Grant, have you heard those JBL Synthesis PRO Monitors?
There are no JBL Synthesis Pro monitors. I think you're thinking of the JBL Pro Linear Spacial Reference 6332s though. These are actually the monitors Harman uses in its Reference Room - NOT Revels or JBL Synthesis!
They probably won't hit the extreme lows of the Salons (tuned for output not extension), or the extreme highs of the Soundscapes (titanium dome tweeter)
If you look way back in your PMs list when you were soliciting suggestions for speakers to look at, you'll notice these are one of the two speakers I suggested to you, which you proceeded to ignore
Grant, you can look at the Aperion VGT plots and see that at 15kHz. they drop down -7dB at 20kHz.
I went and took a look at it for ya. It is referenced to 2.83V and roughly sensitivity is 91db +/-2db from 200hz to 10khz. Below 200hz sound will be dominated by room/placement and above 10khz our ears become very poor.
There is a bit of a response bump @ 13-14khz
@ 16khz response is still at 91db which is the reference SPL.
@ 17khz, which is already
above the upper limit of my HEARING, SPL is about 88db. from the 91db above, this is your -3db point.
@ 20khz response is at 85db which yes, is 7db down. You'd have to be pretty pedantic to be concerned about this though - IMO.
4.) Low end, is lumpy/bumpy, not tight/fast and clean
Not really much I can say on this. So many factors at play (your room, drivers, tuning, your idea of what is tight/fast etc). It your experience, and it's fine, but definitely a ton of factors at play.
6.) Small enclosure at around only 2.4 cu. ft.
If I was on their Engr. team I would make the encl. muchO bigger (4 or 5 cu. ft.)
,
This one's abritrary nonsense. The enclosure size does not indicate bass performance; the mechanical coupling of driver to enclosure does. Some drivers couple best to small enclosures and work like trash in larger enclosures. That doesn't even factor in...
1) Aesthetic appeal ($)
2) Weight ($)
3) Bracing ($)
stiffen it up more close to bottom of cabinet, make the front baffle around 1.5" thick
And these will make audible improvements?
and get rid of the recessed front edges for grille, minimizing diffraction effects.
An owner of these speakers:
is concerned about diffraction ???????????? Sorry man, I gotta call you out on that one.
Drop in Dual 8" or 10" Woofs,
$$$$ not to mention aesthetic appeal which is definitely big on some people's list.
... the aperions already have signs of tweeter bloom with 5" mids and you're going the direction of less midrange dispersion? ehh..... you'd need to engineer a custom waveguide to get any decent directivity index matching, and with dome tweeters that's hellish to say the least because they don't load it with a planar wavefront necessary.
with either a RAAL or Titanium or Beryllium Tweeter,
Titanium vs Silk is a subjective choise as both are flawed and both have their proponents too.
...and the rest are far from $2000 speaker territory drivers. Beryllium Aircircs come in at $500/each and that's about the only tweeter that would satisfy your output and material requirements. A RAAL 70-10D mated to a 6.5" woofer would have some sub par polars. could work if someone is willing to absorb all reflections to turn their room into a dedicated listening room.
redesign the Xovers for 4th Order LR's.
A few issues with that...
- More money... parts cost would shoot up quickly
- possibly worse driver integration... seems to me part of the selling point of these speakers is their imaging and to do that in a 5 driver speaker is quite the feat. Will 4th order maintain this stereo image??
- worse power response especially if you make the aformented switch to 6" mids. To myself at least, the midrange is most important.
Yes 4th order has its advantages but rule of thumb #1 in design is to get the intended "job done" without going overboard.
So they have a lot of engr. work to be done in my humble opinion.
Consider you're an accomplished engineer yourself, I'm a bit dissapointed. Your solution is mostly to throw more money at the problem; some of which are arguably not problems.
I'm not saying the Aperions are my dream speakers or even my choice at $2000 - they weren't and they're not - but your solutions appear neither economical or even just... moot. For the speaker you propose to be profitable you're looking at around $6,000-10,000 even with made in china cabinets. That doesn't even factor in that no one spending that kind of money over the internet is looking for made in china cabinets (Revel can justify it because... it's not over the internet so who knows any better buying from a shop sans research???)... they want all custom IE Vapor / Salk which just isn't aperion's market. And with custom your labor costs skyrocket again, so now you're looking at 12 - 20k speakers.
And then you get to $20,000 speakers and you need to play the specsmanship game of hitting that 20hz mark. Yikes, so now what? You gotta throw away that lovely sensitivity / dynamics for deeper extension to hit 20hz, and oh crap now all of a sudden you're right back where you started at $1800.. without freedom from dynamic compression. What's the solution to get both? Easy, ULTRA Electromagnet 16" woofers with twice the BL.... focal's got some of those, they only cost you a second mortgage... and the rest of the speaker seems to fit your lovely criteria too.
Not tryin to argue here.. it's great that you think the Klipsch speakers are fantastic, but I consider them to be greatly flawed in their own way. It's all a matter of which design tradeoffs bother us most. There's no such thing as a speaker without design tradeoffs, even that ridiculous $180,000 Grande Utopia.
KEF blades won't fit your criteria.. only a 5" mid... same with KEF R900s.
Revel Salons are only 86db sensitive so even with all that heatsinking it's doubtful they'll match up to 98db sensitive speakers in thermal compression (a measurement you don't seem to be concerned with even though it seems most relevant to your goals)
I suppose Gene's favorite RBH T30LSE speakers fit many of your requirements... not all though. They'll do the dynamic range thing, they've got dual 10" woofers, four 6.5" woofers crossed your lovely 4th order to THREE 1" tweeters. Suffice to say some of us are a bit skeptical without some 60-75 degree polar response graphs of the multi driver layout of how these speakers will sound in an untreated room. Of course these aren't an internet direct $2000 speaker .................and they use your hated silk dome scanspeak 9500 tweeters.
I don't think a speaker that's -3db @ 17hz lacks highs in measurement. If it sounds that way to you, there's tons of factors at play... the room, your ears, your expectations (IE as a drummer you're a lot closer to the cymbals which affects your perception of balance - the mixer may have had a different perspective altogether... you might just be finding yourself hating the way records are mixed) etc.
