I thought I’d start off this year with a bit of a recap of my work developing speakers since this past summer. This will by no means be an exhaustive account. I’ll be sharing some more on Instagram over the coming months but most likely won’t get in depth on there. Some pictures from my messy little testing room can be found at the bottom of this post.
I should start off by saying I have no intentions of being a speaker manufacturer. Perhaps that’ll change in the future but selling speakers at any significant scale is an undertaking I’m not capable of pursuing on my own. I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to be involved with a few companies like Audio Test Kitchen doing some R&D involving speakers and putting my knowledge to good use but I do this primarily for my own uses. I know I’ve said this before - unfortunately pretty much all products on the market are compromised in some way (which is a necessity for selling pretty much any product) so if you want the best you very likely need to develop your own tools.
As I’ve posted a bit about, I’m currently in the process of designing a new studio. This will require new speakers which fueled my most recent research in the field of speakers. I had already decided that my system will use a pair of TD15H subs on each side so I was concerned with things only above 100 Hz. What I thought would be a fairly straightforward set of tests turned into an incredible number of revelations and personal discoveries.
My goal was to test the best of a number of different types of drivers and configurations. While there are a number of things I haven’t tested and hope to eventually do, some of the drivers I tested included small mid woofers, larger mid woofers, ribbons, AMTs, mid domes, ring radiators, silk tweeters, beryllium tweeters, textreme compression drivers, and beryllium compression drivers.
Because I was working with some of the best possible drivers, I knew certain factors like distortion would be pretty irrelevant. It’s all well beyond acceptable levels. Every driver has a certain region it excels at. I was hoping IMD tests would help me find “winners” based on technical parameters but again there weren’t really any objective winners.
My testing consisted of flattening the response of a driver and then A/Bing with another driver. Frequency responses would be limited to either the range I would potentially use them in or limited to the capabilities of a certain drivers I’m comparing against. In some cases I set up crossovers to compare combinations of drivers.
While things were measuring very similarly, I was shocked to find the differences present. No matter how hard I’ve tried I haven’t found any way to measure these aspects I’m hearing (something I’ll subsequently be putting much effort into). In the notes I make after every test I’ve come up with my own language to describe these parameters. This includes openness, thickness, liveliness, lightness, the shape of a sound, the focus “inside” a speaker, snappiness, “size” of the source, smoothed transients, and flatness of projection.
Speaker design is all about tradeoffs. I’ve said this countless times and will continue to repeat it. What I wasn’t prepared for was the intricate level to which this extends. For example, comparing a Be compression driver in a very large waveguide to a Be tweeter + 4” mid woofer. Both systems covering 600 Hz to 20 kHz with exactly the same frequency response. The Be tweeter has a uniquely crisp and clean top end with a snappy quality which the large waveguide lacks with more smoothed out transients. At the same time, the waveguide has a spatial cohesion unlike anything else. Even an excellent tweeter crossed low to a 4” woofer introduces some spatial blurring and you lose the point source quality. Another example is how a waveguide or horn entirely changes the shape of how the sound is projected. Don’t get me started on open baffle speakers…
Unfortunately I found it impossible to come up with the ultimate solution for my new speakers. Even with the use case entirely defined (listening distance, SPL requirements, room acoustics, etc.) there was no way to have a single design which optimized the tradeoffs. I’ve come up with 5 entirely different systems. One system will be flush mounted with the subs while the others will be standalone units I can bring into the room and then integrate with the subs.
What’s interesting is how close the systems I came up with resemble certain speakers on the market. I ended up following the same paths that many speaker designers went down to come up with their designs. I’d say they’re all far from perfect but they’re all excellent in some regard the designer has based their design philosophies around. These designers and speakers include the Kyron Gaia, Vivid Audio, D&D 8C, GR Research, Spatial Audio Labs, Javad Shadzi, Gedlee, Knif, Joseph Crowe Audio, OMA, Gryphon, PS Audio, Grimm, and my friend Paul Linke.
At this point the majority of my 5 designs are either “theoretical” in that I haven’t yet tested the full system or they still need to be designed in a final form. I’m done with testing for now and will start things back up hopefully next summer. Until then I’ll be focusing on the CAD work for these final designs.
P.S. While I often seemingly criticize speakers on the market, I’d like to clarify that I have nothing against most companies. Yes, some speakers are absurdly expensive and I’m not a fan of pricing based solely on bigger = we can charge more. Having said that, running a profitable business is by no means easy or cheap. R&D, manufacturing cabinets, assembling speakers, packaging, shipping, storage, distributer markups, marketing, providing warranty and support, accountants, lawyers, it all adds up. My goal is simply to share what goes into speakers and what you’re really getting when you buy, say, ATCs. DIYing is a fraction of the price (or in other words you can get vastly better speakers for the same price) but that doesn’t mean what’s on the market is a rip off. My biggest criticism would be that speakers on the market need to work for everyone. It’s practically never designed for a single use case. If you want the best possible system (whether it be off the shelf or DIY) it needs to be designed for your specific use case otherwise you’re getting needless tradeoffs and sacrifices.
