest to my budget but did not extend like the 3.6. The 33 was a good fit and met almost every criteria I had, but there was no way I could afford them.

Interesting that you liked them. The Joseph Audio speaker that caught my interest was the Perspective. It may be somewhat similar to the RM33 (no longer available) you had liked. It uses two Seas Excel W16 mid woofers plus a Seas Excel T25 Millennium tweeter, and cost (a few years ago) more than $12k per pair. I liked what I heard, but, as you said, no way could I afford them.

I mentioned to Dennis Murphy how much I liked it, and a few years later Salk developed the Veracity ST speaker. It has the same two mid woofers as the Perspective, but uses a RAAL ribbon tweeter in a mass-loaded transmission line cabinet (bass down to 34 Hz). It costs much less than half the price of the Perspective, including shipping and premium ropey cherry veneer. Eventually, I couldn't resist it and bought them, replacing a pair of Salk SongTowers I had for 9 years. That's an example of how buying internet direct from a small manufacturer can cost significantly less than speakers sold through a distributor/dealer network.

 

[Ridire Fáin]

Interesting that you liked them. The Joseph Audio speaker that caught my interest was the Perspective. It may be somewhat similar to the RM33 (no longer available) you had liked. It uses two Seas Excel W16 mid woofers plus a Seas Excel T25 Millennium tweeter, and cost (a few years ago) more than $12k per pair. I liked it when I heard it, but, as you said, no way could I afford that.

I mentioned to Dennis Murphy how much I liked it, and a few years later Salk developed the Veracity ST speaker. It has the same two mid woofers as the Perspective, but uses a RAAL ribbon tweeter in a mass-loaded transmission line cabinet (bass down to 34 Hz). It costs much less than half the price of the Perspective, including shipping and premium ropey cherry veneer. Eventually, I couldn't resist it and bought it. That's an example of how buying internet direct from a small manufacturer can cost significantly less than speakers sold through a distributer/dealer network.

Interesting that you liked them. The Joseph Audio speaker that caught my interest was the Perspective.

This is going to sound really dumb. But there is not much in Hi End audio I do not like. IMHO most reputable manufactures offer an enjoyable product. With a constrained budget what I end up with is due to a series of tradeoffs that I can live with versus this is my most favorite speaker of all time or oh good grief I absolutely hate those. Another speaker, I spent a lot of time with in the day, was the Meadowlark Audio Blue Heron. If I had the scratch back then those would be in my system. Just loved everything about them but the company folded and went off the grid. I recently saw they are starting up again http://meadowlarksings.com/index.htm but clearly are just getting their feet wet. I am not sure I would consider the redesigns they are offering today.

 

[Kvn_Walker]

Pretty low WAF at 200+ pounds per speaker, but if you were single, the RBH modular towers AH just reviewed would probably hit your sweet spot nicely:

https://www.audioholics.com/tower-speaker-reviews/rbh-svtr-tower-reference-speaker-review

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Yes. I don't know the details from a true speaker designer perspective, though I did read the patent. Nothing much there that I could really have an A-ha moment with. I do know the center tweeter is The tweeter, and the 6 around are the Midrange array... with the 6-tweeter array set to run much fuller range than normal, with the idea being that the much lighter vibrating mass of the tweeter will outperform any other Mid-range cone in duplicating the sound and harmonics of the source instruments/voices/etc. Then depending on the speaker, he uses both "Mid-Bass" drivers and woofers. My general understanding is that for all drivers, Eric prefers very lightweight cones for the quickness of their response and similarity to the "vibrating mass" of the source.

Hah, so I have a super low tolerance for nonsense. Eric's designs are built on true scientific principles. His logic, listed on the website, is nonsense. The lower mass of the tweeters operating that low does nothing to improve the response that can't be measured. Either a speaker reproduces those tones accurately or it doesn't. There is no magic there. So you can measure its linearity, and if it's linear, great.

My speakers use a 12" pro woofer operating up to ~1khz and are perfectly linear there. The high mass of a 12" woofer relative to the low mass of the CD diaphragm is of no consequence here.

I like Tekton's designs quite a bit, but a lot of the stuff on his speakers strikes me as inaccurate at best. I don't know why Eric has that there, I sometimes question if he really believes that. If he or someone else can defend those claims in a reasonable way, I'd love to hear it. It makes no sense to me. I believe that @shadyJ holds a similar view to me on this particular matter.

 

[ryanosaur]

Hah, so I have a super low tolerance for nonsense. Eric's designs are built on true scientific principles. His logic, listed on the website, is nonsense. The lower mass of the tweeters operating that low does nothing to improve the response that can't be measured. Either a speaker reproduces those tones accurately or it doesn't. There is no magic there. So you can measure its linearity, and if it's linear, great.

My speakers use a 12" pro woofer operating up to ~1khz and are perfectly linear there. The high mass of a 12" woofer relative to the low mass of the CD diaphragm is of no consequence here.

I like Tekton's designs quite a bit, but a lot of the stuff on his speakers strikes me as inaccurate at best. I don't know why Eric has that there, I sometimes question if he really believes that. If he or someone else can defend those claims in a reasonable way, I'd love to hear it. It makes no sense to me. I believe that @shadyJ holds a similar view to me on this particular matter.

And you pretty much just summed up my reasoning for not gambling on this. Especially after hearing the Phil-3s! Ya it would be totally bad@ss to have the Double Impacts in front of me... but... I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
I'm actually spending a little more now than I would've with Tekton. But the quality of what I'm going to be getting in the BMRs and, when they show up in 5 mos, the 3's is indisputable.
I truly do hope the Tektons are everything they are cracked up to be, and I hope someday, sooner than later, we can see some true, accurate, third party testing on them that lays it all to rest. And maybe a website edit to tone down the marketing bluster.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

And you pretty much just summed up my reasoning for not gambling on this. Especially after hearing the Phil-3s! Ya it would be totally bad@ss to have the Double Impacts in front of me... but... I just couldn't bring myself to do it.
I'm actually spending a little more now than I would've with Tekton. But the quality of what I'm going to be getting in the BMRs and, when they show up in 5 mos, the 3's is indisputable.
I truly do hope the Tektons are everything they are cracked up to be, and I hope someday, sooner than later, we can see some true, accurate, third party testing on them that lays it all to rest. And maybe a website edit to tone down the marketing bluster.

The stereophile article I linked included accurate third party testing of the tweeter array. I have no reason to believe this isn’t representative of the larger models measured performance.


That’s impressively flat


Note how smoothly and nicely the response rolls off to the sides. That is excellent controlled dispersion behavior with no signs of directivity mismatch between drivers. Near textbook perfect. I would prefer a somewhat higher DI and somewhat more gradual and consistent rolloff above 15khz, but it’s academic. It’s of little consequence to the final sound.

 

[Danzilla31]

The stereophile article I linked included accurate third party testing of the tweeter array. I have no reason to believe this isn’t representative of the larger models measured performance.

View attachment 27130
That’s impressively flat

View attachment 27131
Note how smoothly and nicely the response rolls off to the sides. That is excellent controlled dispersion behavior with no signs of directivity mismatch between drivers. Near textbook perfect. I would prefer a somewhat higher DI and somewhat more gradual and consistent rolloff above 15khz, but it’s academic. It’s of little consequence to the final sound.

Yeah from some of the 3rd party reviews they measure pretty well but I heard they sound great on axis but if your not in the sweet spot the off axis falls off a quiet a bit. Do you know anything about this have you heard anything yeah or nay on there off axis response?

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Yeah from some of the 3rd party reviews they measure pretty well but I heard they sound great on axis but if your not in the sweet spot the off axis falls off a quiet a bit. Do you know anything about this have you heard anything yeah or nay on there off axis response?

Well you can see the measurements for yourself. They don’t fall off dramatically off axis other than above about 15khz. Most speakers do that. They aren’t as wide dispersion as some.

If a speaker should have very wide dispersion (a DI of 0-2dB) or narrower controlled dispersion (6-9dB) is hotly debated. People like Earl Geddes and Floyd Toole will argue that a raised DI is a good thing. Toole has been less specific about this criteria, Geddes has made no such uncertainty in his preference. The argument for it is that it actually provides a wider sweetspot while helping reduce unnecessarily strong sidewall reflections. The Tektons have a somewhat raised DI, looks to be about 4-6dB, and as such, some might find that a problem.

However, as I said, I actually think those people are nuts. I think it provides a wider sweet spot in practice. That is because speakers with controlled dispersion like this can be toed in and you can take advantage of time intensity trading. This means that because the speakers response is reduced as you move off axis, then if positioned correctly, as you move to the side, the speakers automatically rebalance themselves such that the speaker closer to you is quieter. The tonal balance doesn’t change on a good CD speaker. Wide dispersion speakers can’t do this.
http://www.libinst.com/PublicArticles/Setup of WG Speakers.pdf

Now as for my own experience with these speakers, it was far too limited. I wasn’t paying enough attention to the tonal shift with listening position. I was in the room while they were finishing setup and it would have been rude to overstay my welcome. Based on those measurements and the limited time I had, I don’t think they fall apart off axis. I think that might be in people’s heads.

 

[Swerd]

Those Stereophile measurements of the Tekton Impact Monitors do look good. I had to go back to the article to remind myself that these MTMs are small compared to other 2-way Tekton floor standing speakers with two woofers, such as the Pendragon or EnzoXL. The Impact Monitors has 6½" mid woofers, and the Pendragon or EnzoXL have 10" woofers.

I would expect good off-axis dispersion of an MTM with 6½" mid woofers, and that's what the Stereophile graph shows. But in Tekton towers with 10" instead of 6½" woofers there are audible off-axis losses in the mid range.

 

[ryanosaur]

@Matthew J Poes ,
Please don’t misunderstand, I wanted to be a Tekton customer, almost too much. I had dates asked off of work so I could fly to SLC, even. I was looking at plane tickets when Dennis said he had a guy that would let me hear his Phil 3s. The rest is history.
That stereophile review was one of the many glowing reviews I read. Don’t think I saw a negative one.
I dig what he’s working towards and hope in 2 or 5 years I have the option to try again! It’s only a matter of time before the Lady realizes what she’s missing out on and asks me to put a system in the greatroom!

 

[shadyJ]

Those Stereophile measurements of the Tekton Impact Monitors do look good. I had to go back to the article to remind myself that these MTMs are small compared to other 2-way Tekton floor standing speakers with two woofers, such as the Pendragon or EnzoXL. The Impact Monitors has 6½" mid woofers, and the Pendragon or EnzoXL have 10" woofers.

I would expect good off-axis dispersion of an MTM with 6½" mid woofers, and that's what the Stereophile graph shows. But in Tekton towers with 10" instead of 6½" woofers there are audible off-axis losses in the mid range.

The real surprise here is the smoothness of the highs and also the smooth rolloff of the highs. It simply performs well for a crazy tweeter grid where half the tweeters in the external tweeter ring are wired in reverse polarity (from what I remember reading, this is how the bessel array on the Tektons are wired). The bessel array can help to control directivity. I did spend a little bit listening to these things, they did sound good from what little I heard of them from them.

 

[shadyJ]

One thing I will just elucidate here is what Matthew Poes means by 'DI' which I am guessing isn't an acronym that everyone knows. It stands for 'Directivity Index' and it is the measure of how all output emanating from the speaker compares to the sound coming from the area dead ahead of it. In Audioholics graphs, it is the difference between the 'Sound Power' curve and the 'Listening Window' curve. Floyd Toole talks about it a little bit in this article. Basically what it signifies is how much the off-axis response resembles the on-axis response. It's generally a good idea to have a flat directivity index because if the off-axis response differs from the on-axis, the speaker is going to have an inaccurate sound character, and equalization can not do much to save the sound because it isn't all that predictable what the in-room response will look like afterward. Room Correction Equalizers such as Audyssey can't help a speaker with an erratic directivity index.

Much of what we hear in-room is from the off-axis response of the speaker because much of what we hear in room is from acoustic reflections of the speaker, not sound directly from the speaker to our ears. So a speaker with an off-axis sound character that does not resemble its on-axis sound character can not really be predictably adjusted because these two responses don't correlate well.

If a speaker has a high directivity index, that means that it is highly directional. A very narrow dispersion speaker would have this property, such as a very narrow horn-loaded speaker or a planar speaker. A speaker with low directivity has a wide dispersion pattern. Small speakers tend to have a wide dispersion. A true omnipolar speaker would be have a zero level directivity index all long the frequency response. Most speaker's directivity indexes vary along their frequency response. For example, this speaker:

The lower dotted black line is the directivity index that we are talking about here. You can see from its directivity index that it has a fairly wide dispersion up to 5 kHz or so, and then it begins to narrow. At 20 kHz, it is beaming pretty significantly, so you would have to be close to its direct axis in order to hear 20 kHz output at all from this speaker (btw, very few of us can still hear 20 kHz, so that is not a big deal). We can see this behavior more explicitly in the polar response graph:

We see a nice, smooth, even wide dispersion that begins to narrow above 5 kHz. To hear 20 kHz on this speaker, you would need to be within 20 degrees of its direct axis (assuming you could hear that high in the first place). Many conventional speakers act like this: low directivity in bass, where the speaker is almost omnipolar, wide dispersion in mids, and tightening dispersion in the highs. That isn't a perfect respones but it isn't a bad response either. Most people would quite like this speaker.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Those Stereophile measurements of the Tekton Impact Monitors do look good. I had to go back to the article to remind myself that these MTMs are small compared to other 2-way Tekton floor standing speakers with two woofers, such as the Pendragon or EnzoXL. The Impact Monitors has 6½" mid woofers, and the Pendragon or EnzoXL have 10" woofers.

I would expect good off-axis dispersion of an MTM with 6½" mid woofers, and that's what the Stereophile graph shows. But in Tekton towers with 10" instead of 6½" woofers there are audible off-axis losses in the mid range.

That could be. I haven’t heard those.

https://www.tektondesign.com/double-impact-se.html
This uses 6” midbass drivers. It’s response should be about identical to that or the monitor but with greater bass and higher sensitivity.

A speaker that shows serious directivity mismatch with band wastebanding of the response is really more a design problem. A 10” woofer doesn’t begin to become directional until around 1500hz or so. The new tweeter array he uses is crossed at 1khz or below depending on the model. As such, even with a 10” woofer as the midrange, this particular array should show the same response pattern.

On the other hand, few If any 1” dome tweeters can be crossed that low, and an array of 3 like used on some of his classic models still can’t reallt play that low. As such, I would imagine you might see wastebanding due to the higher crossover point that is necessary.

Which is all to say, I suspect this particular set of designs behaves better than the Pendragon and Enzo models. I would assume any model using the same basic drivers would measure much like the one stereophile measured.

One of my colleagues just did a listening test of these for our site:
https://www.tektondesign.com/the-perfect-set.html and while he likes them, he actually felt the Emotiva T2’s they had for comparison sounded better. I can’t speak to why or what they found. I have t seen measurements from that session or any detailed notes.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

One thing I will just elucidate here is what Matthew Poes means by 'DI' which I am guessing isn't an acronym that everyone knows. It stands for 'Directivity Index' and it is the measure of how all output emanating from the speaker compares to the sound coming from the area dead ahead of it. In Audioholics graphs, it is the difference between the 'Sound Power' curve and the 'Listening Window' curve. Floyd Toole talks about it a little bit in this article. Basically what it signifies is how much the off-axis response resembles the on-axis response. It's generally a good idea to have a flat directivity index because if the off-axis response differs from the on-axis, the speaker is going to have an inaccurate sound character, and equalization can not do much to save the sound because it isn't all that predictable what the in-room response will look like afterward. Room Correction Equalizers such as Audyssey can't help a speaker with an erratic directivity index.

Much of what we hear in-room is from the off-axis response of the speaker because much of what we hear in room is from acoustic reflections of the speaker, not sound directly from the speaker to our ears. So a speaker with an off-axis sound character that does not resemble its on-axis sound character can not really be predictably adjusted because these two responses don't correlate well.

If a speaker has a high directivity index, that means that it is highly directional. A very narrow dispersion speaker would have this property, such as a very narrow horn-loaded speaker or a planar speaker. A speaker with low directivity has a wide dispersion pattern. Small speakers tend to have a wide dispersion. A true omnipolar speaker would be have a zero level directivity index all long the frequency response. Most speaker's directivity indexes vary along their frequency response. For example, this speaker:

The lower dotted black line is the directivity index that we are talking about here. You can see from its directivity index that it has a fairly wide dispersion up to 5 kHz or so, and then it begins to narrow. At 20 kHz, it is beaming pretty significantly, so you would have to be close to its direct axis in order to hear 20 kHz output at all from this speaker (btw, very few of us can still hear 20 kHz, so that is not a big deal). We can see this behavior more explicitly in the polar response graph:

We see a nice, smooth, even wide dispersion that begins to narrow above 5 kHz. To hear 20 kHz on this speaker, you would need to be within 20 degrees of its direct axis (assuming you could hear that high in the first place). Many conventional speakers act like this: low directivity in bass, where the speaker is almost omnipolar, wide dispersion in mids, and tightening dispersion in the highs. That isn't a perfect respones but it isn't a bad response either. Most people would quite like this speaker.

Just a quick point. What James said is right, but DI can also be restricted and the reference axis can be shifted. If a speakers preferred listening axis is not 0 degrees, then the DI is the ratio of all other sound radiation relative to that listening axis. The DI is also sometimes restricted over a certain range such as the frontal hemisphere. As long as you state this in your measurements it’s all ok.

When I refer to a preferred DI, I am most interested in the DI relative to the listening axis and restricted to the frontal hemisphere if it’s a normal monopole speaker.

 

[Matthew J Poes]

Ok one more point to add James mentioned the fact that much of what we hear in a room is the room. The sound from the speaker reflecting off the walls impacts what we hear. Our brain actually expects this. And if it was a live instrument then that instrument would reflect around the room to create the reverb and spaciousness we hear. How we know that instrument is in a room rather than outside. However our brain gets tripped up if the reflections differ substantially in tonal balance from the direct sound. The instrument in the room no longer sounds natural (because it’s not). This is why a speaker with a flat DI is so nice.

Adding acoustic treatments to first reflection points can be a bad thing for this same reason. If the absorber actually absorbed all of the sound, then it would be akin to listening in an anechoic chamber. However they don’t, quite a bit of sound still reflects off (or through) those panels. They don’t absorb evenly and so what comes out is a corrupted first reflection and that can color the sound as well. This is why Toole doesn’t like absorbers on the first reflection points.

Having said that, just because something measures bad or was found in DBT’s to be less preferred doesn’t mean it is bad. Lots of people love the sound of speakers with an uneven DI and prefer absorbers at the first reflection point. I have removable ones because sometimes I prefer the sound. Especially with surround music where those spacial cues are recreated through the surround speakers.

 

[bboro30]

I have a pair of 3's in midnight blue dye on Curly Maple, along with BMR's in the same finish, arriving from Jim fairly shortly. No--they're not yours. But I will send you pics. I'm not sure whether that will make the wait more or less painful.

Could you please post those pics somewhere public or email them to me? I would love to see them!

 

[charmerci]

RidireFain,

Frank Van Alstine has Philharmonic and Salk speakers that you can listen to just south of Minneapolis.
www.avahifi.com