Mangers ...

[andrew Ivimey]

Okay, just a quickie and I don't expect any answers ...

Mangers are a rarity indeed though they are still made in Germany by, I believe, a small family business. If you Google them I am sure you will find what they look like - decidedly odd with the array of neodynium magnets and being flat too.

There used to be a UK distributor. I spoke to one of the reps - very helpful and enthusiastic.

They are not at all a full range speaker even though I tried various boxes, Voight horns and back loaded horn cabinets.

My point as them being like insensitive Lowthers was that I feel, through experience, that Lowthers are also not full range speakers unless you really do have some clever, huge designs that are impractical for any setting I have lived in. Lowthers are very healthily sensitive and above say 200Hz can sound breathtakingly beautiful. You still need a good imagination for the missing two octaves. I found Mangers to be similar though with less of the stunning micro-detail that late at night and gently quiet Lowthers can produce and convince the user that they are well worth listening to. Mangers are comparable in price to Lowthers. I managed to buy them relatively cheaply and realised that I wasn't going to get anywhere with them particularly as I was getting varying and differing bliss and joyfulnesses out of e.g. Saburos! Tannoys and the beloved Heils.

Life is just too short, unfortunately.

(Um, I still think Mark's thread should split - it would be worthwhile as there is so much in it that is very hinterestingK indeed.)

[IslandPink]

I know JC Morrison is a fan of Mangers. Somewhere on his blog there are some pics .

[Scottmoose]

Akin and not akin.

Lowthers are anything but linear in terms of their frequency response. Yes, part of their appeal, but +10dB or more peaking through the 7KHz region & not much above 14KHz in many (not all) is not my definition of neutral. I suspect they're somewhat prisoners of their own success; their buyers demand a particular behaviour. QED. The irony being that the original units were never intended to be used as direct radiators, having indirect radiation via the compound Lowther-Voigt horn, which would take down said peaking, while the restricted HF of contemporary recordings / carrier mediums meant the relative lack of the top octave didn't make much difference one way or the other. Nor do Lowthers really like being pushed low, sans a big horn. As in 'big', i.e. bigger than a lot of the popular examples. You can force them with an MLTL & correction etc., but it's not really what they do well by physical design character; distortion quickly increases.

Manger units appear to have a similar issue re distortion. Same often goes for tweeters; the Manger unit[s] can be thought of as wideband mids or big tweeters. Within reason, the top octave is less important than the distortion character lower down near the XO frequency; you can have a driver with good LF extension, but if it's severely distorting (look at the harmonic distortion figures -forget THD, it's worthless, but a breakdown of distortion by order tells you a lot) then it's unlikely to sound up to much if run low. Mangers need crossing over to dedicated woofers to give of their best. My experience with them is limited, but I'd probably want to think of 500Hz, with a 3rd order high pass as a minimum, and preferably higher. I always hated them until I heard one done roughly along these lines, LR4 (I think) which was much better.

[andrew Ivimey]

What you suggest in you rsecond paragraph, Scott, is pretty much what the Manger Rep recommended. Then, perhaps, they are something very special!