I was gob-smacked when I saw these last weekend. The latest creation from Earle Weston of Weston Acoustics. The monoblacks are 300B, the preamp uses a 6SN7 per channel. They sounded very nice driving a small pair of 3″ fullrange drivers in a transmission line type of cabinet.Read More →
Over the weekend, Francesca turned into a fully-active three-way. This was done at the famous “Bathurst GtG” of terry j, with help and advice from several people who listened and commented as things went along, but in particular with assistance from Andrew Ward and Paul Spencer. The heart of the system is now a pair of miniDSP 2×4 modules, each running as a three crossover/eq unit. (They can also be used as a four-way, which is I think going to be part of Francesca II….). While they take power from USB, I have an external supply connected – something that is really necessary if youRead More →
With much help from Paul Spencer, I was able to do some gated measurements on the Francesca prototype. One thing we puzzled over was the frequency response of the midrange. Here is the 1m measurement (gate is about 8ms): Red is on-axis, blue is at (approx) 30 degrees. The frequency of the dip, around 1700 Hz, doesn’t correspond to any of the baffle dimensions! If it were the first dip in the dipole response, a 30cm wide baffle should exhibit this dip around 1150 Hz, not at 1700 Hz. And why does the depression continue up past 5 kHz? This was a puzzlement. In theRead More →
A friend of mine asked on an online forum about a new gym (for exercise classes) that has serious acoustical problems. the whole place rings like a bell … the “stage” where the instructor works is beset with reflected sound … the delays and sound reflections are such that the beats in any rhythm are seriously out of step with each other at different points in the room…. the instructors are having a really hard time staying on beat … My take on it is that the reverberation time is simply too high. While there are other issues, like speaker placement relative to the instructor,Read More →
I have to say, I really like the little miniDSP unit. It fulfils a useful purpose, it’s easy to use, and it’s cheap to boot. It doesn’t pretend to be the ultimate anything – you plug it in, and it “just works.” Plain and simple, but also powerful. So, I’ve decided to write a series of tutorials on it, as I think that perhaps some well-written articles will help people cut through the (inevitable – it is DSP after all) jargon and see how they might use it for themselves. My first tutorial is now published on hifizine.com, it’s called “Subwoofer integration and equalization with theRead More →