One of the things that I enjoy most these days is playing with all kinds of new drivers.
Take this one:
I had talked to the guys at Arya Audio Labs a few years back when they were working on a new tweeter concept. Time went buy when I ran into them again at an audio show. This time around they were showing their new AirBlade tweeter prototype. It is an AMT tweeter, but as you can probably see by the design, the on-axis response is about 140 degrees. It has perfectly flat impedance and Arya rated it as capable of performing flat down to 1kHz. Very interesting.
A few months later, I learned they were finally in production and emailed to make sure I could get an early pair. I now have #'s 24 and 25 off the assembly line in my possession.
Like any early adopter, there were some issues Arya was still working on. Specifically, the tweeter could handle audio down to 1kH, but the frequency response was down quite a bit compared to the output at 2kHz...so much so that if we were to develop a passive design with it, we would have to use it at 2kHz and above. Of course, we already had a couple of very good tweeter options that cross at 2kHz or slightly lower and cost considerably less. But since we had purchased them, we felt the need to do something with them.
We realized that if we did an active design, we could easily correct the frequency response, so that is what we decided to do. The only question was what woofers to use them with.
Purifi woofers seem to be the hottest new midwoofer design on the market. So we ordered four of those and a couple of dual channel plate amps with DSP we could use to generate a crossover.
Now we had a ton of money invested in parts. So it was time to make some sawdust...
The first thing I noticed was that I didn't have to do anything special with the Purifi woofers. They were flat to begin with. So creating an active crossover for these was not difficult at all.
How do they sound? In a word, GREAT! The problem is, the resulting speakers would be VERY expensive and our customers don't seem all that enthused about active speakers. So it is unlikely that we will ever offer them as a regular product on our web site.
But it was an interesting project and I now have a one-of-a-kind speaker to add to my personal collection. That's my idea of fun.
- Jim
