Something Old, Something… New From Lowther

[ryanosaur]

Dunno how pertinent this is to conversations about cutting edge, but intriguing nonetheless.

Classic British Loudspeaker Manufacturer Launches First New Model In 30 Years — Forbes

Classic British loudspeaker manufacturer Lowther Loudspeakers is launching its first new design In 30 years with the Almira.

apple.news

(Article from Forbes)

Based on a single folded 1/4-wave Voigt pipe (presumably 0 CSA at the closed end, flaring to an open terminus at the bottom).

The Lowther Almira

The Almira preserves the clarity and scale of bigger Lowther speaker cabinets but in a much more compact footprint.

www.lowtherloudspeakers.com

 

[Trell]

I'd rather get a pair of Genelec 8361 monitors and a 7380 subwoofer for a little less money, but that won't be as nice looking though, especially the subwoofer.

 

[ryanosaur]

I'd rather get a pair of Genelec 8361 monitors and a 7380 subwoofer for a little less money, but that won't be as nice looking though, especially the subwoofer.

Right?
I just thought it was interesting.
More to the point, they seem to willfully eschew any sort of innovation... Unless adding a super tweeter to a Full Range Driver counts.
*facepalm
*shrugs

 

[Trell]

I’ve the Genelec 7360 subwoofer in my home office safely tucked in a corner underneath my desk out of sight. It’s very solid and robust but ugly.

 

[Verdinut]

I'd rather get a pair of Genelec 8361 monitors and a 7380 subwoofer for a little less money, but that won't be as nice looking though, especially the subwoofer.

I'm sure you would get a better low frequency response with any good subwoofer than with a modest size horn loaded speaker. I doubt that Lowther product will produce a decent response below 30 Hertz.

 

[lovinthehd]

TLS there getting a first hand listen?

 

[Trell]

I'm sure you would get a better low frequency response with any good subwoofer than with a horn loaded speaker. I doubt that Lowther product will produce a decent response below 30 Hertz.

The 8361 are quite powerful for “small” monitors in upper bass/low mids, and can be placed horizontally for center speaker duties. I’ve considered them but they are quite expensive and a subwoofer would be needed for HT.

Genelec 8361A – 3-Wege-Studiomonitor mit voll-koaxialer Treiberanordnung im Test

So gar nicht bescheiden beschreibt man bei Genelec das neue Modell 8361A mit folgenden Worten: »The 8361A offers the most advanced acoustic performance of any studio monitor on the planet.« Ob das nicht doch etwas hoch gegriffen ist, sei einmal dahingestellt. Die 8361A ist auf jeden Fall der...

www.soundandrecording.de

8361A SAM™ Studio Monitor - Genelec.com

The flagship of The Ones range, the 8361A offers the most advanced acoustic performance of any studio monitor on the planet.

www.genelec.com

 

[mtrycrafts]

What? No bi wire connectors? What is this world coming to at 12K pounds?

 

[TLS Guy]

This offering does not sound promising.

This unit is a folded quarter wave pipe and NOT a horn.

Paul Voight caused this confusion back in the thirties. He designed the corner horn speaker which is a horn. He also proposed the quarter wave tapered pipe and called it a horn which it was not, and is not. It is a pipe. His proposal was a tapered undamped pipe, with the driver positioned to markedly reduce the odd harmonics. As far as I know, he never produced one.

The design was described in Gilbert Briggs book on loudspeakers in the fifties, and I still have my copy. I built the design age 7.

Decca produced a folded version for the GE 8" aluminum coned speaker around that time, and added to the confusion by calling it the "Decca corner horn."
The engineer was Ralph West.
In the stereo era I built a pair using the 4" JW metal cone speakers. Funnily enough I added an STC super tweeter!

Now these are pipes and NOT horns. However, they are the root design of the TL speakers, but with the taper reversed and the pipe critically damped.

Now to return to this tapered pipe, or TQWAT, as they are often known. The TL parameters required are not the same as those required for a horn, which required very low Qt drivers.

These drivers, the DX3, has a Qts of 0.225, and and Fs of 48.7 Hz. Those are the parameters for a horn design and not a TQWAT or TL.

So the bottom line is that Lowther do not have appeared to have developed a driver for this application. So the prospects are not auspicious for this new design. I would expect a speaker very lean on the low end.

 

[ryanosaur]

Somewhere along the way, I had stumbled on a reference that Voigt never regarded his "Voigt Pipe" to be a good design worthy of producing; that they were inherently flawed.

Of course, Weems came along and folded it while blocking off a bit of the narrow closed end and giving it a CSA >0: the Driver ended up being moved slightly from the halfway point as well.

Then this dude came along:

 

[TheWarrior]

Forget a modest +/- 3 db target, the Almira's response graph shows it to have a +/- 10 db response LOL!

 

[TLS Guy]

Somewhere along the way, I had stumbled on a reference that Voigt never regarded his "Voigt Pipe" to be a good design worthy of producing; that they were inherently flawed.
View attachment 56565
Of course, Weems came along and folded it while blocking off a bit of the narrow closed end and giving it a CSA >0: the Driver ended up being moved slightly from the halfway point as well.
View attachment 56566

Then this dude came along:

Well, what do you know? As you know I'm in the UK. A week ago Friday, I visited our former home, The Old Parsonage, Frindsbury, Kent. The new owners wanted me to fill in details of the original restoration. Even though I was very young, I have clear memories of the project. I often say, I can remember what happened when I was three, better then last week!

Anyhow the new owners had found an old suit case with some old papers, documents and photographs of mine up in the eves. Most of it was junk like old bank statements. But there were photographs, records of my experiments in the Guys Hospital labs, which included smoked drum recordings of frog leg twitches etc. Also there was the instruction manual of my Quad 22 preamp, my Thorens TD 150 turntable., and the instructions and circuits for my Brenell MK 5 tape recorder, which I have in storage and never got round to restoring.

However, concerning this topic, there is a Hi-Fi News, dated March 1959! This contains the theory and constructional details of the Decca Corner speaker, by no less than its renowned designer Ralph West. So these were the plans I used to construct my first stereo pair of speakers.

The similarity to that Almira design are astonishing. Back then of course we knew nothing of Thiel/Small parameters, and would have had no clue you had to match Vas to pipe volume, and Vas, was not even on the radar. Actually we did not know all this concerning pipes until the year 2000.

So actually the Lowther Almira is a blast from 63 years ago. What goes around comes around, as they say!