Reference Rhapsody

[Reffc]

Walnut pair now completed and sound pretty good too:







Crossovers:

[Greg]

Nice job, Paul. Have their been any changes since we heard your prototypes at mine earlier this year?

[Reffc]

Nice job, Paul. Have their been any changes since we heard your prototypes at mine earlier this year?

Hi Greg. Yes. Loads of development work has gone into them since then totalling a few hundred hours. Crossovers have been fine tuned following extensive acoustic measurement to get them sounding seamless and distortion has been lowered to vanishing levels with carefully worked out notch filters for the tweeter and woofer (without the need for higher order filter slopes). cabinet internals have also received a slight tweak to lower cabinet colouration further (to be fair, they were already pretty good in this respect).

They are night and day better sounding now. The original prototypes and current customer pairs are all to the latest spec.

[Greg]

Hi Paul, that all sounds very good and of course ready for you to join with Albarry at Whittlebury Hall National Audio Show the weekend after next. I hope it goes well for you. ðŸ‘￾

[Reffc]

[chris661]

The lower response is a little odd, but it is not flat to 20Hz (look again). It should shelve off steeply from 30Hz and I'm looking into the mic calibration files to see if there's an anomoly there, as I suspect that is where the optimistic results close to 20Hz stem from. As for the rest of it, it is what it is and measures the way it does, and I'm more than happy with the end result. Holes in response depend entirely on room dimensions for null points and also on any diffraction anomolies or internal damping anomolies (as you are aware, a ripple in response can be an indication of slight under damping or a problem with internal cabinet dimensions). The reality is though that these are a very fine sounding pair of loudspeakers

I'm curious: how did you eliminate floor bounce?

There's usually a very deep hole in the response in the 1-300Hz range due to cancellations at the listening position. Does the room/floor have any partcular treatment, or just a very thick rug?

Chris

[Reffc]

The lower response is a little odd, but it is not flat to 20Hz (look again). It should shelve off steeply from 30Hz and I'm looking into the mic calibration files to see if there's an anomoly there, as I suspect that is where the optimistic results close to 20Hz stem from. As for the rest of it, it is what it is and measures the way it does, and I'm more than happy with the end result. Holes in response depend entirely on room dimensions for null points and also on any diffraction anomolies or internal damping anomolies (as you are aware, a ripple in response can be an indication of slight under damping or a problem with internal cabinet dimensions). The reality is though that these are a very fine sounding pair of loudspeakers

I'm curious: how did you eliminate floor bounce?

There's usually a very deep hole in the response in the 1-300Hz range due to cancellations at the listening position. Does the room/floor have any partcular treatment, or just a very thick rug?

Chris

Well, I haven't particularly noticed any significant dip in response with these or my previous loudspeakers, but look again and you'll see that there is some ripple in response, including a dip at between 100 and 300 Hz.

Also, these were measured at 1.5m sited in free space, not at the listening position plus the response plot is 1/3 Octave smoothed. There are spiked dips at the lower frequencies in the raw measurement files.

The room is carpeted. The LF ripple is partially due to cancellations at the measurement position and from internal reflection. I have experimented with internal damping to smooth the response and succeeded in flattening quite a bit at the lower end but at the expense of dynamics, so I removed some of the wool wadding until the sound quality was optimal.

All in all, I am delighted with them and whilst happy to discuss the build, they have to be heard before judgements are passed. They're the best I've personally had in my listening room and are really much better than some previous commercially sourced models (inlcuding SHL5s, Tannoy Turnberrys and some lumley 300ABs). They are accurate, revealing and very enjoyable, allowing you to get to the heart of the music without the usual hifi niggles getting in the way. Off axis response is also excellent.