urakoff писал(а):
Hi Peter! What kind of magnet do you use in this speaker ? Its looks not so big ? If its sounding BEST why make bigger?
Hi Mihail,
The magnet system is made of ultra pure vacuum annealed Armco iron and it is very linear at small signal levels (very thin hysteresis loop, very low loss). It is not big because of several reasons. First of all, I found that the reflective area behind the center of the cone should be as small as possible (in order to produce natural sound). The acoustic barrier should be behind the outer part of the cone, not behind its center, and this is very important. This can be done only with small diameter magnet system and non-reflective speaker frame. The second reason is having as small volume of iron around the voice coil as possible – this is important for the linearity at low levels and helps to reproduce properly the decay of the notes, the fine nuances of the instrument’s timbre and the acoustic environment where the musicians have been played. Well, the total magnetic flux is not so big, but this is not so important as many people tend to believe. In my opinion, the much much more important element of the “motor” is the voice coil. I tried over 20 different voice coil topologies in order to find the best performing one. This driver uses very low inductance 19mm voice coil (on the inner side of the paper former) that instead of using single wire, uses 3 very thin (0,07mm) wires in parallel (arranged in single layer). Now I’m developing a new driver with even smaller voice coil (16mm diameter) with 4x0,05mm (!) wires. Only the ultra thin wire is able to transmit the real colors of the sound and the single thick wire sounds “black and white” in comparison. The diameter of the magnet system is even smaller – only 55mm. There are a lot of silver anti-modulation rings inside (and some other tricks) to ensure stable operating point and low distortion regardless of the small size. So the bigger size will be a step in a wrong direction… You know – the know-how is more important than the size
Евгений писал(а):
Первые картинки я уже видел. Все очень хорошо сделано, но хотелось бы рассказа об этих динамиках. Это эксперименты? Или попытки создания каких-то прототипов. Что замышлялось? Что получилось в результате?
(Excuse me I’m replying in English – unfortunately my Russian is poor…). If you are asking me about the 10” driver shown in the first post, I will tell you that its topology restricts it to produce the so called by me “fresh breeze effect”. What I’m talking about? Before I made the driver I performed a lot of experiments with wooden suspensions with long arms and after I had excellent results I decided to make a driver with 30cm long arm. In fact it outperforms smaller (shorter) suspensions, but there is a huge downside – the baffle around the cone also becomes big. The sound result due to this big surface around the cone was kind of disappointment to me – it produces sound fog around the instruments (and this cannot be prevented even with sound absorbing material over it) and the sound becomes less realistic, less alive… So that was a good lesson for me and after a lot of thinking how I can make a driver with long suspension and small baffle at the same time, I decided it doesn’t worth the multiple complications of the design, so I abandoned the concept. From that moment on, I generally avoid the big surfaces around the cone as much as I can.
But aside from the technical aspects, the most important thing for me in Audio is the philosophy behind the sound. I have strictly visualized (in my head) idea what kind of sound, and more importantly – what kind of sound presentation I’m looking for. The difficult part was to get that sound in reality via loudspeakers… I started to modify different speakers and I slowly began to understand how to manipulate and navigate their sound in the direction that I want. So after I gained some serious experience, I started to make my own drivers, but none of these drivers did combine all the sound properties in a single package – there was always a compromise of at least one sound aspect. There was a 2-3 months long period of personal disappointment and absence of desire to do anything related to audio, because there was always a missing element. Then in the end of summer 2012 I suddenly had an inspiration and I immediately renew the research. It took me about 4 months of experiments and the elliptic driver (shown in the third post) was born. The key point here is that it combines several self-conflicting properties that I haven’t seen in any other driver. For example it can reproduce very smooth and very dynamic sounds at the SAME TIME without compromising any of them. It also allows the listener to hear more recording details than even a pair of very high quality headphones, and at the same time it has nor peaks nor dips in its response. But the most important to me is its ability to create very very convincing illusion of REAL instruments playing, and at the same time to reacreate the original acoustic environment and the spirit of the musical event – it is very magical in its own way feeling that I simply cannot describe! If I have to visualize it – it is something like this – you instantly feel the atmosphere of the recordings:
This is how it looks like for other drivers in comparison to the elliptic one:
The black background of the picture becomes the acoustic properties of the room of the listener, and NOT the original acoustic space of the recording – so you get realistic sound image IN YOUR ROOM, but you are not at the place where the music was performed.. There is much more for explaining, but it can be understood after one hears this sound in reality – the photos of the drivers do not reveal their sound…