Project 10 is my own project, started circa july 2002.
It has nothing new in it. I liked all my projects, but every one of
them excelled in one area and was weak in another.
I felt that I was running in circles around the sound I want.
Finally, I decided to make that final ultimate loudspeaker. I took
the best from all my projects and put this one together.
I used readily available box from Project 6 with added scrap pieces
of MDF.
From Project 2 I took the side woofer idea. I like it for many reasons.
From Project 6 I took the ATC mid-dome and Raven 2 tweeter. From
Project 7 I took the idea of using the midrange driver on open baffle.
Here enters the so far never used driver - ATC 75/234 sc bass. In a
four-way
configuration, the dome and 234 form a perfect midrange.
They complement each other in a magical way. The 234 on open baffle
is so damn fast that it re-defines the term fast driver.
It may seem odd, but the speaker has quite strange radiation pattern
- bass is side firing and sealed, mid-bass is open baffle, midrange is
sealed dome, and tweeter is a sealed ribbon. But I tried the mid-bass
as
sealed, and it does not sound nearly as good as the open one. Even if
it
is the only dipole in the pack - the whole presentation is dominated by
its open and free character.
I had to break all my own rules more than once - I used resistors, I
made a four-way, and nothing was simple about this design.
I spent 4 days with signal generators and measured this speaker
inside-out.
My fantastic new creation - the INSTANT
CROSSOVER
helped me significantly to make the XO right.
Because it is a four-way, I had a lot of freedom in setting the
slopes
and XO points. I tried to use only the best "part" of each driver. For
example, the failure of Project 6 was a result of the dome being unable
to make any good music in the 300-800 Hz range. In P-10 the dome enters
around 800 Hz. From that point up it has no equal.
The first listening came as total shock. The sound was so good. Too
good. The first XO has been here without any mod for 2 weeks and every
day I listen for an hour or so and I still cant believe how well it
sounds.
Sometimes I bypass the R 4,7 Ohm in the mid-dome and the presentation
is
more open, more detailed, wider. I prefere it like that.
Compared to all my previous projects put together, P-10 excels in every
aspect I can name.
1. The in-the-air suspended image - so free of speaker placement and
so real, that I cant describe it.
2. Bass quality - absolutely fantastic. The bass has so much meat,
power, weight, and none of the boooom boooom of lesser speakers. A good
transient from a bass guitar can blow you off the chair.
3. Reality of acoustic sounds - applause, percussion, breathing - all
comes so frighteningly real that I often laugh at my feeling that
someone
actually is in this room.
4. Overall energy - the sound is very very energetic. It rocks and
swings and kicks ass just as I remember from live jazz club
performances.
5. Low distortions - this loudspeakers is very audibly free of
distortions
and compression. It sounds just fundamentally right. Sound is clear,
clean,
crisp. If you are into audio, you would describe it as a million dollar
sound. That is the first impression I have.
The ultra-microscopic approach to revealing the recordings does not
make the music sound bad at all. On the contrary, this works like a
microscope
with rosy lenses - every recording sounds better than I remember.
* Kakamuka is a buddhist word for something like a good spirit in
the
house which is probably very feminine in nature. Or so I was
told.
Tweeter - change for Raven 1 or S-s 9700
ATC: use normal dome, not super
Total savings: maybe 540 USD
Total bill for normalized version: 2990 for a pair.
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