[John Chapman]

Hello!

Al was kind enough to lend me his new 95dB Towers a few weeks back. I know Al well and considder him a freind. Also we work together on various things audio here in Vancouver so you'll have to considder my impressions biased! Since not too many have had time with this speaker yet and since it sounded great here I thought I'd post my impressions anyway. For one week Al also let me pass 'The Tower' over to  another local audio experimenter's home - I'll let him know about this post in case he wants to add his comments.  Both he and I tend to play with lowish power amps so the Towers were a nice fit.

I used them here mainly with Wyetech Labs 18W twin 300b amps. Front end was a DCS stack with an un-named TVC pre-amp.  I am not one to go on and on about sonics and but I'll do my best to describe them.  

They have a full bottom end for twin 6" drivers - maybe too full on some bass heavy music for my 14'x20' shop / listenning room. I did not get a chance to measure them - Al maybe you can list where they actually roll off. I would not think a sub would be needed for most folks. I find many high efficeincy speakers 'music dependant' - by that I mean they sound very very good with some music and yet very very bad on other music. It's not a recording quality thing but more a question of the ballance of the music matching the anomolies of the speaker. I have owned speakers like this in the past and I tend to become a slave to the speaker - choosing what works with it and avoiding what does not. Having lived with this it is one of the things I keep in mind when choosing speakers and Al's towers did not have this tendency at all - which to me means they must be fairly flat and well behaved.  I have a thing for voices - female voices in particular - and 'The Towers' did a great job of vocals.  Highs were very nice but did not stand out - a good thing in my mind. As soon as I hear that extra 'sparkle' and 'detail' some tweeters have it starts to piss me off....... I have spent time listenning to various similar ribbons to the ones in 'The Towers' so I suspect the highs are 'familliar' enough to me that they just seemed to fit in fine.

I gathered from Al that these drivers are the first rev proto's and I'd say they already are fine drivers. He is trying I think to get another db or so out of them to get efficiency up a bit. With the 18W amps they would play fine with any music at any level. I tried some 2A3 amps I have here - about 2 watts or so - and although I could listen fine they lost a sense of control and authority that the more powerful amps had. I wish I'd had a typical 8W 300B here to play with since that is what at least some listeners would maybe mate with this speaker. I'd bet it would work fine.  

Anyway - just wanted to pass that bit on - please post any specific questions and I'll do my best to reply. I think they are off to a great start. For my taste they are one of the best speakers Al has made.



Many Thansk!


John

[machine]

Have you heard the RA8s?

If so how do these compare?

Thanks

[John Chapman]

Hello!

I have not had a chance to really listen to the RA8's. That's a good one to compare to since I gather pricing would not be all that different and efficiency is similar. If Al has a pair setup when I am next over I'll make sure to take time and listen so I can comment.

Thansk!

John

[John Chapman]

Hello!

Bit of a follow-up. The local fellow who also had some time with these speakers asked me to post these notes:

"
 Certainly I can't say anything technical about these as I have no equipment with which to make measurements . I used a parafeed 6336 amp (something in the neighbourhood of six watts) to drive them. Both my girlfriend and I liked them a lot.  I called Al to thank him for letting me try them (courtesy of JohnC.) and during the conversation I tried to persuade Al to sell them to me. Being prototypes he couldn't and so I had to let them go.  Yup , very nice, clear , direct , very solid bottom end and very very nice for vocals.  Not a low level detail showoff with the power I gave them , though that may have been due to other system interactive causes that I don't know about yet. They certainly did not seem to lack detail when I listened to them at John's place before taking them home.  All in all, a very good speaker. I gathered from JohnC/Al that these protoype drivers were a bit under the 95 db target and the production units will be a bit higher efficiency (AL?). I found myself thinking  that if AL can get the sensitivity up a little more they might prove to be an answer to the prayers of many  low power tube amp owners. . . .

"


Back to me here:

I had gobs of power with the twin 300B's (16W or so) here but I think that 6 watts is about the lower power limit for these speakers. For fun we tried my 2A3's here (3W or so) and they were quite listenable but the Wytech's were much happier driving them.

Thanskj!

John

[RAW]

Thanks John for the time you put on the new MTM.

Bob had even said after listening to them on your set up and then when he had them on his Well lets say he wants a few upgrades.

Over all we are really happy with the 95MTM and think with the changes to the production driver we may just hit what we wanted.

Having the lower wattage set up for these is were I was looking at going  with the design to match the ribbon as close as possible for crossover components I wanted the least amount of resistance on that ribbbon and that ment bring up the drivers as high as we could.

The finished demo pair is coming soon.


Thanks again John for the review.

[RAW]

Have you heard the RA8s?

If so how do these compare?

Thanks

Well we are just finishing another pair of RA8 and will see about getting John to have a listen to them before we ship them off to Don.
Then John can post a comment on the RA8.If we can arrange the time.