Swerd

Swerd

Audioholic Warlord
Haven't heard them – no first hand experience. Tekton is considered, at best, controversial because it's designs stomp on several well known and widely accepted concepts of loudspeaker design. The Tekton website offers numerous glowing testimonies from owners, but avoids showing any standard graphic measurements of speaker performance. That would allow readers to easily compare them to other competing speakers.

In some other 2-way models, Tekton uses 10" woofers crossed to a tweeter at frequencies too high for such a large driver to sound decent. It could easily be beaming and breaking up. I don't know what crossover frequency is used in the Double Impact model.

A claim of sensitivity of 99 dB at 2.83 V (2 W in a 4 ohm speaker) is unusually high. Considering how many loudspeaker makers claim high sensitivities for their speakers but never back up their claims with any measurements, I wonder about Tekton's unverified claim.

Tekton website delivers confusion about speaker impedance. Is this a 4 ohm or 8 ohm speaker?

The multiple tweeters create the very real possibility of interference (comb filtering) that would create numerous spikes and valleys in a frequency response curve. I have some experience with DIY speaker design, and I've never seen any speaker, DIY or commercial, that uses seven tweeters. Tekton claims it has a "revolutionary" patent, which, I assume, involves the array of seven tweeters. I am not impressed because a patent only claims something is different. It isn't required to actually perform better.

The space required by those seven tweeters forces the two mid-range drivers to be mounted far apart enough to create audible cancellations. This depends on the listener's sitting or standing position. This problem could easily be avoided if one tweeter were used.

At $3000 per pair, the Double Impact has many other competitors, including some very good speakers. I could go on, but I'm not impressed by this or other Tekton speaker designs.
 
D

Dennis Murphy

Audioholic General
Of course, bumblebees can fly. Tekton is listed for room 730 at Axpona next week in Chicago. I'll see what all of those speaker design rule violations add up to.
 
Swerd

Swerd

Audioholic Warlord
Of course, bumblebees can fly. Tekton is listed for room 730 at Axpona next week in Chicago. I'll see what all of those speaker design rule violations add up to.
I would be glad to hear what you think after you hear them. Thanks.

Yes, bumblebees do fly :). But no one could confuse them with dragonflies based on their flying ability. The question with Tektons is not do they make loud sound, but how good is their sound?
 
Mikado463

Mikado463

Audioholic Spartan
gents, thanks for the replies, Dennis, I'll look for your comments after Axpona !
 
S

shadyJ

Speaker of the House
Staff member
We had a discussion about the Tekton Enzos when they were measured by Stereophile, and they actually measured better than I would have thought given that design, so who knows, maybe these things have some merit. That array of tweeters might be some attempt to control treble dispersion to make it match the midwoofer dispersion. Who knows how well it works. I will also give them a listen when I go to Axpona and try to talk to the reps about it.
 
Mikado463

Mikado463

Audioholic Spartan
Of course, bumblebees can fly. Tekton is listed for room 730 at Axpona next week in Chicago. I'll see what all of those speaker design rule violations add up to.
Dennis, did you get a chance to listen ??
 
S

shadyJ

Speaker of the House
Staff member
I heard the Tekton Double Impact Monitors at Axpona. They didn't sound bad to my ears. The marketing literature for them is crazy town. The patent that Tekton uses for them is insipid.

However, there is one cool thing going on with them, and the use of all these tweeters is not as crazy as it seems. The outer ring of tweeters is a bessel array, and every other tweeter in that ring is wired out of phase. This can modify the dispersion out to certain frequencies, and may help There is a bunch of patents and research on bessel arrays and it looks like a workable idea. I wouldn't be shocked if these speakers didn't measure all that bad. The central tweeter probably functions more like a tweeter/supertweeter, and the ring of tweeters around it might be more like a upper midrange driver. That is just my speculation. I would love to take one apart to see what is really going on under the hood.
 
D

Dennis Murphy

Audioholic General
Dennis, did you get a chance to listen ??
I did, but like so many other rooms, they were playing poor program material that made it impossible for me to judge quality accurately. They didn't sound to me like they were doing anything really wrong. But I'm absolutely certain that you could have plopped down a pair of KLH 6's (vintage 1968) in most of the rooms and they would have sounded very much like what you heard from all of the compressed classic rock and indifferently mastered studio recordings.
 
Mikado463

Mikado463

Audioholic Spartan
interesting, thanks for the feedback all ...........
 
fuzz092888

fuzz092888

Audioholic Warlord
Another example of a Bessel Array



http://www.sourcespeaker.com/CC825554.html

I heard the Tekton Double Impact Monitors at Axpona. They didn't sound bad to my ears. The marketing literature for them is crazy town. The patent that Tekton uses for them is insipid.

However, there is one cool thing going on with them, and the use of all these tweeters is not as crazy as it seems. The outer ring of tweeters is a bessel array, and every other tweeter in that ring is wired out of phase. This can modify the dispersion out to certain frequencies, and may help There is a bunch of patents and research on bessel arrays and it looks like a workable idea. I wouldn't be shocked if these speakers didn't measure all that bad. The central tweeter probably functions more like a tweeter/supertweeter, and the ring of tweeters around it might be more like a upper midrange driver. That is just my speculation. I would love to take one apart to see what is really going on under the hood.
 
S

shadyJ

Speaker of the House
Staff member
Some could be intelligent engineering, some could be just bling. Its hard to say with out measurements. I suspect the XTZ and McIntosh may be deliberate design choices that yield some actual advantages.
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
On one of the FB audio groups there was a discussion I was reading yesterday where Eric Alexander (the Tekton designer) popped in to defend his not providing details about the speaker's construction and measurement. One guy was adamant the excess drivers were a reason to avoid the speakers, but he was pretty much on his own of those that had said they heard these in play or owned them (and that guy wasn't an owner, but claimed to have listed a half dozen times to a friends' set). Alexander just feels its proprietary and sees no reason to share. Several owners popped in swearing how these compete with much more expensive ($15k was mentioned a few times) speakers. Does make me wonder...
 
NorseMythology

NorseMythology

Junior Audioholic
Yea I mean, he isnt the only one doing it so maybe there is something to it?

I dont view his with as much scepticism as I do Zu audio, but I am not an engineer so who am I to judge?
 
lovinthehd

lovinthehd

Audioholic Jedi
Bose also makes pleasant sounding systems....to some.
 

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