Hi Gavin,
Yup. They were designed to be placed in the front corners. Practically anything diffusive in corners is a good thing for high frequencies anyway. Even cylindrical bass traps are diffusive at these frequencies. By looking at them, especially their height I can imagine a pretty good ray trace result with them in a room. What I can't seem to wrap my head around is how the resonant chambers work, or for that matter those little resonators by Tsang and Synergystic. I've heard the latter two and in a very quiet room they do make a difference. My only problem was that the differences were firstly faint and secondly were not always positive. Another variable to be bothered with. Who wants to get up and remove them little bowls and put them back on again when the differences are easy to listen past. The Shaktis however, resonant chambers aside, appear to have enough surface area to actually work resonant chamber or not.
Hi Robin,
Albert's ambience tweeters are a bit different. If one were to stand close to ear level with them from directly behind the speaker one would hear spookily full range sound. It's a strange thing for sure. While it does add corner fill, widening and increasing stage height in the rear, bringing up the rear ambience levels actually moves the stage forward and not back. Given standard untreated drywall front walls, most folks that prefer a stage behind the speaker plane keep their ambience tweeter levels low either off or 8'oclock at most, those at the plane somewhere at 9 o'clock and those that relish walk in stages closer to 11 o'clock. This of course depends on the front wall treatment. Where diffusion comes in handy is that when properly done overall tonal balance is kept even avoiding late arrival time beaming from the rear tweeters. An issue for those that want that walk in soundstage but not the HF boost that comes with running the rear tweeters pretty wide open.
It's a very thoughtful and useful feature for adapting the VR family of loudspeakers into varying acoustic spaces, especially non symmetrical ones in both shape and building materials but like any feature requires a bit of experimentation. Thankfully, it comes after the speakers have been set up for desired tonal balance with the tweeters off making the process more of an icing on the cake feature having distance to boundaries, toe-in and rake angles covered.
In the end I guess what it gives the owner are options for choosing one's preferred ratio of direct to reverberant energy. A subjective one of course but the adjustability actually means one may require less acoustical treatments versus say true dipoles. After 6 years and owning and using 5 different models from the 4jr to the 9 SEs, it's a feature I've come to rely on for the sheer utility and ease of use.
Jack
