Hi Duke, I looked at your website. Very interesting designs and thorough consideration of all kinds of subtle issues in your designs.
Your Azel tower looks like something that sounds beyond fantastic. I like the rear-pointing horn, that's clever. I heard the same or similar Faital horn combo 4 years ago from a design by Javad Shadzi with 2 8 inch woofers and it was super-high-res sound. I've been dreaming of LTH142 horn + Eminence Textreme 314 compression driver + SB 15OB350 woofer in an a-frame dipole similar to the "Beryllium Live Edge Cottonwood Dipoles" that you see if you scroll down at
https://www.perrymarshall.com/speakers/ where I have write-ups on several designs. Direct link
https://psma-website-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/live_edge_beryllium_dipoles.pdf.
Several of my designs have an Lpad on the tweeter on the back so we clearly have some similar ideas about radiation pattern.
No surprise that your design surpasses a lot of pricey prestigious contenders.
Hi Perry,
Thank you!
And thanks for the links - wow, BEAUTIFUL speakers!!
(I had a couple of articles in SpeakerBuilder in the late '80's, and look where I ended up... be careful, you're on a slippery slope!!)
The 16-ohm Eminence Textremes are better than the 8-ohm ones, for our purposes. The 16-ohm version uses a thinner voice coil wire to get the higher impedance, and thinner = lighter, and lighter = a little bit better tippy-top-end. If you've eyeballed Vance Dickason's measurements of the 8-ohm Eminence Textreme, you may have noticed that its waterfall plot is competitive with, if not superior to, any of the Beryllium compression drivers he's measured. The settling time is very fast. Eminence tells me that they consider its main selling point to be durability, in that stadium installations and such will not need to have drivers replaced or changed out as often. That's not a bad thing either! It will need some EQ, but so does everything else, and I doubt that intimidates you.
The Eminence Textreme measures a little bit better on the 18Sound XT1464, less pattern-narrowing at the very top end. But I like the large radius round-over of the LTH142, it seems to image a bit better (something which cannot be documented with measurements!), so that's the direction I'm going with my current project. I've also had some wooden 1.4" throat Oblate Spheroid horns made, but they are MUCH more expensive than the other two.
My first dipole is still down the road a bit; I have some of the boards cut but need to finish up a couple of other projects first.
Anyway GREAT to meet you, I love your work, and hope never to compete against it!!