Danley SH-50/SH-60 for dedicated Home Theater - Page 18

[quote=robobob;20504932]

The last adjective I would use in regard to the SM60M's response would be "ragged"! I can only speak to the SM60F/SM60M and the SH100 models but the words that I would apply would be: smooth, neutral, transparent, musical, efffortless, NON-fatiguing to the max!

My test of a sound system is how you feel after a 6-8 hour immersion session; other than flat-butt syndrome, the 4 channel Danley system has the least listener fatigue of all the systems I have owned. [/i]

I totally agree with robobob, I routinely immerse myself in multi-hour listening sessions with my SM60Fs without a trace of fatigue.

or people saw the construction photos of the FG sections.

Stopped by Danley to audition the TH221 this afternoon. To my surprise was a brand new sub design. Its called a DBH218LC. I really like how this new sub sounds. In movie tracks It seemed to out perform the TH221. The sharp tight bass sounds really great. Its also made to accomadate verticle or horizontal Installs.

I think Ivan remarked about this DBH218 version earlier in this topic.

My collegue with the Quad speakers is a bit sceptical about the inherent speed of a mechanical tweeter compared to the one in a static (or plasma) design. My guess is that Danley uses mechanical tweeters in the SM60's, but I couldn't easily find info on what category of tweeter is used and how fast this is.

The Summas were merely one idea. Relative to the remainder of the line, they're are certainly expensive. When you say the directivity is better, I'm not sure what better means. Tighter perhaps? The directivity and pattern control of the Summa's are superb, wrt the transition between the drivers. Just as Seaton has massaged and tweaked the response of the Cat via dsp, Earl has voiced the system and Xover to the Nth degree. I like the simplicity of a 15" two way and there are some Meyer designs I've been impressed with as well.

In addition to other products, when I'm ready I'm going to arrange a visit to hear the Danley's. I'm sure they're impressive, as all these products are. Finding what's right for me, in my room is key.

Thanks for the response.

I think he uses a coax driver.

Could you please explain/elaborate?

I think he is referring to their vertical directivity, which is one of two areas the speaker has been criticized (the other being is poor on axis performance, but that is easily ameliorated by toeing them in to cross in front of the listener). If I remember correctly Earl did acknowledge that a spherical guide was not ideal, thus the quest for guides with different shapes by many DIY projects.

Any new thoughts about TH221/DBH218LC vs. triple DTS-10s?

Yes, I found it eventually: a BMS 5 1/2".


It has to do with the mass that has to move to create the sound. To quote: "In a mechanical (dynamic) design tweeter the weight is far greater (and therefor much slower to respond) than with an electrostatic panel or (better still) a plasma globe. It is what gives these a truly effortless sound."

In how far this difference is in itself noticable is unclear to me, but I found there is an extra quality to the sound of a well-made electrostatic speaker.

As as usual, there is a tradeoff. In this case specifically SPL. Electrostatics don't get as loud as other "mechanical" tweeters.

What is the sound difference? I really don't know as I have not heard the Danley products side by side with some good electrostats.

I am a big fan of ESLs but they just do not produce the dynamics required for HT. That diaphragm just doesn't displace enough air.

yeah my thought is I dont know which direction Im going to go in. If I had all of these in MY room then the descision would be easy. Right now Im leaning for 2 of the DBH218LC

Well, it is a good thing to know there are limitations to Danley's designs compared to those of others, even if it would be preferable that there were none. For one thing it allows people to distinguish themselves from being "fanboys".

Ettepet wrote;

My collegue with the Quad speakers is a bit sceptical about the inherent speed of a mechanical tweeter compared to the one in a static (or plasma) design. My guess is that Danley uses mechanical tweeters in the SM60's, but I couldn't easily find info on what category of tweeter is used and how fast this is.

Hi
Yes I can understand how he might think that, one naturally uses a car analogy here.
An experiment which will cause much head scratching, is one that reveals what is actually happening.

For a direct radiator, mass actually has no impact on the speed of the device, I know this sounds ridiculous (in the car analogue domain) but here is how you can prove it. Take a woofer you can toss out and out it in a box. Measure the response all the way up high, examine it's impulse response.

Now, glue a coil of solder to the joint of the dustcap and cone body so that you have substantially increased the mms (moving mass). Now, re measure and you see the mass has reduced the sensitivity and lowered the low corner BUT the hf response and attack part of the impulse is UNCHANGED..
The reason is to produce flat response, the direct radiator needs an acceleration response, NOT velocity and so increasing the mass doesn't affect the hf corner at all.

In the ESS system, the need for low moving mass is related to the desired sensitivity and weakness of the force that the ES field can apply on it.

In the case of the Synergy horns, I am not sure which is better to copy and paste previously written text or to supply a link. Being lazy, I am posting a couple links that explain what I am trying to do, how this is different and how the ESL-63 played a key role.


http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showth...t=danley+esl63


http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showth...lignment/page7

A few thoughts on some other posts, I wish I had more time but we are in the lead up to a big trade show, so writing is more like taking a relaxing break while pressed for time.

Yes it is a coax driver but used unconventionally as both a mid and high frequency compression driver and not a direct radiator with a time offset.. It was part of the original patent but the SM-60 had to wait until we could mold a horn with the proper passages and shape.

The BIG advantage of horns like this is they do not produce lobes and nulls and have a large front to back energy ratio. It is that directivity that causes them to measure very similarly at the LP as at a meter or two.

In commercial sound, a KEY to producing words you can understand in a terrible room is that kind of directivity, that is why our horns are as large as possible given the cabinet size and why all the sound comes from one origin.
It was also possible to develop and apply a crossover that eliminated the phase shift (time spread) normally found in crossovers and so boxes like the SH-50 can reproduce a square wave over a wide band, over a large range of positions (the result of being a single acoustic source in time and space).

In the home, that means the speakers nearfield (where the direct sound is louder than the reflected) extends farther into the room, preserves more of the recorded signal (reflections generally compete with the desired signal)

For those wishing to EQ the Synergy horns, this is an ideal use for eq BUT the flaws of EQ are also more easily heard. By flaws, that isn't the right word as when EQ is right, it has no flaws, the problem is trying to EQ something that is not EQ-able acoustically.

If your going to EQ them, please do this when you can.

Set the speaker up on a stool or mid height in your room. If you can do this outdoors, that is vastly better. Keep the mic a meter or more away. The goal is to measure the speaker only, not to include reflections or room stuff. This is important as the speaker IS the only part you can actually fix.
Once you have it like you want it outdoors, then move it back to your room.
In room, It is safe to cut or lower peaks or mounds and it is safe to tilt, shelve or apply a broad boost. Generally DO NOT try to fill in deep cancellation notches.
Best regards and happy listening
Tom Danley

Tom, I understand what you're saying about "speed" in the domain of woofers but does the same apply between 2kHz - 24kHz? Would you dare to say that a synergy horn (SM60F for instance) can reproduce the HF effortlessness, HF cleanness and HF detail of a Quad? This would be very impressive indeed.

I had two visitors at home few weeks ago from another country, to hear my SM60F. One of them is using an old Quad, the ESL57. As I could get his opinion, he was very much satisfied how the SM60F sounded. He did not feel to loose a lot from all those lovely Quad properties he likes, but gained dynamics, volume and room filling coherent and balanced sound in which the SM60F is so strong.

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.

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.

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".

Why break the trend now? You should strive for 9 years

Maybe go for some kind of record?

My thinking was: Excellent stereo gear is 'old tech', so why bother with unnecessary risks?

And to think I told my wife this hobby was going to be cheaper than motorcycles

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

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?

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"..

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.