Deang

The "rats nest". Never,ever, judge a book by it's cover. Yeah, The Jolida is pretty, but you're not going to see anything like this underneath. Imagine trying to solder all those points.

I guess beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

O.K., maybe she won't win a beauty pageant, but I've seen worse. Find one in good shape, buy an aftermarket cheapy cabinet, slide it into a shelf, and they look pretty decent. I actually think they are kind of cool looking, and it's pretty neat having the extra controls -- they DO come in handy.

kjohnsonhp -- get something like a used AE-3 ($400 or less) in front of that Dynaco -- and you can live happily after too.

Is it accidental that 99% end up using tubes to run their horns? Not just here either, but the world over. Three years ago, most of here were using SS. I was using a tube preamp, but 200 watts of Luxman on my RB-5's! With the exception of Jeff, I can't think of one single person who has gone back to SS. I still think the problem there was not having an active preamp driving the Manley Stingray. Tubes get you closer to a harmonically 'correct' sound. There will be texture and richness. If you want to hear what Marshalls sound like -- reproduce the sound with the same technology that makes a Marshall sound like a Marshall. Personally, I think you'll be fine on the bass. C'mon man, your missing a horn loaded 15" driver! You'll get some natural room gain, and 90% of the music you'll probably play ain't going to go down past 40Hz anyways. Your ears will adjust. You're trading some slam for detail (actually hearing the individual bass notes). The pitch will be right and it will have great pace. Quit second guessing your choice -- the Belles are the bomb. Now go get yourself a Scott 229a or 299b. Have Craig work it over, and be done with it. You'll have tube rectification, plenty of power, tone controls, a balance knob, and a phono section. Four out of the five things just mentioned you will not get with a Jolida. Once you've seen the makeup of a Scott, you'll understand why no one builds anything like them anymore. A $600 investment gets you $2500 or more worth of tube integrated. Get settled in, rope caulk the squawker, clean up the wiring, get some decent tubes -- and live happily ever after.

You guys are a bunch of kooks. Cary rules, and it doesn't matter if it's 6SN7 or 12AU7 -- just make sure it's tube rectified. They just plain sound great.

If I was running Scala's, K-horns, or Belles -- there is no doubt I would be running Triodes or Beam Tubes minus the grid connection on the tubes. Those three-way horns just don't NEED the additional drive and extension through the middle and top that UL provides. I think it's probably true with the Cornwall as well, but the lower sensitivity puts it on the border. I think straight up pentode is a good compromise with them.

I've heard both the LaScalas and Klipschorns several times, and there ain't no way a Cornwall can match the speed and articulation of the horn loaded bass. I do think the 'fullness' of the Cornwall bass fills in the bottom better, helping to balance out the output of squawker (as Tom pointed out). I think the ALKS would help here too, as m00n could move the squawker leads to the other taps (lowering the output of the squawker).

Magnet wire is an excellent choice for those interconnects -- you did good. You'll have fun doing the upgrades over time, and they will give you 'more'. Don't forget to throw the Scott in there from time to time, and throw on some Led Zeppelin -- just to keep those caps broken in and your ears cleaned out.

I couldn't have said that better myself. That's exactly it. I forget in what thread I said it, but 95 db with the Quicksilvers sounds loads better than 95 db did with the 18 wpc SET amps. I could get 95 to 100 db with the Apollos, but it wasn't all that much fun to listen too. I do 95 db with the Quicksilvers, and the bandwidth just seems to go on forever in both directions. There is no edge, and I'm not grinding my teeth. The difference is substantial. I think the transparency and immediacy of SET is awesome, but as soon as I would take the Apollos up a little, things would get nasty very quickly. The bass of the Apollos was outstanding, better than the Quicksilvers to my ear -- but I've been wondering how much of what I was hearing was really just the 2nd order harmonic distortion of the low notes piggy backing on the fundamentals. It's a double edge sword. If you want the ultimate in transparency, you're going to have to give up the 'big sound'. Incredible imaging with the Apollos, which could push the soundstage almost to my chair at even the lowest volume levels. I do miss that sometimes -- buy hey, you can't have it all. However, I can achieve the same effect with the Quicksilvers by simply turning them up a little more. I just think the hard driving stuff, and Rock in general, just sounds better overall with some power underneath it all. Choices should REALLY be based on size of the listening room, choice of music, and general listening habits. Everyone doesn't listen to K-horns and Jazz, that's just a fact -- Now, where's that Chevelle CD

I know it may not be possible for you -- but try to get the Belles as close to the walls as possible. In corners would be the best. After you get your bank account built back up, you can buy some ALK crossovers from Al K.

SS bass is tight, fast, and punchy. Tube bass is slower, more rounded, and more like a thump instead of a whack. With tubes, the bass notes hang around long enough to enjoy them. In comparison, with SS, the notes almost seem like they're over before you have a chance to get into them. No time to savor.

Nice. What recipe did you use for the interconnects? Chris Vanhaus'? How would you characterize the difference in signatures between the Scott and Bottleheads?

Oh man, you gonna take me on with half your tubes glowing. Dude, you're brave. What a waste of some good 6550's -- get 'em all together and then cut their balls off. You must have meant to say my '8' wimpy EL-34s.

Of course, as soon as you move to the KT-88 or 6550, you lose most of the midrange warmth and texture. The treble won't 'sparkle' as much either. My experience with the EL-34 to date is that it exhibits the attributes normally used to describe the tube sound. They in fact sound 'tubey'. A little fat, warm, and smooth as electric velvet. Having run KT-88's (somewhat similiar to the 6550) in the Superamp DJH, I don't really feel the additional drive and slam in the lower registers is worth giving up the magic midrange for. I really enjoy putting the juice to the RF-7's and never having the top harden up or go strident. The treble is oh so sweet and rich. When that Jolida 'opens up', what you will notice is the soundstage expanding outwards and forwards (bloom), and there will be more focus (stable images within the soundstage). Craig, Someday, we will have to run the Quicksilvers against the Mark III's. Doesn't that sound like fun? Your tube rectified, fast and deep 6550's against my eight (8) EL-34's and solid state rectification. I was always partial to small blocks anyway!

How much does it cost to be "your friend"?

Ah yes, isn't the internet great? Good article below by Thomas Dunker. Why Horns?? So why would anyone want to use horn speakers today, when we can have 100W amps at low costs? As I hinted in the previous paragraph, horns DO have other special qualities than just high efficiency. Okay, it's necessary to understand a few basic things about HOW HORNS WORK in order to say WHY they do some things better than other speakers. (You'd be amazed at how many people who simply refuse to believe that horns can be used for serious music listening because somebody told them so or because they think horns all sound like megaphones.) A horn can be viewed as an acoustic impedance transformer. Turning mechanical motion (a vibrating diaphragm) into sound waves in air is in many ways a difficult thing to do. The most fundamental problem, which has a lot to do with the issue of efficiency, is that the difference in DENSITY between a paper or metal diaphragm and AIR is huge. There is a tremendous impedance mismatch. This fact explains that sound travels very far through denser media like metal, water or rock. In a speaker-air situation, the speaker diaphragm can be seen as a high impedance source (solid material) and the air being a low impedance medium (the air does not easily load down solid moving objects). There is a reason why humans can't fly by waving their arms! What the horn does is to help the transducer couple its radiated energy into sound waves in air by means of an impedance transformation. What this means is that it creates a higher acoustic impedance for the transducer to work into, which means that more power is transfered. (Analogous to putting an antenna on a radio transmitter, which seems like an obvious thing to do!) Basically, a horn is a tube or conduit with increasing cross-section along its axis. The narrow end (where the driver sits) is called the horn throat, and the large end (which opens into the room) is called the horn mouth. Sound pressure is defined as pressure change per unit area. In a horn, the wave front is restricted by the inner walls of the horn, and the area across the horn increases as the wave front approaches the horn mouth. So what happens here is that at the throat we have a small area and high pressure with small amplitudes, efficiently loading the diaphragm. As the wave fronts travel towards the horn mouth, the pressure drops, while the amplitude and the area increases. A horn also has the property of directing the sound into a narrower beam, which increases the on-axis sensitivity (SPL/1W/1m). Increased directivity combined with high electric-acoustic conversion efficiency means that horn speakers are very easy to power, even with very small amplifiers. What does all this really mean, then? In what ways does the horn 'help' the driver/transducer. And how does all this make horn drivers a bit different from direct radiators? I will try to sum this up in a few points: -Improved energy conversion means that for a given SPL, a horn loaded diaphragm will have to move less than a direct radiating diaphragm of equal size. For any electromechanical transducer, the distortion generated by the driver itself will be proportional to diaphragm excursion magnitude. Thus, for any given SPL, the horn loaded speaker will have lower distortion than the same size direct radiator. -A smaller diaphragm on a horn can be used to generate the same SPL as a larger direct radiating diaphragm for the same excursion amplitude. This means that you have a smaller mass to accelerate for the same acoustic output when you horn load a driver. This helps the transient response of the speaker regardless of what Fourier said. Subjectively, horns will be noted for their effortless, snappy handling of transients. -The smaller diaphragm excursions allow the use of short, underhung voice coils (reduced mass again) taking full advantage of the flux in the pole piece gap. This increases the efficiency of the transducer, allowing the amplifier to work with more headroom and greater ease. Horn drivers need to have powerful magnets and tight magnetic coupling because of the high pressure they are asked to produce when sitting in a horn throat. -Because the amp has more headroom, and because the driver handles signal peaks and high outputs more ideally, horns will be able to produce much higher SPLs than comparable direct radiators before distortion becomes objectionable. In short, there will be room for more dynamics, at lower distortion, with better transient response, with less stress on the amp. Since this is an enthusiastic pro-horn text, I have not emphasized the problematic aspects of horns. One thing I haven't mentioned is that the lower the frequency one wants to reproduce through a horn, the larger the horn must be. The size of a horn quickly multiplies when you go down a few octaves. Bass horns can be next to impossible to fit into a normal home. This really shouldn't be a problem to a true enthusiast, but even I have had to postpone any dream of a bass horn until I get a bigger place to live. Some people say that horns have 'horn sound'. I'm not sure but I think what they mean is a sort of megaphone-like quality to the sound. A good horn should not have any of this. Unfortunately, many bad horn designs have led people to think that this is how horns 'are supposed to sound'. To the true horn fan, 'horn sound' will be a compliment that means, clean, dynamic, 'fast', physical, detailed and present sound. Admittedly, there are a few things that horns don't always handle quite as well as your typical small direct radiator speakers. Particularly the much hyped concepts of 'imaging', 'neutrality' and 'transparency'. Horns will often lean towards a more 'solid' (as opposed to 'transparent') presentation with more 'body'. (Less ghost-like if you will!!) And horns will definitely not sound laid back! The music will jump at you rather than shyly hiding some place far behind the speakers. Anyhow, horns have their problems like any kind of speaker, and can be extremely sensitive to the room and the rest of the system. The enthusiast would say that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and that the problems are challenges.

If you are going to stay with a solid state amp, then I highly recommend the MIT Biwire 2's. I used them for a long time. With a solid state amp and horns, the MIT's known tendancy towards warmth and a slight softening of the treble is welcome. Biwiring, good for SS, not so good for tube amps. There is a much longer version of the following by Jon Risch, but trust me -- you need to know how to use a freaking slide rule to know what the hell he's talking about. *What is bi-wiring? Bi-wiring is where the crossover inside the speaker has been separated into it's HF and LF sections, and separate pairs of connecting terminals provided to access those separate sections independently. Normally, the LF and HF crossover sections are in parallel, connected internally to the same single pair of binding posts. For single cable use, a set of jumpers is provided to bridge the terminal pairs, paralleling the separated crossover sections outside the cabinet instead of inside. Then, separate speaker cables are run from the same amp output to these separated pairs of terminals at the speaker. *What good does bi-wiring do? Some say that any improvement in the sound it makes is strictly due to the decreased total DCR, and this makes the speaker less prone to frequency response variations due to cable resistance. According to this view, simply running the two cables in parallel at both ends will do the same thing. In my opinion, this is a very simplistic and incomplete way of looking at the situation. Once the crossovers have been electrically separated, they present different impedances (loads) to the power amp within their passbands and outside of their passbands. The woofer and corresponding low frequency crossover section will present a low impedance at low frequencies and a high impedance at HF, while the tweeter section will present a low impedance at high frequencies, and high one at LF's. With the electrical separation, differing currents will flow within the two cables that make up a bi-wire set. For the separate cable feeding the woofer section, a lot of current will flow at LF's but not much current at HF's, and the tweeter cable will have some current flow at HF, but very little at LF's. A division of labor has occured with bi-wiring, whereby a single cable does not have have to carry the HF currents simultaneuously with the LF current. Two things happen due to this: 1. The losses in the cable due to "eye-squared-are" losses (current squared time the resistance equals voltage drop) are reduced for each frequency band, so that any tendency for the woofer to modulate the tweeter due to current draw is greatly reduced. This form of IM would be in lock-step with the original signal. 2. The magnetic fields due to the HF and LF currents have also been separated out, and any tendency for them to intermodulate and cause sonic artifacts has been greatly reduced. This form of IM would be occuring both at the same time, and in a time delayed form due to mechanical resonances and motor/generator action.

LOL, ain't it fun? No, pounding bass is not the EL-34's strong suit, but magic midrange and 3D texture is. I've never been much of a bass freak, and my sissy ears really appreciate the warmth and additional fat in the middle. I really dig the EL-34.

I would love to have those Artto, I could use them in my Cary preamp.

Tom, aren't most of the speakers in the pro-line designed for behind the screen applications? At any rate, most listening rooms just won't accomodate speakers of that size. I wish you lived closer, and I wish I didn't work 64 hours a week. I just can't believe you would listen to my rig and say it doesn't sound 'horny', or think it didn't bring some of the good stuff.

That's a good point.

I stand corrected. Here's what he said, in case you were curious. "These things (Jensen PIO's) are unquestionably a total rip-off! The thing measured 2.099 uF with a quality factor of only 200! In contrast, I have measured many Hovland MusiCaps and have never found one yet that measured below 2000. More musical, baloney! They are simply so lossey that all you highs go away as heat inside the capacitor! This is equivalant to connecting a .38 ohm resistor in sereis with a Hovland MusiCap. My advice -- DON'T USE THEM! "Quality factor" is the same as "Q". It's defined as the ratio of capacitive reactance (pure capacitor effect) and series loss as represented by a simple resistor. A 2.2 uF cap has 1 / (2 Pi F C) ohms reactance. At 1000 Hz, that is 72.34 Ohms reactance. A Q of 200 means there is .362 Ohms of loss inside the cap. That is, 72.34 / 200 = .362. A similar Hovland Musicap will have an internal loss equivalant to a .036 Ohm resistor. think that's why Hovlands have thicker wires coming out of them. The wires become a significant part of the loss. With the Jensen, who cares about the leads, they can be small because the loss in the cap is so much. One reason the Jensen caps may be used in tube amps is becasue they are rated 400VDC. The Hovlands I use are only rated 100VDC. For crossover networks, you could use 25VDC caps and be safe. Also, in an amp you in an "active" circuit. This means losses are not a problem. You just turn the volume up a bit to compensate. In a filter, like in a crossover network, the frequency response and input impedance get loused up! Losses are usually highest at the points of maximum group dealy, That happens near the crossover itself. Specifically, about the 1 or 2 dB down point on the skirt of each filter." Al K.

Sure it matters. If you get them backwards, the tweeter will be out of phase with the rest of system.

Oh my, what have you done? Just cancel the order. Man oh man, do you have ANY idea what even a set of RB-5 II's and a good sub or two will do?