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CONVENTIONAL SPEAKER MANUFACTURERS
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Planar drivers coming in Ribbon, electrostatic and piezoelectric film configurations, with flat and pleated diaphragms; flat panel speakers featuring a variety of means to excite their surfaces; horn speakers using many different methods to control the wave after it has left the diaphragm. These are all loudspeaker designs which have seen radical developments in the past 10 years. Many of them would not be recognizable as a speaker to an audiophile of 50 years ago.
But the bulk of loudspeakers which make their way into the stereo and home theater systems of today are not the radical re-thinks of air movement listed above but the conventional design paradigm classified as “dome/box” speakers.
The typical configuration is a bass driver and possibly a midrange driver, both cones, with a dome driver handling the top end all on a single flat baffle as one side of a 6 sided box.
The fact that the basic design hasn’t changed in 50 years doesn’t mean that improvements haven’t been made. In the past 10 years particularly there have been huge strides made in diaphragm materials, cabinet materials, bracing and damping technology. More consideration has been given to air movement in and around the cabinet as well as to typical consumer room placements and listening positions.
In short, both the drivers and their cabinets have been improved in terms of their simple technical performance and in terms of how they work in real world listening rooms. To be sure, there is phony technology presented as breakthroughs, eye-candy presented as quality and high prices presented as proof of performance but, on the whole, the workaday dome box loudspeaker has come a long way.
There are many solid designs from reputable manufacturers sold at reasonable prices but here are a few companies which offer consistent excellence. Newform may or may not agree with their various design approaches but their execution and basic integrity are of a high order.
The differences between these best-of-the-best conventional manufacturers and Newform is in the basic design approach. From our point of view, a dome tweeter has some basic, unavoidable limitations.
For a start, a dome is round and it is small. Therefore it radiates in hemispheric pattern and must move a great deal to pump enough air at high volumes. A dome unavoidably bounces a huge amount of sound off the ceiling and floor of a listening room reducing soundstage focus as well as introducing a fatigue factor. By compressing at high volumes, the sound gets somewhat congested.
A dome uses a coil which as an inductor, unavoidably introduces phase shift over the drivers frequency bandwidth. This slightly smears the higher frequencies resulting in a slight loss of transparency and detail - the background is less black.
Also, a dome tweeter is almost always mounted on a large flat baffle which introduces baffle bounce (the wave moving along the baffle surface “bounces” or reflects several times until reaches the edge of the baffle) as well as diffraction (where the wave propagation suddenly changes when it encounters a major change in the baffle - ie, the edge of the cabinet) . Both these conditions contribute to time delay anomalies and reduce transparency and the focus of the soundstage.
Although crossover frequencies in dome/box systems have been moving lower, they are still too high to avoid the off-axis suckouts which lead to a narrow sweetspot and reduced soundstage focus.
Newform’s Ribbon technology avoids these issues almost completely with the result that our systems offer soundstage breadth and focus and an overall level of transparency from low to very high volume levels that even the best dome/box systems can’t match. That is, in our opinion and that of many of our customers.
Our new Coaxial Ribbon LineSource designs come in at higher price levels than we have occupied before but they offer significant improvements in both fidelity and practicality over most loudspeakers, regardless of price- conventional or planar - in most listening rooms. They are just as electronics friendly as our
other speakers and thus, for $15,000 total system cost, it is possible to attain ultra system performance.
But for the largest part of the market, the continuous refinements applied to the well known problems of traditional dome / box speakers has been enough to maintain a high level of satisfaction. So if you are looking for a conventional loudspeaker, take a look at the speakers offered by Revel, Thiel, Totem, Vandersteen, Paradigm, KEF, B&W and Wilson Audio. They may not be the cheapest but they have done a huge amount of work to refine the conventional box speaker and bring it up to its current level of performance.
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