Following in the footsteps of the Golden Ear Award-winning Dream Makers, I'll be introducing a less expensive speaker that embodies the controlled-pattern offset bipole configuration.
Advantages of this format include:
a) Puts more spectrally-correct energy into the reverberant field while preserving the benefits of a fairly narrow-pattern first-arrival sound. When set up as recommended, this additional reverberant energy arrives late enough that it is beneficial instead of detrimental;
b) Wide sweet spot and good tonal balance throughout the room when set up correctly;
c) No baffle-step falloff in the lower midrange region;
d) Reduced floor-bounce notch;
e) When set up as recommended the front and rear woofers are displaced relative to one another in all three dimensions, resulting in smoother in-room bass.
Disadvantages of the controlled-pattern offset bipole include:
a) The speakers must be at least 3.5 feet out from the wall behind them - and preferably 5 or 6 feet - and toed-in a lot, which looks wrong (at every audio show I get quite a few well-meaning audiophiles who want to "fix" my setup by reducing or eliminating the toe-in);
b) The enclosures are inevitably large and wide;
c) Requires twice as many drivers, so less-expensive drivers are used compared to a monopole system with the same driver cost;
d) No one else is really doing this so it's an unknown.
For a bit more detail on the controlled-pattern bipolar configuration, click
here.
The distance-from-the-wall requirement is identical to what a fullrange dipole speaker calls for, so that's not something new. I've chosen drivers that I think are a very good value, and I think the room-interaction advantages of this configuration are of greater benefit than twice-as-expensive drivers would be.
One of the really unwieldy aspects of the Dream Makers is their sheer size, which gave very good bass extension but in most situations I ended up working to reduce the amount of bass output. What I'm doing with these new bipolars is designing for what I believe will be adequate bass extension in most situations, but the Swarm can be added if needed. So in a sense this speaker will fall somewhere in between the Dream Makers and the Planetarium Betas. Looking at it another way, the cost of the full-blown system can be spread out over two purchases.
The Dream Makers are nine grand a pair, and the Planetarium Beta system is ten grand a set. These new speakers will be under four grand a pair, with the sealed Swarm adding another 1.7 grand. The tradeoffs relative to the Dream Makers and Betas will be mostly cosmetic; in blind A/B testing the prototypes were very competitive with my current offerings despite their significantly lower cost.
Like my other vented speakers, the port tuning will be user-adjustable. Among other things, this will facilitate integration with a subwoofer system.
My target market will be people who really like the way a good mid-priced planar speaker sounds, but who want serious impact and dynamic capability. Several of my customers have replaced rather well-respected planars with my bipolars, and
here you can read the online review of one of them.
These new speakers will easily go north of 120 dB given sufficient power... which means they will have excellent dynamic contrast at normal in-home levels because they'll typically be operating at less than 1% of their thermal limit. Thermal compression will be less than 1 dB up to about 115 dB. This also means the tonal balance will be consistent at a wide range of volume levels; in other words, you won't have to crank them up in order for them to "come to life". I can explain more about this if you'd like.
Preliminary specs include: 95 dB efficient; 16 ohms; power handling 800 watts program, thermal or mechanical; typical in-room bandwidth, ballpark 40 Hz to 18 kHz; extension with sealed Swarm to lower 20's; dimensions 44" tall by 22" wide by 12" deep.
With apologies to Elton John and Bernie Taupin, oh but they're wierd and they're wonderful.
