[barbon]

Hi, first post to introduce myself.
I hail from Cumbria in the UK, have been gradually moving through the world of music reproduction for 50+ years now, through Garrard, Linn and currently Nottingham Analogue, too many amps including Tricord, Exposure etc. SET inc Welbourne Labs DRD 300b, and now WAD 5881 monoblocks, fed from the turntable and a Raspberry Pi /Allo one digital player to aTVC pre and into Frugalhorn XLs. Lovely music, but in the spirit of onwards and upwards, or often sideways, never admit backwards, am building Planet 10 Mar Ken mini onkens with Alpair12 pw and 6p drivers. Love the 12pw!
Thinking about building a Transcendent Audio OTL amp. Do any members have experience with them. How are OTL designs superior to conventional valve amps (if they are)?
Cheers

[Phil A]

Welcome to AC!

[JLM]

Welcome!

Have a few of the Alpair drivers and liked them all.  Dave from Planet10 is knowledgeable and his cabinets good sounding, just wish he'd organize his web presentation better.  Best to pair them with a subwoofer (or better yet multiple subwoofers).  Have never heard an OTL that impressed me much.

[FullRangeMan]

Welcome to AC 

[ArthurDent]

Cheers & Welcome to AC barbon   

[barbon]

JLM, Have a single Augie from Hawthorne Audio, in an open baffle, that needs driving and integrating  properly, but the MA Alpair 12pw is a very good bass unit on its own, not bad full range but really benefits from support in the upper registers. Currently building speakers to use a pair each side(using Dave from Planet 10's planset).

Agree totally with you about the smaller Alpairs. Using the 5.3 in my study, so much better all round if responsibility for bass below 400 hz is taken away from them and given out to a bigger companion. Did that yesterday and spent much of today just listening and enjoying.

[JLM]

Have heard all of the earlier Hawthorne offerings (live about 80 miles from Dave and his mentor/builder of the first crossovers), including the Augie in infinite baffles.  Many single driver fans have over time have become conditioned to do without deep bass and in fact get confused when they do hear it.  Thanks to Floyd Toole, Earl Geddes, and Duke LeJeune I use 3 subwoofers to tame inherent in-room bass peaks/dips.  Also have six GIK 244 "full range" 2ft x 4ft absorption panels at first reflection points and four GIK 244 "bass traps" 2ft x 4ft absorption panels straddling the front corners along with three tall randomly filled bookcases on side walls to serve as adjustable/casual diffusers in my well insulated 8ft x 13ft x 21ft (Fibonacci ratios) room.

BTW my loudspeakers are floor standing single driver transmission lines by Bob Brines and inspired by Martin King's MathCad design work.  The drivers are Fostex F200a (8 inch, no whizzer, AlNiCo, rated 30-20,000 Hz, 8 ohm, 90 dB/w/m and have a full bodied sound).  Had Bud Purvine provide EnABL treatments to the drivers (he invented the concept) that reportedly pumps them up to one of the best drivers in the world.  LeJeune suggested adding a "Late Ceiling Splash" tweeter to help diffuse high frequencies (and sound stage).  These tweeters are simply $20 Dayton Audio 1 1/8 inch soft domes sitting on the floor directly behind the loudspeakers and aimed straight up. 

[barbon]

Crikey. Bit out of my league. The wife would kill me were I to suggest that in our sitting room, though I could and have swung the bookcases.
Deep bass, aka real bass, is absent from many systems. Often only missed on organ music, though once back on other stuff you realise what was not there. But isn't hifi at home all about compromises and which you can put up with and still enjoy the music?

[JLM]

Yes, audio is all about providing crutches to our fleeting aural memory of the original performance.  A nearby salesman once recounted a music professor who come to find out had been listening to blown tweeters for 10 years.  He evidently didn't need them to recreate the original recordings he enjoyed.  But the better/more accurate recreation of the original the easier it is for our minds to fill in the blanks correctly.  Lack of proper bass for instance, left uncorrected will condition us to accept those inherent in-room peaks/dips as accurate reproduction.