Danley SH-50/SH-60 for dedicated Home Theater - Page 2

Forin,

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, your input here does ease my concerns a bit.

I will likely pursue auditions before I go much further; I also want to hear the JBL 4675C-4 and 5732 products. For the same investment I can install full front stage as opposed to going phantom center.

I'd like to think the SH-50 is the end-game, and perhaps she is:-)

I have a 146" AT scope screen with no speakers (just sold my JTR gear), and I'm going nuts over here...

Larry

IMO,
You may be right, however the longer I'm into multi-channel, the more I realize the significance and importance of the dedicated center channel. Obviously somewhat less with multi-channel music, and more-so with dialog centric motion picture releases. The clarity afforded to the center, with sidewall smearing effects almost completely out of the critical ~10msec VER range, and without the resultant destructive interference. Some material responds much better to the added clarity, some less so.

My $.02

If you want to stop by, it is best if you make an appointment-for a couple of reasons. You want to be sure somebody will be in the office to give you a demo. There are always people around-but we do a lot of field demos and are out of the office from time to time. We also "disable" the demo room from time to time to take to take to trade shows and such.

Second you don't want to "walk in" on somebody elses demo-who may have a totally different agenda from you. They may be talking football stadiums or large performace halls and you may be interested in HT. Very different approachs and tools.

The best person to contact for a demo is jeff@danleysoundlabs.com or call the office 770-535-0204 and ask for Jeff.

With a coherent loudspeaker (like the SH50) the phantom center is a scary thing.

If you place a loudspeaker (any loudspeaker) in the middle and DON'T hook it up, then play a stereo track, you will SWEAR that the vocals are coming out of the center speaker.

It is only until you walk up to it, do you realize that there is no sound coming out of it.

The less well behaved a loudspeaker is-the less effect the phantom center has.

If you would like to bring any loudspeaker with you for a demo-please feel free to. We encourage side by sides as it is the best way to hear the differences.

Now in a home theatre with surround setup, how well the phantom center will work with the way your receiver process the center channel and there is no center channel-that could be completely different in how well it works. But in stereo it is great-and scary how well it works.

Looking forward to your impressions.

Thanks Ivan. I wouldn't come in cold, thanks for the contact info.

Football stadiums are(were) my life. Professionally, I lived in one. Then, over time we spec'd a new one, and lived there while overseeing constuction. Then, moved in upon completion,....and sadly, no Danley products used.

Thanks for your help

"Lion", congratulations! It'll be VERY interesting to read your three-way comparison, having read your Genelec vs Seaton thread, I found your comments exceedingly informative and unbiased.

"bukiwhitey", I'm looking forward to the news of your ordering the complete 9.2 all active Danley system in the near future (you wrote in an old post "The Danley set-up I am interested in consists of SH-50's for L&R with a SH-100B center and 6 SH-100's for surrounds and front height effect speakers. I am looking at using 2 DTS-10's for subs. All speakers will be active with built in amps").

"Lion", which amp have you decided to use with the SH50s?

Hi all
I am remiss for not checking in here more often but I have been really busy, the JH-90 was the hardest design so far and the combiner (the hardest part) took 4 four months to arrive at the end solution. Next time I say I think I see a way to do that I will think a bit longer before opening the front sound hole and radiating.

Funny though, having slugged through a marsh to get that design, the new one Ivan mentioned (should be +6 to +8dB more) was done in a couple weeks and simpler (doh)

One thing most all of our full range speakers do is radiate as if they were a single point source in time and space. AS I developed these over the last 12 years now, I found the closer I could get all the drivers to adding coherently, the harder it was to hear the speakers physical location in depth when my eyes were closed (the more strongly the signal sound governed).
It was easy to hear the direction but harder to hear where in distance it was. The absence of lobes and nulls and other aural que's makes it harder for your ears to localize the location of the speaker in depth.
When you go to stereo then the exciting thing for me happens is that the same lack of identity allows the mono phantom image to be so strong people literally walk up and stick their head in the center channel (which was off). The stereo panorama is seamless left to right.

I don't know if you guys who have them in the home have noticed that identity effect or the difference in imaging .

One thing I would suggest with them is THEY SHOULD BE THE SAME distance to the center seat and about ear height, to toe them in so that each speaker is aimed at or just past the seat kitty corner (assuming one has a couch). Adjust angle to suite but the high degree of directivity should make this relatively non-critical so far as room effects.

It is funny / sad that most of the places these speakers are installed, they are not used in stereo or at least in a way where stuff floats around in front of you which is my goal at home haha. The requirement of making them sound the same over a large listening area and radiating as little as possible outside the pattern required that the multiple drivers add coherently both together and at crossover to the others.
As result if you walk up to an sh-50 you can literally stick your head in the horn and the sound always sounds like it's coming from somewhere in front of you, NO critical distance for an image to "knit" together.

Lastly, many of our horns can do something else that is really weird possibly useful and that essentially no other full range speakers can do, operate against a boundary without producing interference or reflections.

If you have a narrow room, or can't get your L&R speakers far enough apart or want them farther apart, here is a possible solution. With the array-able cabinets like the SM-60, SH-50 etc (have angled sides) you can place the angled side flat against the wall or floor etc.

This produces a boundary image for the woofer, you might have to roll off the low end a little bit but otherwise your ears / brain will be swearing to you the source is at or very close to the boundary between the speaker and the wall and at times can feel like your outside or somewhere else as there are few / no near reflections (like outdoors).
Having such a large horn (usually the full front area) means the directivity is maintained to an unusually low frequency for a given size.

Anyway, it's cool some home users are hearing them now, I love home audio & hifi but that isn't exactly what we have been in.

I have tried to apply the targets I saw to the designs based on what I thought was the ideal based on the views of Richard Heyser, the first person to identify the time variability of loudspeakers and devised a way to measure acoustic phase.
Ironically, while he did not describe the how, I recently read a paper by Richard Heyser where he describes the exact acoustic result of the Synergy horns.
Dick Heyser passed away about 25 years ago and had developed the TDS system I have used to measure time and audio for about 30 years and had written the paper I had just read written way back when I was a JR in High school.
When I read his papers I conclude Dick Heyser was an unrecognized genius.
Sometimes I feel like I'm a bulldozer chasing a butterfly.

Hey, for fun, here is a JH-90 (on a 5KW gen) as captured with a camcorder, use headphones if you have them.
Large scale HTS? i keep thinking.
Later they went back and measured the farthest distance at just over 700 feet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk54IFD4znw

Best,
Tom Danley

"Sit down and listen, its about sound, it's why you got into audio".

Thanks for that post Tom. I've been following the Danley threads closely and I'm excited to see you turning an eye towards home HT. I look forward to finding an opportunity to listen to the SM60's. They might very well be my next upgrade

Tom,
I'd love to comment on many things, however time doesn't allow. However, what a great demo. The apparent clarity and coherence is stunning.

So, one per side and throw in some LF reinforcement(if needed)...is that the idea? More later, but wow.

Thanks

FOH wrote ".......The apparent clarity and coherence is stunning.", that's right, my little SM60Fs have even more clarity than my electrostatics and of course they are MUCH more dynamic! I placed them hard against the side walls (as Tom describes) in my 15' wide room which gives me a 13' center to center width and my ears are at the tip of the 13' equilateral triangle. With most conventional designs, one needs a room of at least 19' to 21' wide (2 - 3 feet away from the side walls) to allow you to have such wide placement. This gives me a huge soundstage width with my relatively narrow room. I often listen to symphonic music with tutti hitting 98-99 dB, C weighting, fast reading which translates roughly to 110 dB at one meter with absolutely no hint of strain. Since there are no side wall reflections from the cabinets that are against the walls and very little 2nd reflection projected onto the opposite walls, and dramatically lower SPL on the back of the speakers, one hears deeply into the recordings. Depending on the recording, listen with your eyes closed in total darkness (wear a blindfold during daytime which I had been doing for nearly 30 years) you will have the performers in your room or you will be transported to the recording venues; with well-recorded live performances the experience is so thrilling, so frighteningly real and happens so often that I am often shaken with deep emotional satisfaction!

I am so glad that I discovered these Danley "PA" speakers!

FOH, Having a real center was a definite improvement and I would always recommend one, but with the SM-60 if you can only afford 2 and have to save for the rest dont worry about it .

Tom
I have to concur with your statment regarding wall boundaries. Once I moved the dts-10s and played around with the sm-60s (they sit on top of the subs). After an hour of moving,measuring and listening I decided as a joke to place them flush against the walls ontop of the subs. Boom! Perfect stereo imaging .

What's the price of the SM60 ?

I believe it's $2500 each.

Jheyau, FOH

Man I love your reviews thanks! and it's a relief to know there are others that hear the difference. I will comment on what that is below.

I am glad you tried the on wall approach, I had a narrow room and it was a shock to set the various speakers I had over the years out doors and be lost in the image, move them back indoors and it's mostly gone.

When I had a pair of early prototypes in that room, I found they were better but one day on a whim I tried against the wall and WOW it was sort of like being outside again.
The speakers can do this because the origin is at the rear of enclosure and so the arc of the wave front is very nearly the same as the enclosure walls and horn wall angle. Remember these radiate a portion of a sphere.

Unlike normal speakers, one can place two of them side by side and not hear any seam listening to music. That same thing allows a physical boundary to be used instead (like a wall or floor).

I know exactly what you mean about being transported, feeling the emotion. One of the things that happened to me as these progressed over the years is I went back and listened to old recordings and discovered endless details I never heard or didn't remember. As weird as this sounds, the two first Led Zeplin albums were like listening to new recordings of a familiar event.

FOH
Yes, the object of these is to do a good sized venue with one per side. Subs can be added but are not needed, for example at Northwestern university football stadium, they used two of these for all of the pa system, music / voice / special effects for 46,000 people I think it was. Four, with subs are at BYU stadium for a very large place.

One question most people ask is doesn't this fry the people up close?.
Well it is a point source, most people think of a point source as an omni directional speaker which that is an example. A point source can also have directivity, have a very different energy profile depending on angle. If one has a speaker with constant directivty, that energy is confined into a given angle over a span of frequency.
A perfect constant directivity speaker can confine all the energy into the design angle from DC to ultrasound but very useful things can be done well short of theoretical endpoint.

Picture a speaker with a single radiation lobe, draw an imaginary line around that lobe and say that is the same SPL anywhere on that line (an equal loudness balloon).
Imagine the speaker is placed over the stage up in the air and the center of the lobe is aimed at the heads in the back row.

Now, the loudest part is pointed at the rear where the distance is greatest. As you move closer, you are moving off progressively axis and since the energy the speaker radiates falls off as you move off axis. There is a combination of lobe shape, height and audience depth where the SPL is nearly constant from front row to back and in extreme cases, the Shaded amplitude approach can be used to tailor the lobe shape.
Assuming I can find a picture and link it, the speakers that look like a bird house are synergy horns with amplitude shading, the result is a + - 1 dB SPL variation over the seating area.

Picture #2 http://www.danleysoundlabs.com/danleyport.asp?ID=61

The idea of using the lobe of a single horn is an ancient one, I heard about it at a Synaudcon seminar in the 80's and it was old / obsolete then.
The problem was a single horn wasn't always powerful enough and wasn't full range or constant directivity. When you add a second source or make it a multiway, the single lobe is destroyed where ever more than one source is radiating the same frequency.
What I mean is how sound acts depends on the spacing relative to the wavelength. Take two subwoofers, place them close together, they add coherently, radiate equally in all directions. If you reverse the signal to one, you very nearly cancel all the sound (the principal of active sound cancelation).

Now, when your spacing exceeds the fuzzy 1 / 4 to 1 /3 wavelength between sources, now one has entered a new condition, an interference pattern. For example two sources 1 / 2 wavelength apart produces a figure 8 polar pattern. Now, if one reverses the drive to one of the sources, the sound isn't canceled out as in coherent addition but the interference pattern moves, the figure 8 is rotated 90 degrees. The farther apart they are, the more lobes and nulls the interference pattern has, the farther from coherent addition one is.
By using conditions where the sources add coherently to each other and other ranges at crossover within the horn, the horn remains to set the constant directivity radiation pattern, a single lobe over a broad band driven by the equivalent of a single crossoverless source.
Not producing an interference pattern was a requirement I thought for larger scale sound because one wants the sound spectrum to be the same everywhere, but the effect smaller scale is interesting and I believe the why of why with a voice, playing through one speaker, they are much harder to hear the loudspeakers depth location / why they can produce such a strong stereo image.

Interestingly, a real hifi speaker company has recently discovered you can hear the source shape as well. While they are not CD, do not preserve waveshape and cannot go as loud, the KEF blade system addresses the audibility of the source shape.

FOH's comment on the video is interesting too.
When Mike and I began this adventure we performed generation loss tests with loudspeakers. You see it's not all about measurements, just one would be a fool to ignore what they can tell you. In the generation loss test, Mike would use a Digital recorder and good measurement mic to record a loudspeaker (up in the air away from reflections). A music track would be played and recorded then the mic signal played back through the speaker and recorded again. Each generation becomes more of an exaggeration of what is wrong, a perfect system being able to undergo unlimited generations.

In reality, most speakers sounded bad on gen 1* or awful at 2, few were ok at 3 and our best sounded funky at 4 bad at 5.

* partly on account of the entirely different way we hear from two points in 3d while a mic is one point.

Anyway, a weird part of not having source interference and getting close to a single broad band source in time and space is that there is less generation loss even one way like a video that includes the sound.
Well i have put off a task long enough, back to work.
Best
Tom Danley
Danley Sound Labs

"Sit down and listen, its about sound, it's why you got into audio"

Is this a new development? I'm a student at BYU and have felt recently like some huge change took place with the stadium's sound, and this would explain why...

Me@home wrote;

Is this a new development? I'm a student at BYU and have felt recently like some huge change took place with the stadium's sound, and this would explain why...

Ah, yes that would explain it haha.
Seriously I hope your enjoying the new sound. I was out there last fall when it was installed to do a presentation to the acoustics department / ASA and got the hear the system cranked up with good music.
I walked around the stadium and then sat at the far end opposite the score board.
I kept thinking, they should use the big screen and play movies through this and let people sit on the grass.

Here is a write up about your sound system;

http://blog.mixonline.com/briefingro...football-fans/

and a link to one of the speakers in a parking lot (wear headphones if you have them);

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk54IFD4znw

A pair would make a nice dorm system?.
Best,
Tom Danley

"Sit down and listen, it's about the sound, it's why you got into audio"

Tom while we have your attention here maybe you could answer some basic questions

Let us say that cost wasn't a huge concern (being that the price of the SH-50 and SM60F aren't astronomically separated) which is a better fit for the home environment ? In a home environment either speaker is likely to be crossed over to a sub so the low end response becomes less of critical importance. If I am not mistaken it is more likely to boil down to the 1" tweeter in the SH50 or the coaxial in the SM60F.

Basically I want to know which one to buy :P

Oops-I just realized that Tom had replied.

Here are the basic differences.

The SH50 goes lower
THe SH50 has a higher sensitivity
The SH50 has greater power handling
The SH50 is larger in all dimesions
The SM50 has a narrower pattern (this may or may not make a difference in a particular room)
The SH50 is heavier
The SM60 goes higher in freq.

Which ones are more important-depends on the particular user and their room

TheLion,

How much lead time were you given?

Larry

Will there be a Danley speaker smaller than SM60?

I'm fully on board with a the capabilities of a phantom center.. but as noted above regarding possibilities of your processor possibly limiting things.. Note that the dolby surround standard dictates that the entire audio track has dynamic compression applied to it by selecting NO for your center in a typical surround processor. A little known fact.

Tom,

You have commented that, "the SH-50 can reproduce a square wave, not at one frequency but over more than a decade in range, not in one position but anywhere “in front”, something very few speakers at any cost can do." Additionally, you have also discussed the concept of some your speaker's ability to generationally replicate a source signal out to 5 replications before significant degradation occurs.

That really is an amazing design accomplishment. I'm curious, is the design of the SM60F capable of these amazing feats as well? Or is this only the larger designs, ie SH50/Jericho?

Thanks,

Mark

I've always suspected that.

Tom/Ivan,

If enough people say pretty please with sugar on top, will you come out with a DIY version of the SH60 or 69 or some other suitable home design?

Please!!