Lynn's ideas about speakers progressed since Ariel. Later on he advocated open baffle and vintage Alnico drivers. One of the reasons could be that he has got interested in no-feedback transformer-coupled DHT push-pull amplifiers. He designed Aurora and Karna, the amplifiers highly regarded in the DIY tube community. Ariel is not suitable for such amplifiers.
Indeed in his 'beyond Ariel' quest, OB was first explored to trade high cone excursion for a no-box sound, then he moved to a smallish vented (Altec 416 in 125-40L, 31-34Hz) with horn and now it's a 100L closed cabinet - perhaps subwoofer supported and there's a split between his personal setup and the public design. All of his designs do have one important thing in common: ESL57-like imaging and sound at higher efficiency and bandwidth... but that highly directive nature is not for everyone (I loved my ESL57s for yonks but I wouldn't want them today) I'm not sure if you last statement holds water; Olson's amps, a fully differential 3-stage 300B design, were developed for and are sufficiently powerful to drive the Ariels: his amp can drive the 300Bs 30V into Class A2 with under 3% distortion... Olson reports that his Ariels start to compress well before his amp shows any signs of clipping, and he stated that, subjectively, his Karna amp has the same headroom as a 700W Crown Macro Reference amp.
@@EduardBroekman I believe the issue is not power, but output impedance. Any resonant enclosure speaker relies on electric damping, which a non-feedback amplifier cannot efficiently provide.
@@anatolygrishin4234 I can agree generally with respect to output impedance but note that Lynn Olson made this statement on his Ariel: "I regret to say that many high-end transistor amps just don't sound good with the Ariels; if the transistor amp has banks of power transistors, electrolytics the size of beer cans, and complex floating bias schemes, it probably won't sound good on the Ariels. The Ariels are intended for simple, moderate-power amps, which in the transistor world is 60 watts or less." From my personal experience working with highly resonance enclosures and rear loading drivers optimally, the level of damping and rear horn loading applied in the Ariel will provide an more than sufficient damping without needing any amp's intervention - it's probably damped more than 99% of speakers out there and not very resonant. Additionally, the Ariel has a complex 3-4th order crossover, so I suspect there's a hard limit to what an NFB amp can correctly deal with due to the delays of those filters.. all corrections would come 1-2 cycles late probably doing more harm than good... Anyway, that all said now, I do align with your (inferred, sorry if it isn't) general view on output impedance. Here my own experience is somewhat contra to the science I read on this, which shows poor correlation between damping factor and perceived audio quality. I do find that lower output impedance helps a tight bass response but it depends a lot on how the speaker was designed. One first hand experience I have is that higher winding ratios and lower DCR on non-NFB tube amps helped getting better lows; I've A/B this a couple of times, swapping out just OPTs. In case of NFB amps I expect they'd shine brightest when bi-/tri-amping with direct access to the driver.
@@EduardBroekman Indeed, damping factor below about 10 does not make sense: whether it is 0.001 ohm or 0.8 ohm OI in series with 8 ohm speaker, the speaker resistance dominates 99.9% or 90%, which is practically the same. Speaking of complex enclosures, I am not big fan. A simple ported box can do pretty much the same. Room modes dominate the bass, so optimal speaker placement goes a longer way than complex enclosure.
@@anatolygrishin4234 As for bass reflex, in terms of FR response / SPL, agree complex enclosures do not add much. And if you'd go the Ariel way of applying equally heavy damping as a BR, I'd totally agree with you. But the downside for BR is that its resonance/pressure mode is homogeneous, pressuring all panels equally at the same time. That in turn necessitates heavy bracing and damping, which produces a drab and smeared sound, aka the sound of damping material, while the bass (which can't be damped) is relatively resonant in a small band. Now most people are very accustomed to that BR sound. However, no natural instrument or sound sounds even remotely like a damped cabinet and once you hear this effect, much like refraction, or other distortion, it can become disturbing. High aspect ratio enclosures have spread-out pressure points and hence (IMO) lower damping requirements and to me at least sound a lot closer to unamplified instruments...
I still have my lovely pair of Lynn Olson Ariel's! These sound amazing. The bass is clean even in big rooms. I remember modeling them with a math cad template from Martin J king and they modeled well.
In the eartly 90s a loudspeaker builder named T+A had a very famous TL speaker A160 or so. I really wanted to have it, and found a dealer studio to listen to it. They said the speaakers require big transistor amps because impedance sometimes goes very low. Never the less the bass was full, but also seemed to be a little late and was everything but precise.
Janos! So glad to see you making a video again. Sorry you hadn’t been feeling well. WOH,..Linn Olsen / Derek Walton’s “Ariel” (sp?) transmission line looks like it might take a bit…lol. Crazy but very interesting design though. I got a couple solid wooden boxes with dovetails holding them together. Need to do some design ideas for front and back, but especially internally.. It’s much smaller than something like my Fortes or Pendragons. I’m hoping to make my smaller DIY speakers live cabinets, but is there a limit to that at a certain size? (Neutered of Neutral?) Haha 😂 Love your vids, my friend! 😂 🔊😊🎶💜🙏
Lynn’s latest is Altec based 416 in a relatively compact sealed cab with a purposeful shape, then a large format compression driver (tbd what model) on top and a choice of two horns he has not yet decided on since his last update, IIRC.. Candidates are either Azurahorns, or custom jobs from Joseph Crowe with a wider dispersion..
Thank you so much for your great video reply - you gave me some great new insights!! What led me to ask is that the possibility of having a 'wider' port response than a resonant BR port. Plus, in a speaker with two TLs or two well placed drivers, the TL/TQWT/Voigt combing effect can be mitigated and we can omit the ('wrong sounding') damping to smooth out the driver/port response. So that led me to check in with you.... NOW, what I never got about your 'Lancelot' design is that the BR port is there as a kind of pressure 'valve' for frequencies at the bottom end of its QW length and leave everything above it 'resonant' or in order words, utilise all of the woofer's backside energy. That completely escaped me until now. So if you need me, I'll be chewing on that bit for a while :)) Couple of quick 'TL' comments: (1) Folds act as lowpasses (2) If BR calculations indicate very long ports, a negatively tapered TL looks like a very elegant solution (3) TLs seem to be the only enclosure type that can effectively dampen the driver's self resonance when designed so that Driver Fs=QW length - but I'm unsure how useful that is in the scheme of things!
I built a Sub with a 2,000 watt RMS Capable massive 18" sub driver and using an L-Shaped port designed with Bass Box software, it is 13hz to 100hz +/- 3dB. And powered with an 1,800 watt Class A/B external power amp it shakes the house like an earthquake!
Wow, that's quite a monster! :) Just be careful, it really does produce energies like an earthquake, can do structural damage to your building with that. There was an attempt to place such subs in cinemas, and they had to shut them down because they critically damaged the buildings.
Hi Janos, transmission lines often have a problem with comb filtering. Clearly the Ariel has mitigated that in its own way. You sometimes see a cavity of 1/3 or 1/6 of the transition line to mitigate that. I have also seen designs where the opening of the transmission line resembles a Karlsson resonator. This way you have a wide band transmission line that should eliminate the comb filtering. I kind of like that principal much more than what I have seen of the Ariel. I have even thought of combining that with a Voigt pipe. What are your thoughts about this for the transmission line and for the Voigt pipe? Or a BR port for that matter...
Hi Hugo, that's what I did with the Voice of Lancelot.... :) It would also scale to smaller volume TLs or ones with different drivers. I think it's a good idea to add a BR port to a TL when the TL is long enough so that the 1/4 frequency is where the port opens. That seems to be a sweet spot for synergy between port and TL...
Hello Janos, would it be possible to build an omni directional folded voigt pipe speaker? It would have the speaker cone on the top of the cabinet so it fires directly down the pipe with a conical reflector above it and with ports on each side of the cabinet near the top. No need to reply if you think this is a stupid idea lol. Keep up the good work, Neil
Yes, it would be a good idea to build one. You might not need a conical reflector if the pipe is tall enough and your ceiling is low and uniform. (popcorn ceilings - you will need the reflector.) My Voice of Lancelot is essentially a folded pipe with the 400Hz and higher frequencies are omni, fired up to the ceiling, and the 40- 400Hz is fired to the front, sub-40Hz is omni again. In my experience the critical part for omnidirectionality is the 500Hz and higher region, as below 500Hz we lose the ability to pinpoint the source of the sound, and even though the driver radiates the sound forward, bass will propagate in an omnidirectional way even if driver tries to push it forward (that's how bass works, as the soundwave is long enough to warp around the cabinet and expand from there in every direction with roughly same efficiency).
@@realworldaudio Hello Janos, thank you for replying. I will have a go at doing this. It will take a while. Thank you for the advice as well regard Neil
Both history and present. The commenter just below your comment has a pair. There are lots of them still around and the plans are available so anyone can build them. I think it is vital that we are aware of the speakers that were impactful at the time of their inception. Thank you for your comment, danke sehr!
Lynn's ideas about speakers progressed since Ariel. Later on he advocated open baffle and vintage Alnico drivers. One of the reasons could be that he has got interested in no-feedback transformer-coupled DHT push-pull amplifiers. He designed Aurora and Karna, the amplifiers highly regarded in the DIY tube community. Ariel is not suitable for such amplifiers.
Indeed in his 'beyond Ariel' quest, OB was first explored to trade high cone excursion for a no-box sound, then he moved to a smallish vented (Altec 416 in 125-40L, 31-34Hz) with horn and now it's a 100L closed cabinet - perhaps subwoofer supported and there's a split between his personal setup and the public design. All of his designs do have one important thing in common: ESL57-like imaging and sound at higher efficiency and bandwidth... but that highly directive nature is not for everyone (I loved my ESL57s for yonks but I wouldn't want them today)
I'm not sure if you last statement holds water; Olson's amps, a fully differential 3-stage 300B design, were developed for and are sufficiently powerful to drive the Ariels: his amp can drive the 300Bs 30V into Class A2 with under 3% distortion... Olson reports that his Ariels start to compress well before his amp shows any signs of clipping, and he stated that, subjectively, his Karna amp has the same headroom as a 700W Crown Macro Reference amp.
@@EduardBroekman I believe the issue is not power, but output impedance. Any resonant enclosure speaker relies on electric damping, which a non-feedback amplifier cannot efficiently provide.
@@anatolygrishin4234 I can agree generally with respect to output impedance but note that Lynn Olson made this statement on his Ariel:
"I regret to say that many high-end transistor amps just don't sound good with the Ariels; if the transistor amp has banks of power transistors, electrolytics the size of beer cans, and complex floating bias schemes, it probably won't sound good on the Ariels. The Ariels are intended for simple, moderate-power amps, which in the transistor world is 60 watts or less."
From my personal experience working with highly resonance enclosures and rear loading drivers optimally, the level of damping and rear horn loading applied in the Ariel will provide an more than sufficient damping without needing any amp's intervention - it's probably damped more than 99% of speakers out there and not very resonant. Additionally, the Ariel has a complex 3-4th order crossover, so I suspect there's a hard limit to what an NFB amp can correctly deal with due to the delays of those filters.. all corrections would come 1-2 cycles late probably doing more harm than good...
Anyway, that all said now, I do align with your (inferred, sorry if it isn't) general view on output impedance. Here my own experience is somewhat contra to the science I read on this, which shows poor correlation between damping factor and perceived audio quality. I do find that lower output impedance helps a tight bass response but it depends a lot on how the speaker was designed. One first hand experience I have is that higher winding ratios and lower DCR on non-NFB tube amps helped getting better lows; I've A/B this a couple of times, swapping out just OPTs. In case of NFB amps I expect they'd shine brightest when bi-/tri-amping with direct access to the driver.
@@EduardBroekman Indeed, damping factor below about 10 does not make sense: whether it is 0.001 ohm or 0.8 ohm OI in series with 8 ohm speaker, the speaker resistance dominates 99.9% or 90%, which is practically the same.
Speaking of complex enclosures, I am not big fan. A simple ported box can do pretty much the same. Room modes dominate the bass, so optimal speaker placement goes a longer way than complex enclosure.
@@anatolygrishin4234 As for bass reflex, in terms of FR response / SPL, agree complex enclosures do not add much. And if you'd go the Ariel way of applying equally heavy damping as a BR, I'd totally agree with you.
But the downside for BR is that its resonance/pressure mode is homogeneous, pressuring all panels equally at the same time. That in turn necessitates heavy bracing and damping, which produces a drab and smeared sound, aka the sound of damping material, while the bass (which can't be damped) is relatively resonant in a small band.
Now most people are very accustomed to that BR sound. However, no natural instrument or sound sounds even remotely like a damped cabinet and once you hear this effect, much like refraction, or other distortion, it can become disturbing.
High aspect ratio enclosures have spread-out pressure points and hence (IMO) lower damping requirements and to me at least sound a lot closer to unamplified instruments...
I still have my lovely pair of Lynn Olson Ariel's! These sound amazing. The bass is clean even in big rooms. I remember modeling them with a math cad template from Martin J king and they modeled well.
In the eartly 90s a loudspeaker builder named T+A had a very famous TL speaker A160 or so. I really wanted to have it, and found a dealer studio to listen to it. They said the speaakers require big transistor amps because impedance sometimes goes very low. Never the less the bass was full, but also seemed to be a little late and was everything but precise.
I opted for the ME-2, same drivers, same x-over, added subwoofers. Sound great!
Janos! So glad to see you making a video again. Sorry you hadn’t been feeling well.
WOH,..Linn Olsen / Derek Walton’s “Ariel” (sp?) transmission line looks like it might take a bit…lol. Crazy but very interesting design though.
I got a couple solid wooden boxes with dovetails holding them together. Need to do some design ideas for front and back, but especially internally.. It’s much smaller than something like my Fortes or Pendragons.
I’m hoping to make my smaller DIY speakers live cabinets, but is there a limit to that at a certain size?
(Neutered of Neutral?) Haha 😂 Love your vids, my friend! 😂 🔊😊🎶💜🙏
Lynn’s latest is Altec based 416 in a relatively compact sealed cab with a purposeful shape, then a large format compression driver (tbd what model) on top and a choice of two horns he has not yet decided on since his last update, IIRC.. Candidates are either Azurahorns, or custom jobs from Joseph Crowe with a wider dispersion..
Thank you so much for your great video reply - you gave me some great new insights!!
What led me to ask is that the possibility of having a 'wider' port response than a resonant BR port. Plus, in a speaker with two TLs or two well placed drivers, the TL/TQWT/Voigt combing effect can be mitigated and we can omit the ('wrong sounding') damping to smooth out the driver/port response. So that led me to check in with you.... NOW, what I never got about your 'Lancelot' design is that the BR port is there as a kind of pressure 'valve' for frequencies at the bottom end of its QW length and leave everything above it 'resonant' or in order words, utilise all of the woofer's backside energy. That completely escaped me until now. So if you need me, I'll be chewing on that bit for a while :))
Couple of quick 'TL' comments: (1) Folds act as lowpasses (2) If BR calculations indicate very long ports, a negatively tapered TL looks like a very elegant solution (3) TLs seem to be the only enclosure type that can effectively dampen the driver's self resonance when designed so that Driver Fs=QW length - but I'm unsure how useful that is in the scheme of things!
I built a Sub with a 2,000 watt RMS Capable massive 18" sub driver and using an L-Shaped port designed with Bass Box software, it is 13hz to 100hz +/- 3dB. And powered with an 1,800 watt Class A/B external power amp it shakes the house like an earthquake!
Wow, that's quite a monster! :) Just be careful, it really does produce energies like an earthquake, can do structural damage to your building with that. There was an attempt to place such subs in cinemas, and they had to shut them down because they critically damaged the buildings.
Hi Janos, transmission lines often have a problem with comb filtering. Clearly the Ariel has mitigated that in its own way. You sometimes see a cavity of 1/3 or 1/6 of the transition line to mitigate that. I have also seen designs where the opening of the transmission line resembles a Karlsson resonator. This way you have a wide band transmission line that should eliminate the comb filtering. I kind of like that principal much more than what I have seen of the Ariel. I have even thought of combining that with a Voigt pipe. What are your thoughts about this for the transmission line and for the Voigt pipe? Or a BR port for that matter...
Hi Hugo, that's what I did with the Voice of Lancelot.... :) It would also scale to smaller volume TLs or ones with different drivers. I think it's a good idea to add a BR port to a TL when the TL is long enough so that the 1/4 frequency is where the port opens. That seems to be a sweet spot for synergy between port and TL...
Hello Janos, would it be possible to build an omni directional folded voigt pipe speaker? It would have the speaker cone on the top of the cabinet so it fires directly down the pipe with a conical reflector above it and with ports on each side of the cabinet near the top. No need to reply if you think this is a stupid idea lol. Keep up the good work, Neil
Yes, it would be a good idea to build one. You might not need a conical reflector if the pipe is tall enough and your ceiling is low and uniform. (popcorn ceilings - you will need the reflector.) My Voice of Lancelot is essentially a folded pipe with the 400Hz and higher frequencies are omni, fired up to the ceiling, and the 40- 400Hz is fired to the front, sub-40Hz is omni again.
In my experience the critical part for omnidirectionality is the 500Hz and higher region, as below 500Hz we lose the ability to pinpoint the source of the sound, and even though the driver radiates the sound forward, bass will propagate in an omnidirectional way even if driver tries to push it forward (that's how bass works, as the soundwave is long enough to warp around the cabinet and expand from there in every direction with roughly same efficiency).
@@realworldaudio Hello Janos, thank you for replying. I will have a go at doing this. It will take a while. Thank you for the advice as well regard Neil
😮😮ein toller lautsprecher. Doch sinnlos darüber zu philosophieren wenn es die Chassis nicht mehr gibt. Historie
Both history and present. The commenter just below your comment has a pair. There are lots of them still around and the plans are available so anyone can build them. I think it is vital that we are aware of the speakers that were impactful at the time of their inception. Thank you for your comment, danke sehr!