Full range drivers, simple crossovers and a natural midrange ..

IME the best full range no crossover natural midrange drivers are full range electrostatics. The midrange on Quad ESL 57's is considered by many (me included) to be the best there ever was.

I'd second the vote for planars in general .. seems to me they are all pretty natural in the middle. It's the top where they differ most.
 
I've fallen in love with single driver speakers after being given some Goodman Triaxiom 12" and then given a large pair of folded horn cabinets to put them in.
Everyone that's heard them comments
They are unbelievable.:banana:

Since then l found some Coral 10" coaxials which l had a mate build some cabinets for.
They took me a while mucking around with the damping to get them right.

And have also built the large Karlson cabinets and the friend that gave me the folded horn cabinets gave me a pair of Celestion 12" coaxials to drop in.
And they sound damn nice:thumbsup:

I love that l have the ability to build a speaker cabinet, drop in a driver and all l have to fiddle with is the damping

Full range single driver speakers are special in many ways. Anyone can buy a speaker but not anyone can build one.
 
I've had a pair of Jensen triax (Sigma SG-300) for many years, haven't played them for awhile only because I think the phenolic dome tweeter sounds dull after half a century and there is no replacement I can find. Couple of caps in this speaker, two voice coils on the woofer for bass and mids, and the tweeter mounted on a bracket in the center. They do have all the characteristics you described. They followed me to college and held their own in the dorm stereo wars, too.
 
These posts kinda sound like a yes to me ..a transparent mid-range brings the music alive ...
Meanwhile the Proac's sit in the corner unused .. a good speaker, but the mid-range is depressed (for lack of a better word)...damn chokes .
And the 40 year old re-foamed no-names make the music .
(sub-woofered cause it don't work if there ain't no bottom )
 
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Proac's should have plenty of midrange, that is what the British sound is. Based off of the LS3/5A, it should have midrange a plenty. Sounds more like a mismatch of equipment.

And COAX's are not SINGLE DRIVERS. It that is the case, then KEF Uni-Q drivers count. In all of those, there is more than one driver present. A single driver is like a Full range FOSTEX, etc.

Maybe it's not the quantity of what's there, so much as crossover notching that irks my ear .. been hearing it a long time though, (since the seventies) and planars and full range drivers don't seem to have it.
Also this is just low-res IPOD music... kinda casually listening stuff .. just saving tubes in the main system but want something musical ..
 
I worship at the Tannoy shrine and my humble suggestion is folks audition a pair of their dual-concentrics,you might like.Just my few pennies.....:)
 
Here are the Frugal Horn Mk3's featuring Fostex FE126En full range single drivers. There's no corrective circuit or filter required so the signal path is pure and unadulterated. Plans are free on line and you can diy a pair for around $150. Compared to most back loaded horns these are not difficult to build.

 
IMO, if a speaker is to have a successful midrange (at least in a 2-way design), the cross-over point needs to be really low. Altec Lansing, JBL and EV designs were very successful in this regard in the early years. These XO frequencies were 500 or 800hz, distanced far away.

Oddly enough, a 3-way design seems to offer some problems, as the midrange unit itself is tanked due to band pass filtering.

The JBL LE8T was a fairly successful 8" full range driver, but it was not without a circuit to tame irregularities in it response.
 
Well, you are, of course, entitled to your opinion, however, there are many classic speakers with very low XOs. 2500 is still in the midrange zone. I do realize that higher frequency XOs are the current trend. My Martin Logans (reQuests) are XO'd at 200hz (12db/ slope). And the real problem (IMO) is maybe not the frequency of the cross-over, but rather the order in which it is done (2nd, 3rd, 4th) and when they go to something like a 4th order slope (24db/) things get weird (phase shifting/time alignment).

Andrew Jones's new Debut2's XO has about 80 components in it. That is a massively complicated cross-over. Apparently it works very well, but not every company has an Andrew Jones to design their XOs.

Maybe the real answer is not the XO point, but rather the execution of the XO slope and fixing all the tine stuff (how well its done).
 
The devil is in the details .. it is about tonality, but not just tonality
I say depressed mid-range and I mean that detail is missing .. the edge to a sound, the air in the flute, the brush of a hand on the bongo.
I've brewed up many different interconnects and speaker cables. Every topology or wire type affects the sound one way or another, so I accept the fact that every component in the chain is affecting the reproduction.
For me those details provide realism and engage me in the music... Without it, It ain't Hi-Fi to my ear ..
(and given the above, it seems reasonable to conclude that a damn 40ft coil of wire in the crossover is often robbing something.. damn chokes)
 
It seems logical the more complex the crossover, the more specific the frequencies are that are distributed. Very specific ranges. Things can get chopped up and all of sudden the challenge becomes managing those crossover points for the overlap between each driver.
That's why speaker design is as much art as engineering. Getting it right is difficult.
 
Oddly enough, a 3-way design seems to offer some problems, as the midrange unit itself is tanked due to band pass filtering.

Describe what you mean by 'tanked' please.

NOT TRUE - you want the crossover ABOVE the midrange point. I feel Altecs, JBL, etc. screwed the pooch on that and also they are horns. Only met a few horn speakers that didn't cause me a bleeding headache.

I feel a crossover in the 2500 - 3500 range is best for a 2 way.

Describe what you mean by 'the midrange point.' The midrange is a range - what point within it are you referring to?


Sorry for the questions, I'm just trying to keep up!
 
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