Thanks for that, very helpful. So would you say that the house sound for different designers comes more from the crossover or from driver selection?
My curiosity is more as a hobbyist trying to understand speaker design rather than a diyer.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
That's an interesting question and I'm not sure.
I think the answer lies largely in intangibles in the area we do not, or can not easily measure.
I know there are commercial outfits, that have a so called "house sound" but those are definite aberrations.
Despite that, even among the best of designs the designers experience and preferences come into to play. I think a lot of this is developed over time from the designers musical preferences.
I think this comes down to the power band response. You don't really get a sense of that from standard measurements.
I always aim for a flat response and wide dispersion and so do a lot of others. Yet, listeners and friends say they can tell my speakers. I think this has two reasons likely, although I really don't know.
The first is that I listen to classical music pretty much exclusively as a choice. Now a good deal of this program has its major power response in the midrange. Therefore I think I have instinctively devoted more power resources to that range than is usually the custom. So my designs do tend to have a higher power capability in that band. It is not emphasized but it can deliver the goods and not ran out of gas when the orchestra is in full cry and even a choir added on top. So listeners with experience tend to point to the realism and fullness of that power and in my design. I realized long ago the enormous power in that 80 to 1.5 KHz and even a bit above power band. As I said this has nothing to do with a frequency elevation just the power band response and that is something we hardly ever talk about.
The second issue, at least for me, is the bass balance and above all its quality. Live sounds are in general free of boom. For speakers this means that bass needs to sound non resonant. Unfortunately most forms of loudspeaker bass reproduction involves resonance to the point where bass is artificially bloated to varying degrees.
This is the issue of the bass tuning, and I have a strong preference for low Q designs. This approach leads to the rest of the spectrum being more transparent.
In the end I suspect a lot of this is not easily quantifiable currently, so I think designers are led by their experience and preferences. I know I am.
