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Danley SH-50/SH-60 for dedicated Home Theater

127K views 751 replies 93 participants last post by  mahandave 
#1 ·
Hello!


Right now I am considering going with either Danley's SH-50 or SH-60 as FCR for a pretty high end home theater setup.


My upcoming dedicated room will be about 22'x19'x12'. I have been using 5x Genelec 1037Cs for the past couple of years. Before that I made my experiences with horn speakers: Klipschhorn, THX ULTRA 2, JBLs and even Avantgarde Acoustics at some point. I generally like the sound signature of horn speakers.


Lately I bought a Seaton Catalyst 12C to benchmark it against the Genelecs - you can read about it over here: http://www.seaton-sound-forum.com/post?id=4897368


In short: I am not quite satisfied with the relative performance of the Catalyst versus the Genelecs - despite its much greater dynamic headroom.


So I am thinking about going back to my first love - horn speakers. And that's were Danley enters the picture...


I would appreciate it to get some advice on the following points:


- I am considering the SH-50 or the SH-60. Both will work in my setup and the ~12 feet listening distance. I noticed that the driver/component configuration is different (6x4" versus 4x5"). I take it the SH-60 is the more recent design. What are the differences between those two regarding "sound quality" (other than the different dispersion)?


- Both speaker come in a passive and active version. The active uses IcePower moduls with DSP crossovers just like the Seaton Catalyst does (they use the same OEM for the amps). My question is: Would the version with passive crossovers together with a decent external amp (I am thinking about the MC2 MC 1250) give me "better sound quality" compared to the powered version? I guess the tri-amplified Class D amp with digital crossovers has its advantages but I don't like the concept of going through additional A/D-D/A steps.


I take it Tom Danley himself uses the passive version together with external amps. Is SQ the reason for that? (Note: I don't have any amps right now that I could simply use - so the question is whether to buy the "turn key active version" or the passive one with appropriate amps).


- Are there any European Danley dealers listening?


I am looking forward to any advice! Thanks.


- Walter
 
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#529 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ettepet /forum/post/20519230


I have no doubt one owner could say that musically, but if you also use and judge it as a tool there might be only few designs capable.


One way a Quad excells is its ability to disect sound to the extreme, allowing you to hear much of what was originally recorded from a poor, distorted recording. I listened to several such (mostly old) recordings on a few modified Quads and was amazed how well they did that.


B.t.w, I asked about all this only to see if other designs (and in particular Quads) still hold ground out of reach from a synergy horn. Knowing about such limitations helps to understand the principles involved and makes for a more balanced story imo.

I have a luxury to use the home audio system for pleasure not for analysis.


One of the most important aspect of using the SM60F at home that it can show all the tiny details if you want to hear them, but let you focus on the music even if the the recording is bad.


I think if one listen music loud, sooner or later will realize, that loud music listening is very different than the moderate level listening. Details, space an other so called "audiophile" aspects of the reproduction are disappearing, and timing, dynamics, coherence, balance will be more important. The way how you listen is different as much larger part of the listening will be driven by direct sound pressure, vibration through the body, not only the ear canal. The controlled dispersion and low distortion of the Synergy horns really help the loud listening. As they are designed for this



In case of loud listening you can live the music as an event, as it becomes very direct influence, in case of normal or quiet music listening you have to regenerate the event using your brain and mind. Sorry if it is offtopic here.
 
#530 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by ferenc_k /forum/post/20520294


I have a luxury to use the home audio system for pleasure not for analysis.

It is more a matter of interest I think, just like how people use a car or mobile phone.


It is indeed wonderful to have speakers able to reproduce minute subtleties as well as the full-blown dynamics of a live event. The Catalysts have been doing that to a very large extend in my home for almost 2 years now. With the SM60F's I clearly get the feeling it is more revealing than my pre-amps (TAG/Onkyo) can show, meaning I need better (dedicated stereo) gear.
 
#531 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ettepet /forum/post/20520576


It is more a matter of interest I think, just like how people use a car or mobile phone.


It is indeed wonderful to have speakers able to reproduce minute subtleties as well as the full-blown dynamics of a live event. The Catalysts have been doing that to a very large extend in my home for almost 2 years now. With the SM60F's I clearly get the feeling it is more revealing than my pre-amps (TAG/Onkyo) can show, meaning I need better (dedicated stereo) gear.

Sure, there are different ways of listening music at home. None of them is better or worse.


The SM60F can sound very good with very affordable electronics, just try the small Parasound zAmp and zPre, sounds extremely nice with the SM60F for peanuts for example, but a electronics like the MC2 Audio MC1250 amps or the French Devialet DAC/Amp I am using can add more reality and more drama to the reproduction and much higher volume for sure. The SM60F can work with a wide variety of electronics without really big compromises.
 
#532 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by ferenc_k /forum/post/20520629


The SM60F can sound very good with very affordable electronics, just try the small Parasound zAmp and zPre, sounds extremely nice with the SM60F for peanuts for example, but a electronics like the MC2 Audio MC1250 amps or the French Devialet DAC/Amp I am using can add more reality and more drama to the reproduction and much higher volume for sure. The SM60F can work with a wide variety of electronics without really big compromises.

Thanks for your suggestions.


I am hoping to hear what the speakers are capable of before yet another blind buy though. The last 8 years ALL my A/V gear (16 speakers, 8 subs, etc. etc.) were bought "blind".
 
#536 ·
Hi Ettepet, all

I am not sure how to compare the principals involved with a specific ESS especially using hifi words. I used to contribute occasionally to an old audio magazine (Audio) but have not kept up with terms used now, my focus being on how the drivers and systems work.


Also, it appears to me that this subject is so involved, that a pre-explanation is required.


The late Richard Heyser not only developed the first way of looking at loudspeakers in time but wrote a great deal about perception and how we do things. So forgive me if is use many of his ways of seeing.


Nature has no frames of reference, we use them to help see how things work but we should not forget we have constructed these.

Sound is energy in the air, it travels as an alternating disturbance to the mean air pressure and is comprised of two components a real and imaginary (or more familiar a reactive component). We measure sound pressure but sound propagates as alternating pressure and velocity which are 90 degrees apart. The smallest sound envelope one can make, exists in all three dimensions, it is that three dimension part that causes Hoffman's iron law the scorn of bass cabinets.


We choose to use time as one frame of reference and so we think of sound as a periodic event where the number of cycles per second is Frequency. But if we examine sound as a function of wavelength in 3d, then 20Hz follows the same rules as 20KHz.

Our hearing span is like a large set of stacking Russian dolls, each frequency is identical except for it's physical dimensions (if you look at the hole spacing in the Synergy horn you can sort of envision that)


We feed speakers with a complex signal (music) so lets start here.

If one constructs an imaginary instantaneous signal that has an equal amount of energy in each of the ten octaves normally thought of as our hearing span, one gets a very short impulse when you examine the waveform.


So, one feeds that impulse into the speaker and then you examine the microphone waveshape.


If the speaker has flat frequency response, then the energy in each octave / frequency is identical to the input signal.


If the speaker has no phase rotation, then all of the frequencies emerge at the same instant, if not, they are spread out in time according to the phase shift.

In fact, the speakers impulse response and it's magnitude and phase response as the same information as viewed from a point say 90 degrees apart (one a time reference, the other energy vs frequency and phase relative to frequency).


If the speaker is completely linear then only the spectrum of the input signal will emerge without added free sound in the form of harmonic distortion and noise.


If the speaker radiates as a single source of sound over the bandwidth then there is no interference pattern and moving left to right or up and down has little or no effect on any part of the sound and it becomes harder to hear the speakers physical position (in depth). Outdoors if used in the wind, there is little or no detectable change in the sound.


If the speaker radiates an interference pattern then it will be position sensitive and in the extreme case of a normal large sound system outdoors, when the wind blows, the sound changes a great deal even in slight wind or listening position changes.. Two or more sources more than a quarter wave length apart producing the same frequency, results in an interference pattern.


If a speaker has constant directivity then the width and height of the full bandwidth window is unchanging with frequency and the reverberant field has the same spectrum.


Non constant directivity causes the frequency response to change off axis.

So with that background, what one can say is the speed or time response of a speaker may well be two different things, one related to the HF response (actual speed) and the other to the dispersive (in time) nature of even a single loudspeaker driver as well as most crossovers. For example, a Butterworth, Linkwitz and the other familiar crossovers all have a phase rotation once past the first order. That phase shift going from well above to well below crossover is 90 degrees per order and so one finds a 4th order crossover has a phase shift equally 360 degrees and so on. While these sum to flat, they also act like an all pass filter because the low frequencies come out after the highs.


In most multi-way speakers, there are hundreds or even thousands of degrees of phase rotation from top to bottom and so the idea of reproducing the input waveshape is for the most part an imaginary ideal in hifi.


A full range ESS can come much closer, it has no crossovers and as the driving force IS the voltage, it has no acoustic phase shift as a transducer. In the real world, one drives an ESS with a step up transformer who's hf response is then limited by the transformers stray series inductance and the ESS's parallel capacitance. As result getting to 20KHz is a trade off for sensitivity (step up ratio).


My last hifi speakers were ESS, I made a bunch of them and before that had some Accustats and Janzen panels. They were the best thing I could find /afford. I loved the dynamics of horns, I had been accumulating a pile of drivers and horns I was saving for someday when I was going o build a full horn system for home. I never found a way to get around the problem of using more than one horn, having two horns on at crossover caused an interference pattern and goofy polar pattern. AS good as each could be individually in their own frequency range, they were impossible to join satisfactorily with a mate.


The idea for the Unity and then Synergy horns was the way I saw to get around that problem. If one can combine the sources at a dimension less than about 1/4 wavelength, then they truly add coherently into one radiation and then the horn defines the pattern. All the drivers feel the adjacent range drives and so it was possible to devise a crossover that doesn't have the normal phase shift and does not spread the signal out in time.

A speaker like the SH-50 can reproduce a square wave from fair to very good, from about 260Hz to 2900Hz. I have not tried that with eh SM-60 but it should do it also.


The BEST speaker I have ever measured so far as Time, was a Manger bending wave transducer, it is better than the SH-50 in that regard.

The down side of the manger is that at a very modest level, it has high harmonic distortion and very limited output and no real directivity.


In use, the single source nature and directivity is probably where these are the Synergy horns most different than normal speakers. That causes the near field' of region where the direct sound dominates the reflected sound is much larger than normal.

This is a very good thing for stereo imaging in the home or being able to understand the words in a large sound system.


So I am not sure if I answered your question or not, they have some similarities and differences but speed is not a limitation.

Best,

Tom Danley
 
#537 ·
Tom, are you saying that there is no audible difference between ("heavy") mechanical tweeters and (extremely light weight) electrostatic panels besides the fact that a good panel has an almost 100% flat phase and frequency response at higher frequency ranges? And that through the synergy horn design you effectively get close to these qualities while adding directivity, dynamics and greater output, especially down low?
 
#538 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ettepet /forum/post/20520576


It is more a matter of interest I think, just like how people use a car or mobile phone.


It is indeed wonderful to have speakers able to reproduce minute subtleties as well as the full-blown dynamics of a live event. The Catalysts have been doing that to a very large extend in my home for almost 2 years now. With the SM60F's I clearly get the feeling it is more revealing than my pre-amps (TAG/Onkyo) can show, meaning I need better (dedicated stereo) gear.

Any other comparisons to the cats?
 
#539 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by misterkit
Any other comparisons to the cats?
I was waiting to post on this subject after the current discussion about HF reproduction and limitations as a few people have asked me by pm.


Given the limited means and time sofar, similarities (SH100B 'ishness of the Catalyst), and vastly different lower Frequency Response my initial impression is that the Catalysts are holding up quite well in comparison to the SM60F's - on my Onkyo 5008. For stereo listening the SM60F's perform somewhat better, again on the Onkyo. Proper stereo gear is needed to look into this further.


The directivity of the Danleys is much more apparent, but the Catalysts go much lower so for a proper comparison bass output should be kept low. I tried to use the crossover of the Onkyo but this reduces fidelity way too much, so maybe I need to focus on music that naturally hardly contains bass.


I consider it "Work in Progress"..
 
#540 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ettepet /forum/post/20532275


The directivity of the Danleys is much more apparent, but the Catalysts go much lower so for a proper comparison bass output should be kept low.


Hey, Hey, Hey...excuse me...but that's not much of a comparison if you're cherry picking content so that the Danley's don't look bad.
 
#541 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by JimP
Hey, Hey, Hey...excuse me...but that's not much of a comparison if you're cherry picking content so that the Danley's don't look bad.
It's not that I'm getting paid here!



I would rather think that by eliminating lower region bass from the equation the strengths of the SM60's would become MORE apparent, not less. Or would you rather see me puting a SubMersive beneath each SM60F and go for a joint victory thingy?
 
#542 ·
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ettepet
It's not that I'm getting paid here!



I would rather think that by eliminating lower region bass from the equation the strengths of the SM60's would become MORE apparent, not less. Or would you rather see me puting a SubMersive beneath each SM60F and go for a joint victory thingy?
Remember that the SM60F was not intended to be a stand alone full range box. Athought it has found other uses (for home-as experienced by some), it was intended to be used with subs.


So it will not have as much lower bass as some other designs.


Since most home systems have subs now-having a cabinet that goes to say 40Hz is not as important.


And yes the SM60F could be redesigned slightly and have flat response down to around 40Hz. But the tradeoff would be sensitivity. Not much of a problem for the typical home usage-but that would be problem in larger rooms.


Tom has actually talked about making a lower sensitivity SM60. It just depends if it is worth the extra design effort.
 
#544 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ettepet /forum/post/20534629


Ivan, that was exactly my starting point.


Rather than compare speakers by adding extra variables (for instance a sub) it seems better to bypass the whole "subwoofer domain" in a natural way: through a choice of content, not 'phase polluting' high pass filtering.

And to add that people often get confused about what highpassing does and how it sounds. Many think the response stops at the filter freq-but it actually rolls off


If you have 2 loudspeakers-(one that has a lot mroe bass than another) and put a normal highpass filter on them (say 24dB or less), then listen to material with bass content below the crossover freq-the cabinet with the deeper origional response will still sound deeper.
 
#545 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivan Beaver /forum/post/20534447


And yes the SM60F could be redesigned slightly and have flat response down to around 40Hz. But the tradeoff would be sensitivity. Not much of a problem for the typical home usage-but that would be problem in larger rooms.

That would be great option for the DIY kit project. The speakers would not be geared to pro use, so the kit would not eat into that part of your business, and it gives you guys a way to disperse the cost of redesigning the SM60F
 
#547 ·
Ivan if you stack 2 SH50 on top of each other and run the speaker wire to one and then do the daisy from that on to the other what ohm will it draw from the amp? The SH50 is 4 ohm. Does it now go to 2 OHM or 8 OHM? I have a chance to buy 2 more slightly used ones at a great price. Would the Crest 8200 be strong enough? Would I gain anything?
 
#549 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by kutlow /forum/post/20570198


Ivan if you stack 2 SH50 on top of each other and run the speaker wire to one and then do the daisy from that on to the other what ohm will it draw from the amp? The SH50 is 4 ohm. Does it now go to 2 OHM or 8 OHM? I have a chance to buy 2 more slightly used ones at a great price. Would the Crest 8200 be strong enough? Would I gain anything?

It would be 2 ohm. It would be louder Ibecause of the coupling and the lower impedance (additional power)


HOWEVER it would not sound as good. This will be because of the interference between the two units.


If you were to place them side by side,m they would not interfer.


However you would lose the gain-because now they are radiating into 2 different areas.


To be honest-I think your money could be better spent elsewhere in your system.
 
#550 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivan Beaver /forum/post/20534447


Tom has actually talked about making a lower sensitivity SM60. It just depends if it is worth the extra design effort.

A mid-90s dB/W/m molded Synergy with a shallower rolloff in the bass than the SM60F sounds like the PERFECT Synergy kit speaker!
 
#551 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by DS-21 /forum/post/20572019


A mid-90s dB/W/m molded Synergy with a shallower rolloff in the bass than the SM60F sounds like the PERFECT Synergy kit speaker!

That is one thing that has been discussed.
 
#552 ·
Sunday I had a friend over to try out his Onix Melody SP3 tube amp on my SM60F's. We used an Arcam dv27a dvd/cd-player as an analog source.


I wasn't in the hot spot but immediately noticed a very clean, smooth sound. This was much to my surprise because in general I clearly prefer the digital output of the dv27a. When we came to Jeff Buckley's album version of Hallelujah chills were running down my spine as I heard every little breath and nuance (which I never knew I was missing). It has been years since the last time I felt a good stereo setup do that, and never at home (and until now never way outside the hot spot). We also tried a pair of X-amps that were brought over and the Onkyo 5008 with the Emotiva MPS-1.


My visitor favorably compared the Danleys + Melody SP3 to a Parasound driven pair of Wilson Benesch Arc speakers he heard extensively during a shoot out. He also very much liked the quality of the Onkyo + Emotiva through the Danleys.


I guess I'll have to look out for a good stereo DAQ/amp...
 
#553 ·
TheLion,


Any updates on your experiences with Danley?


Thanks
 
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