Hi Everyone,
I,m just wondering if all of us are hearing some kind of attractive phasing anomoly from using two mismatched woofers in the Imperial speaker.  Steve, have you tried a pair of matched woofers yet?  Honestly, I wonder what both Imperials sound like, even with mismatched woofers.
Take care,
Steve F

[quote author=Peter  link=1040842968&amp/45#59 date=1041626354]
I take that dispute back. [/quote]

I was really interested in your challenge. The perceived difference in the MP3 and WAV is blatant in my opinion, glad we see eye to eye. I've done MP3 A/B's before, I nailed the MP3s every time.

I was listening through a stereo receiver that was connected to my sound card so amplification wasn't much of a problem. Especially since my phones are really efficient. I know the DAC in my sound card isn't the best but the recordings were still very reveling.

[quote author=Peter  link=1040842968&amp/45#59 date=1041626354]
--Addendum:  Even so, the crazy imaging is still there.  Where did that come from?
[/quote]

My guess is since Steve's recording was so pure, meaning it wasn't damage by a recording "engineer", and since Steve's horns are able to accurate reproduce the signal, the way our brain perceives the music is true to the actual music which is why it sounds life like. Even through we weren't listening to a stereo pair of speakers, the horns were still able to transmit the necessary acoustic information to our brain. Remember the brain is what perceives a sounds location by analyzing the properties of the sound. Not sure exactly how our brains do this, but I?m sure the ?Illusion? of a 3D played-back sound has more to do with preservation of the acoustic information than the number and location of the speakers.

It?s my belief that the best possible recording is one with the least amount of distance between the microphone and our ears. In other words: the simpler the recording the better. For example: every time an EQ, mixers, compressors, ect. is used during a mixing session, information that our brain needs to recreate the true sound of the music is lost. These tools make the original acoustic information untrue to the music. It?s like copying a video tape, with each copy of a copy the video quality degrades. A lot of mixes are guilty of something similar. In Steve?s recording, everything was preserved why it sounds life like.

Peter..dude..you are getting way too deep for me at this late hour, I mean I think I understood what what you said...and that scares me

Audioillusion wrote, Quote:


You know, i may as well let the cat out of the bag. All recording engineers today are contracted by a government agency, to insert "damage" and subliminal messages. The end result is "mass birth control" by destroying the male libido, not to mention invoking paranoid delusions, and an inability to take amature recordings at face value.

I Honestly dont mean to offend anyone, I just wanted to show contempt fot the "William F Buckley Jr." tangent that seems to surface at times in this forum...

Jamie

If you do catch hell for it, I hope it's in a new thread!  

I have received 4 matched woofers for the cabinets.  Still waiting for a replacement compression driver. The new drivers are real nice, but I doubt they will fly.  We installed a pair in the other cabinet last night and everyone liked the miss-matched drivers better.  The new drivers do not have the midrange and I believe that is most of it, however it raises many questions.  

I'll try to do a complete update over the weekend with a few more pics.

Steve

Sorry about bringing Don Gabor into this thread.  I will move him over to the music lover's forum.  

Steve, too funny!! that A-bomb gave me a good laugh!

So as you might have guessed we are now listening to a matched pair of cabinets (each with miss-matched woofers).  I still do not have my compression drivers because the original ones I ordered only went up to 9K.  I am now waiting for another pair of something else that will handle between 1.5 ~ 20KHz.  In the meanwhile I have a pair of low grade compression drivers installed using a simple capacitor for a crossover.  The woofers are running in parallel with no crossovers.

The overall frequency balance at this stage is surprisingly flat.  I was also pleased to find out that when you toe them in and stand in the sweet spot you actually get one hell of a sound stage!  Very believable imaging too.  I am very pleased with the bent wood horns and learned something very important as a result of building them.  I will make plans and a white paper available soon where I will try to explain what I discovered about horn flare design.

So for the past week we've just been playing with them.  In this state, they work for any purpose.  PA use, no problem.  Home audiophile use, no problem.

To date, these are the tightest most extended speakers I have heard at any price and any size, including live concerts.  Turning these speakers up loud is an experience you'll never forget.  There is no ear fatigue, and it sounds convincingly live on any type of music.  The effortlessness and shear power is unreal.  I can only compare them to my Acoustats which I listened to last night.  The Imperials sound lower and hit harder and sound tighter in the bass than the Acoustats which should be impossible.  On everything else, they demonstrate a presence that is not found on the Acoustats.  The richness and harmonic textures of piano, string bass, etc. sound more real on the Imperials.  This is because the cabinet is like a piano and you sense it's presence when it plays because it is really there.  On these speakers it is really there too, the mass and size is the same.  Interesting stuff to say the least.

I have never been a person to listen to music loud because my distortion alarm always goes off about half way there.  On these speakers it has not gone off yet, and I'm sure we have listened in excess of 120 dB from time to time.  My ears have yet to ring from listening to these, yet at lower volumes our own band has created the dreaded ringing you hear when you go to bed later that night.  That means ringing is not tied to SPL, but rather a side effect of distortions.

I have just about completed the blueprint for the Imperial.  I plan to give it away for free to everyone following this thread.  Later they will be available on the site for sale.