Very nice and I like that you are pushing the limits! Now that my friend has a pair of your sealed line arrays and I own a pair of RC-5Gs I can say the line arrays have a larger soundstage and bigger sweet spot. He picked up the older line arrays with rounded cabinet recently sold on audiogon.
I may have missed previous posts on the subject, but why an open baffle design for the line array? It seems there is growing interest in this type of speaker. I guess for years I have listened to posts and designers talk about how important it was to have a speaker box to stop the back wave so it didn't interfere with the front wave. This seems to turn that thinking upside down. I know there are probably endless white papers and posts on this subject elsewhere so I was looking more for your general thought on the subject. What does the open baffle now add to the incredible soundstage that you were already able to get with a boxed line array? Do you feel that this statement speaker is the best evolution of speaker design right now? Could these be kept close to a wall without major problems to the sound?
Thanks Rick!
You need some room behind a dipole (3-4 ft. or more) to take advantage of the rear radiation. The midrange is more "open" sounding - no cabinet reflections / coloration plus it adds depth to the soundstage. This is better than an "open back" enclosure which can actually be very resonant and doesn't function as a true dipole. Dipoles are more diffuse than a monopole, in essence, the room becomes the "box". For that reason room treatments of the area behind the speaker can help control the rear output.
Dipole arrays are a real structural challenge in terms of supporting the weight of all the drivers (64 lbs. in this case!). To overcome this we used very expensive materials (carbon fiber veneer,baltic birch ply, carbon fiber rods, and bamboo ply) for a very stiff and non-resonant frame that only weighs 31 lbs.! I know of no other array (or conventional speaker for that matter) that has all of these materials plus RAAL ribbons and Scan-Speak Illuminator drivers! The owner wanted something over the top and that's exactly what we did.
