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Speakers that made use of multiple full range drivers?

The only thing that counts is the sound, but I would love to see a coherent brochure or white paper from the manufacturer to see what they had in mind.
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I share your curiosity, even though I suspect that you would understand more of such a white paper than would I. These speakers were designed as an AV device. They could be set in the proximity of a TV, possibly with people sitting in an almost near-field situation. Nevertheless they were designed to throw a wide horizontal image. IMHO the fact that the sound-stage is as DEEP as it is (in addition to the width) makes these speakers remarkable for the price.

I think that these speakers were deliberately voiced for digital source. I say this now that I have auditioned them on my Micro-Rega combination. This was not an exhaustive, scientific test, but rather just a subjectively gathered impression. I might stick to my Tannoy 10 inch dual concentric Golds for vinyl. On the other hand, the DS-S5’s do make Red-Book a real pleasure — for a change.

Do you notice any changes in sound as you sit and then stand in front of the speakers?
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Yes. There isn’t so much of a dramatic dropout as just a loss of the sound stage you hear when you sitting down — more so than with other speakers I have. When sitting down, the horizontal field is remarkably wide and with appreciable depth. They are not super critical for placement — at least not in my room.

kfa888 wrote:
Looks like they went to a lot of trouble and design for an inexpensive speaker.
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That's been on my mind too. This design was one of the last speakers that was assembled and produced as an end product by Mitsubishi Corp. — Diatone. According to one source (assuming that my Japanese was up to snuff for once) Diatone are still making drivers to order for companies that need production supply. And, apparently there is some supply that can be accessed by the internet. The Diatone speaker brand was discontinued five years ago. Diatone may have been inclined to make this modest speaker a sort of last hurrah — a punctuation point at the end of an era.

I think that the next speaker for me will be a single, or two driver full-range DIY project. This design has given me pause for thought, and I thank you guys for helping me to understand then better.
 
I am not really a big fan of line arrays, but PartsExpress once sold a buyout speaker (Pioneer OEM), cat. no. 269-469, which was a very good sounding FR speaker in its own right, and cheap enough (the final, close-out price was 69 cents a pop!) to be an excellent candidate for line array experimentation.

The best known example of the latter was probably the arrays built by a student in Dr. Higgins' physics Class at Luther Burbank HS in CA (Sacramento?): http://ratch-h.com/

art28a.jpg


Farm's line arrays:
http://ratch-h.com/farm.html

Data on the 269-469:
http://ratch-h.com/69centwonder.html
 
Hardy,

Excellent link! Those kids are getting more exposure to speaker building in their teens then most of us old farts have now!!! Where was that class when I was a kids. What a great learning experience. Cool stuff.

More... http://ratch-h.com/tweak.html

They are building some very cool stuff...

linearray4.jpg
 
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Here is a pic of a HT system I helped design for a friend who was interested in extreme overkill. Used the 49 cent mids from a recent PE buyout nicknamed the (NSBs or No Stinkin Badges by AKer Lefty, I believe).

In my experience, using arrays doesn't necessarily mean you end up with better sound than a single driver unless the poor sounding properties of the single driver are completely output dependant. In other words, poor freq response does not get better by adding drivers but if the problem with a single driver is just that it doesn't the excursion capabilities to reach high output levels, using multiple drivers can certainly aid in that respect.

With regards to these drivers, they really lend them selves well to modding. Adding a phase plug out of dowel rod or even steel (not stainless unless you use something to secure it other than the power of the magnet) and coating the cones with a couple of coats of laquer or a thin coat of PVA glue does wonders to help with cone breakup above 4khz. Adding some mass to the stamped frames takes you a step closer to getting a high performance driver for next to nothing. More experiments will be taking place with different phase plug shapes in the future but these things sound far too good for the cost involved.

The tweeters used for this project were the 3/4" neodynium tweets from PE. Their tiny mounting flange allowed a center to center distance of 3/4" virtually eliminating the effects of comb filtering.

For those wondering about the MTM array design, it was used to control dispersion vertically (by way of the line array) and horizontally (by the MTM design).
 
Fascinating stuff and I am very impressed by the finish these young people acheived in their work I'm sure I can/could learn a lot from these students.

Will there be some serious 'comb filtering' problems with the 20 driver array model built by Kin and Farm? And what is the reason for wiring groups of drivers so that they are out of phase with eachother?
 
Lorne, any array will have comb filtering effects, it's the center to center spacing between the drivers that determines the freq where that comb filtering will take place.

There are interesting arrays that use wiring schemes to make arrays act like a point source. Do a google search on Bessel Array's. They are not uncommon in prosound, but are even used in consumer equipment like McIntosh HT speakers. There are 5, 7, 9 driver arrays (and probably more) and the same wiring principles can be used to make 5x5 grids for arrays. There is some lobing effects if you get too close to these arrays, so using them for larger diameter drivers in a home probably won't work, but in large music venues they are very nice.

The most interesting is the 7 driver array that uses 6 drivers (!) where the center position is left blank. a series of 6 small diameter midranges with a tweeter crossed over and place in the center position creates a point source from the tweeters position when far enough away.

ANyway, I'm rambling...more later when i have time to collect my thoughts and come up with something more readable.
 
Back in 2000 before I left Germany; I saw an interesting speaker. I cannot remember the name of the company but, it was a full range multi driver speaker with a large side firing woofer and a Lowther driver on the mids. I did not hear it. It was only a static display. It looked really intersting. Dick Olsher's "Basszilla" looks pretty impressive. It uses an Aurum Cantus ribbon tweeter with a Fostex fullrange coupled with an Emminence Magnum 15" woofer.
 
lorne said:
Fascinating stuff and I am very impressed by the finish these young people acheived in their work I'm sure I can/could learn a lot from these students.

Will there be some serious 'comb filtering' problems with the 20 driver array model built by Kin and Farm? And what is the reason for wiring groups of drivers so that they are out of phase with eachother?
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without reading the article, i'd bet they are wired in phase, but wit combos of parallel and series wiring to get a manageable resistance like kfa888 mentioned.
 
Here's that wiring diagram. The middle group really does appear to be wired out of phase. But I think the idea is to make series-connected groups of 3-in-parallel. Here's another look at the same thing.
 
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At first glance it appears out of phase, but it is in phase in the diagram. Just a bit odd how they color coded it.
 
Come to think of it. I think that the pairs of 4 smaller drivers in my Diatones are wired like this. At first it looks as if they are wired in series. But then one notices that the top two have the connector bar facing down, and the bottom two are facing up so that the pairs have their respective +/- pins opposite eachother. Now this looks to me like outa phase but ... Mr Dyslexic has gotta think about it in a hot bath with a glass of plonk. :beer:
 
The two diagrams show drivers in parallel and sets of three drivers in series. This keeps the wiring simple and the resulting speaker impedance reasonable . In the first diagram the combination of 9 drivers gives the same total impedance as each driver. If all the drivers are 6 Ohm each ; then 3 in parallel is 2 Ohms , and 3 sets in series gives a total of 6 Ohms. Be careful to use identical drivers, or a few will take most of the power and maybe damaged . Since speakers are not the same impedance at all frequencies . If two speakers are connected in series and one has a low freq peak of 20 Ohms while the other is 10 ohms at that freq , the 20 will see 2/3 the input voltage and the 10 only 1/3. If they are connected in parallel the 20 Ohm sees 1/3 the current and the 10 sees 2/3 the current .
Don
 
Also I believe they state under one of the pictures that they briefly tested them before gluing the drivers down to make sure they were all in phase.
 
That's right. They're not making a Bessel array, or even a Barker array or even a Quadratic Phase Array (Philips).

's just an array.

Array Dull Care.
 
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