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Volti is usually very accommodating and friendly, they have always had CD spinners at their east coast show demos. Volti Feastrex speakers that I heard at Capital AF last summer were the best Feastrex speakers I ever heard, and I have heard a great many over the years, and built a half dozen myself. They are tricky driver to work with, but Volti really has good ears and box tuning talent. Somebody told me there is a wood plank inside the box angled downward to redirect the rear reflection, which is important with these thin paper cones. The drivers are capable of so much "life" that any acoustic damping inside the box is audible by robbing life, and so it's usually a negative. But you are right Dave, Feastrex 5" usually excel on certain music and just OK on others. The 9" are transcendent on some and utter fail on others. It would be fun to hear my own demo disk on these Voltis.
My pleasure! I have some reviews of other single-driver designs that I'd love to post, in time. DaveC113, may I ask what you thought of the bass of those boxes in the main Feastrex room (1121)? When I was there, the sound was oh-so-sweet but since the material was very old jazz records, I could not assess the bass at all. I'd love to hear your impressions.Richidoo, are you still listening to single-driver designs? I remember you (and Phil Townsend) were the earliest adopters of the D5NF (several years ago).
Hey RJ, no I'm not using single driver speakers now. I very much like what they do, but I need louder speakers and flatter FR. I had a lot of fun with them and some peak listening experiences, and some major frustration. Feastrex got me into speaker building, for which I'm grateful.
What are you using right now?
Planet10 Freddie ChangPlanet10 Maiko 1
I read somewhere about a study (was it from Bell Labs?) which found that people don't mind giving up some bass as long as the treble is reduced in the same proportion. Whereas the majority of speakers strive for SPL's and bass/treble extension, this particular design is going for an ear-pleasing balance emphasizing tone and clarity.
I'm not entirely sure this responds to the question asked, I did once make a study of the literature on treble/bass balance. Most of the work was done in the first half of the last century; Snow was one of the big names at Bell Labs. Some of the references have proved, shall we say, elusive ... :^) The most useful studies I found looked at quality loss as a function of cutoff frequency. If you accept my assumption that good balance results when the bass and treble quality losses are equal, then the product of LF cutoff and HF cutoff should be approximately 630,000 Hz^2. That means 63Hz to 10kHz, or 32Hz to 20kHz, or 125Hz to 5kHz. Note that there is no particular reason to think "20Hz to 20kHz" is the right range for music! (In fact, I've always heard that hearing goes down to something like 3Hz, if the signal is loud enough. Ask Tom Danley! It's just not extremely important for music, based on the old studies.) Various numbers have been quoted for the "magic number" over the years, from 400,000 to 1,000,000. I've never found any claimed justification for them, which is why I went back to the earlier research. The above analysis is based on perceptual acoustics, not economics. Treble is generally cheaper than bass, so the best sound for the money may well be limited bass with extended treble. It would not be balanced, but the total quality loss would be smaller than an equal-cost design with balanced losses. Look at the classic LS-3/5. To balance it you'd want to add an octave of bass and cut an octave of treble. At the same quality level, it would be much bigger and more costly, not to mention the problems with moving the crossover and diffraction artifacts into the midrange.
