mixsit,
Welcome to our forum! I dropped the ball on this one. I was on the circle several times yesterday and never saw your posting. Please accept my apology - I wasn't ignoring you.
If you like it loud and/or wide dynamics - that's us - in spades. I've run the "little" Timepiece with a 750WPC into
8-ohms, Crown Macro-Reference wherein the amp was clipping once every 2 or 3 seconds - without a hint of fatigue from the speaker - that's over 1,060 watts peak! Now, that was on relatively wide dynamic range jazz material so the peaks were up there with respect to the average power.
We tried that same level with some highly compressed heavy metal and although they sounded incredible, we were no longer clipping the amp and after a while, I started smelling baking enamel coming from the voice-coils of the woofers. Needless to say, we shut it down right away, but nevertheless, the woofers didn't fail. Another 10 seconds or so and that may not have been the story though.
In that instance, since there were virtually no dynamics, we were dumping large amounts of raw power into that one little woofer so it's no surprise they got hot. Still, the volume was incredible and the customer that was with us stated that he'd never heard anything like it in his life.
Now, just translate that to the 3dB more power handling you get from the extra woofer in the Continuums, and that should give you a pretty good idea what they will do. Get out'a Dodge man, you just can't play them as loud as they can handle in anything resembling a normal room - even a big one.
The Continuum A.D. MKII is 30.75"H X 12.5"W X 15.75"D. Be watching AC here in the next few days, there will be a review from a new owner of the Continuum A.D.'s. I think you'll be impressed. Then there's the Positive Feedback Online review with a link posted here on our circle of the Continuum 2.5's, which are essentially the same as the A.D.'s except for bottom octave bass extension - which I don't think you want or need. It's an "audiophile" review but it should give you some idea about their sound capabilities.
There's an interesting development taking place with regards to accuracy, resolution and detail...at least as far as we are concerned. There's the view that "accurate" speakers sound harsh and excessively detailed. We are finding that this is true only because the claimed accuracy of such products is not actually realized.
Yes, they may have a flat frequency response, high power handling ability and even controlled directivity, but what about their real distortion levels? Specifically, what is the distortion at higher frequencies? High frequency distortion is harder to measure to begin with and even harder to do anything about. Pro Sound's solution has virtually almost always been to use compression driver/horn devices. The problem is, those devices trade excursion limited diaphragm distortion for air non-linearity. Although they are extremely efficient, distortion levels increase as frequency increases because the compression ratios are so high that the air itself cannot handle it. It literally becomes non-linear and produces harmonic distortion even though the diaphragm is not distorting. That’s why horns usually sound somewhat "harsh" at high frequencies.
Our waveguides operate at compression ratios that lie between those of a standard baffle mounted tweeter and that of compression drivers. The tweeter is completely unloaded from the waveguide above 5 kHz so it doesn't benefit from any acoustic gain from the waveguide from there on up. Hence, it doesn't suffer from the high compression ratio air non-linearity effect as horns do either, but then the system's distortion becomes totally dependant on the performance of the tweeter's diaphragm itself. That's why we have to use a really good tweeter to start with.
The combined effect is a very "soft" sounding high end that doesn't exhibit that "aggressive" quality most associate with highly "accurate" speakers. The upshot is that high accuracy is not aggressive sounding or excessively detailed. Those artifacts are actually the result of insufficient accuracy. If you raise the accuracy bar high enough, everything sounds more musical and pleasing to the ear while retaining all the detail and resolution. At first exposure to this level of sound though, most folks that are expecting our products to be highly accurate and possessing that analytical presentation are somewhat knocked off balance. After listening for a while and letting the speakers break-in, one discovers all the detail is there - it's just not exaggerated. We're talking paradigm shift in expectations here. In many ways, our designs do represent something totally new to the industry. Our slogan is "
the new Reference for the new Millennium." I think as time passes many will come to realize...it's not just a slogan.
Welcome aboard!
-Bob
