Romy the Cat wrote:

The whole point in a compression driver is that anything in back chamber is irrelevant.

Romy the Cat wrote:

Haralanov, all that you need to do is to make your own experiments, the practical experiments. Take a dozen compression drivers and play with back chamber. You will learn that it will have minor effect to the very bottom knee and practically no impact to the normal operation range of the driver.

Romy the Cat wrote:

The back plate is located a few mm from diaphragm and any back reflections are not compatible with wavelength.

Romy the Cat wrote:

I do not feel the need to do any experiments with it as I did it a lot. None of my experiments indicated that I had any important difference in sound if my driver were operating well outside of own critical regions.

haralanov wrote:

You haven’t heard any important difference because you haven’t tried what I illustrated on the picture above.

haralanov wrote:

And what does it mean you did “a lot of experiments”? Who defines what is “a lot” and what is “not enough”? In context of midrange horns you have to build at least 15-20 different horns with different profiles, different shapes of the mouth, different materials and so on, in order to judge which one fits closer to your requirements of how it should sound. This is valid for everybody who deals with horns, not only for you. I am amazed when I see somebody who is sticking his theoretically correct MF horn to his compression MF driver and then he just accepts the result! He "plays" with arranging the horn in space, with setting of the optimal off axis angle, with different crossover techniques, but none of these compensates the badly designed horn.

haralanov wrote:

Just a short example: the horns with round mouth have the worst possible performance in terms of sound complexity and they are champions in achieving the so called “open, but closed within itself” type of sound, where the sound is perceived as it is a hostage close to the bottom of the horn, trapped inside (but still energetic and "jumpy"), not "breathing" freely in the air. This effect is greatly reduced when for example the horn has oval shape (or even better – complex, “brain acceptable” shape), especially when the width/height ratio of the elliptic contour is the correct one. Who defines what is the correct ratio? – it is the one who builds many different horns and then uses his ears to select the best performing among them. All the people who performed a lot of experiments know that for achieving a good realistic imaging – the MF horns should be shorter in the direction of the other L or R channel, compared to the direction toward walls

Romy the Cat wrote:

haralanov wrote: Just a short example: the horns with round mouth have the worst possible performance in terms of sound complexity and they are champions in achieving the so called “open, but closed within itself” type of sound, where the sound is perceived as it is a hostage close to the bottom of the horn, trapped inside (but still energetic and "jumpy"), not "breathing" freely in the air. This effect is greatly reduced when for example the horn has oval shape (or even better – complex, “brain acceptable” shape), especially when the width/height ratio of the elliptic contour is the correct one. Who defines what is the correct ratio? – it is the one who builds many different horns and then uses his ears to select the best performing among them. All the people who performed a lot of experiments know that for achieving a good realistic imaging – the MF horns should be shorter in the direction of the other L or R channel, compared to the direction toward walls Perhaps you are correct, I do not know, I did not deal with it. A few years back you were a strong proponent of single-drive speaker and clearly denied any horns. You had a lot of strong and confident reasons behind it. Nowadays you look like accepted horn topology and claim advanced practice with elliptic contour. You might or might not have any practical background behind of what you say. It is internet and everyone can say anything. Post the configuration of your elliptic installation, explain reason behind it and demonstrate your ability to answer question. That, my friend, is not just internet blabbering but the actual knowledge sharing.

Romy the Cat wrote:

I very much do not want to sound like I am expressing sarcasm.

Romy the Cat wrote:

I well know that you and others you trying to experiment with horns installations or at least are trying to think that they do are in a way the continuation of my efforts. There is nothing wrong with it if you have honesty in what you do and able to recognize of result without ego evolved.

Romy the Cat wrote:

However, what I was caring about my MF I did not care about the lower range but only about the actual MF band path. It looks like you with your strategic orientation to “wider-rangeness” care about your MF in context of the lower octave you can get from the horn.  I have very different approach. It is like building an amp – you need to ask yourself what will be limiting the bandwidth: gain stage, filter, transformer  etc…I prefer it to be my explicit filter.  In a channel of acoustic system I prefer the same, not horn profile or driver roll off shall be filtration factor by my filter as filter will decay with know to me phases characteristic.

Romy the Cat wrote:

A few years back you were a strong proponent of single-drive speaker

Romy the Cat wrote:

Nowadays you look like accepted horn topology and claim advanced practice with elliptic contour. You might or might not have any practical background behind of what you say. It is internet and everyone can say anything. Post the configuration of your elliptic installation, explain reason behind it and demonstrate your ability to answer question. That, my friend, is not just internet blabbering but the actual knowledge sharing.

haralanov wrote:

The horns, even the fast opening ones are physically too deep for their mouth’s size, and this leads to a psychoacoustic illusion that the sound images are arrested at the bottom of the horn and from there they scream they want to escape, but the listener does not hear them - he hears their echo jumping out of the horn. This is the most important reason not to use horns.

haralanov wrote:

Very unsatisfactory level of tonal discrimination. There are two reasons having negative impact on tone. The first reason is the horn itself. The sound of the compression driver accepts the inherent sound characteristics of the horn’s material. These specific sound characteristics affect any single note that passes through the horn in exactly the same way, effectively homogenizing the variety of original colors that are contained in the recordings. It is the same as wearing sunglasses. You can see part of the original colors of the objects around you, but you always see the added “color” of the glasses. The second reason is the compression driver. For tonally rich midrange and upper midrange, the diaphragm must be at least 5-6”. But if it is so big – then the sound of the upper range goes into the toilet, that’s why nobody uses big sized domes. I will not mention the big voice coils as a reason for bad tonal discrimination, because there is a way to construct compression driver with relatively small, tone capable voice coils (sacrificing few dB of efficiency). So it is downside of the specific implementation, not the topology. The same is valid for the material of its diaphragm.

Romy the Cat wrote:

It is possible to throw fantastic imaging presentation by using direct radiator but did you pay attention that many playbacks do not do it? What does it mean? It means that an ability of playback to make imaging interning is ALSO derives from the skills and objectives of a system owner.