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#11
The Dark Room / Re: Good to see 'Australian Hi...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - March 06, 2024, 06:28:48 PM
Has anyone noticed how stereonet starts flogging tickets to their show right at the time Australia Hifi hosts their show even though stereonet's show is 31 weeks away ?? That's what they do :(

And see what they have this year that is definitely worth going to see ;)

https://analog-precision.com/forum/news-updates/duntech-sovereigns-to-feature-at-this-years-austalia-hifi-show/
#12
The Dark Room / Re: We BAIT Audio FORUM goers ...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - February 28, 2024, 11:47:38 PM
Mikey is right. Check this out. Recently I caught one of them out on ASR bagging my product. This dude has got sour grapes because I wouldn't sell him a DSP board at minidsp prices. Now he is interested in paying top dollar for the new DEQX, and Audioweaver running on Danville hardware is not a problem but is only a problem  when it's running on my hardware apparently. LOL ;D  Their opinions change depending on which forum they are on. You just can't make this shit up but like Mikey says that's exactly what goes on in this industry !!

On ASR this person bags both mine and another product for using Audioweaver !

ASR_Post_Bjorn.png

Now we have the same person on WBF now endorsing that same product that he bagged on ASR ! Doesn't mention my product of course. Seems to be a pattern here.

WBF_Post_Bjorn.png

And then he sinks the boots into people like myself who have spent countless hours and risked alot to make somethging that doesn't meet his expectations :(

ASR2_Post_Bjorn.png

Note the people liking this post. The one who started the thread appears to have an agenda. On another forum says it's all about the software but on this forum it's all about the hardware when spruiking DEQX ;) These are the armchair critics like Bjorn who can't build their own hardware or write the code for it but will whinge and whine when someone like myself spends countless UNPAID hours on a superior product but fails to offer it at a price-point lower than minidsp. You could never satisfy people like this no matter what you built and how much effort you put into it nor would they offer you the funds needed to build a product according to their requirements. They just think that you can magically come up with a product that suits their exact needs without them risking a single penny on it. It seems to be a common theme with some people in this industry. Anyway I have one word of advice for people like Bjorn. Build your own DSP hardware and write your own custom DSP code the way you want it and then sell it to all of your mates for 2 dollars and then nobody can complain can they ?? Rather than cop more abuse from the likes of Bjorn etal I decided to do what he is doing and build my own SOTA active speaker system using my own hardware and custom DSP code. Badluck Bjorn, looks like your options just got a whole lot narrower. Be careful what you wish for mate ;)


#14
News Updates / Re: Introducing the Ultimate A...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - February 26, 2024, 05:35:27 PM
Some people spend a fortune on speaker cables thinking it is the most purist form of signal delivery from amplifier to their loudspeakers !!

2021MOSC_TAI4629_1100x.jpg

But unbeknownst to them the signal has to pass through a complex passive crossover full of an array of lossy and imperfect passive components before it reaches their loudspeaker drivers which is kind of defeating the purpose of having this ultra-pure interconnect cable in the first place !! Passing large amounts of current through capacitors, inductors and resistors was never a good idea. If a passive component was ever going to show its flaws was in a hostile environment like this and yet people continue to seek out the law of diminishing returns by throwing good money after bad on interconnect cables whilst ignoring the elephant in the room ! Hell, there are some speaker vendors who even go to great lengths to hide their passive crossovers by potting the components so people can't scrutinize their design choices !

Passive_Crossover.jpg

With our active speaker, each driver is connected directly to its own amplifier channel with the shortest possible cable length, and even like speaker drivers do not share an amplifier. Every speaker driver has its own associated amplifier channel with its own active crossover network implemented in the most purest form inside a DSP in the form of a mathematical algorithm that more accurately mimics a passive crossover without any of its disadvantages. The advantage of doing it inside a DSP is that there are no issues with power dissipation, component tolerances and drift in values over time, component non-linearities, capacitor dielectric absorption, inductor iron losses and of course cost !! Not only that we can accurately match levels between drivers without using padding resistors that dissipate a lot of power and can drift in value over time. You might think this is overkill but when you consider that the cost of this whole speaker is less than the cost of these speaker cables alone you'd have to agree that the Ultimate Active Speaker has a hell of a lot more to offer than a traditional passive speaker system !

#15
The Dark Room / Duntech Sovereigns to feature ...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - February 16, 2024, 10:52:51 AM
Worth going just for that. See how this old timeless classic stacks up against the new !

https://www.whathifi.com/news/australian-hi-fi-show-sydney-2024-dates-venue-and-ticket-info

unnamed.jpg

QuoteLEVEL 1: FARM COVE ROOM

Halcro & Duntech & Döhmann

The best of Australian – maybe the best in the world!

This unmissable audio suite will host Duntech's flagship Sovereign loudspeakers – acknowledged by experts as the finest in the world, certainly the most accurate, a seven driver system with the drivers symmetrically arranged on a vertical axis and time aligned.


The power comes from Halcro's very latest reference amplification, a triumph of form and function, unique in its imagination of what an amplifier is and how to puh the boundaries of technology.

The third Aussie legend is analogue playback courtesy of a Döhmann Helix turntable, engineered to deliver unparalleled performance in analogue playback and is the result of many years of research, development, collaboration and listening by internationally acclaimed analogue designer Mark Döhmann and his team.

It's an Australian supersystem not to be missed!


#16
News Updates / Is Jitter RUINING your audio ?...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - February 10, 2024, 03:42:51 PM
#17
The Dark Room / We BAIT Audio FORUM goers and ...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - February 08, 2024, 10:42:42 PM
No doubt happens here in Australia too. No doubt about that at all !!

#18
News Updates / Why we would never use a DEQX ...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - January 19, 2024, 07:20:41 PM
Don't be fooled by the blurb on the DEQX website regarding group-delay correction or compensation of loudspeakers. It's a way oversimplification of reality and they have been pushing the same barrow for decades which is probably why they have never commercialized their own speaker systems using it, instead pushing the gimmicks onto other naive loudspeaker designers. Trying to fix up a loudspeaker on a single axis was never going to work. Loudspeakers are far more complex than this and radiate into free space in all directions and not just on one axis alone ! What would fix up a signal chain on an electrical connection simply won't work with a distributed device such as a loudspeaker. This is why no serious hi-end audio manufacturer would ever use a DEQX as well ! Yes, sure our own  UPP can do long-length high sample rate, ultra deep convolution and FIR filtering and do a much higher resolution correction than a DEQX could ever do but do you really want to go down this path ?  When it comes to loudspeakers there simply is no free lunch here and no easy fix and throwing lots of DSP at the problem can often make the problems a lot worse. It certainly is not a panacea for a bad speaker design to begin with !

Anyway don't take our word for it but we suggest you read these three important documents before outlaying your hard earned money on such a device or anything that is just a fancy inverse convolution filter ! These are documents written by other well established audio engineers and echo the same sentiment as us. This is what DEQX will never tell you and why they never sell loudspeaker systems themselves using their own DSP hardware and even if they did it was always going to be a band-aid solution to a complex problem !

https://www.grimmaudio.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/speakers.pdf

And the take-home message from this document is:-

QuoteDSP loudspeaker crossovers done right

From the above we've learned that:-

• Heavy-handed correction exacerbates acoustical problems
• Sharp, linear-phase filters cause pre-ringing
• Targeting an exact linear-phase sum can cause pre-echos.

In short, brute-force correction sounds grainy and smudgy. When you hear cymbals go "splash" instead of
"crash", it's naive DSP at work. So:-

• Do not shave off the hair, a nasty stubble will grow back.
• Do not correct beyond the very beginning of the impulse response.
• The gentler you correct, the wider the angle over which the correction still improves things.
• Target a minimum phase sum.

For the time being I would strongly recommend designing the correction manually. This rules out FIR as the
main workhorse. For each bump or dip one corrects, one should know exactly where it comes from, and make
sure that it isn't better corrected for acoustically. Unfortunately, designing DSP filters does not relieve one from having to know one's acoustics.

Also:-

https://linea-research.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/LR%20Download%20Assets/Tech%20Docs/CrossoverFilters%20White%20Paper%20-C.pdf

QuoteAlso shown in Figure 8 is the impulse responses for a complementary high-pass brick-wall FIR. If we construct a crossover filter bank with such a complementary pair of filters, the Gibbs ripples are also complementary (since we will expect the filters to sum to a flat response with linear phase, producing a perfect impulse). The summed result will thus be free of any Gibbs ripple, so what's the problem? The problem is off-axis. The complementary ripples will only cancel if the delay suffered by the signal from each driver is identical. Off-axis, where the path lengths differ, the ripples will not cancel, leading to the possibility that Gibbs ripple might become audible (just like a high-Q ringing filter).

Such summing errors will be more pronounced at higher crossover frequencies because the ripples are more closely spaced. Lower frequency
crossovers will have wider ripples which will more easily cancel in the presence of off-axis induced delays.

It is evident that steeper cut-off slopes give rise to Gibbs ripples of greater duration. It makes sense therefore to restrict the cut-off slope to be no more than is necessary for the application.

And from the Linkwitz Lab website pretty much the same cautionary tale ;)

https://www.linkwitzlab.com/frontiers.htm

QuoteI - Digital crossovers

Some people think that digital crossovers will replace analog ones, because digital filters can be designed with desirable characteristics that are impossible to realize with analog circuitry. In particular, lowpass and highpass filters with extremely steep slopes and linear phase shift are possible. Steep slopes reduce the overlap region between drivers. Linear phase shift eliminates waveform distortion and merely causes a delay of the signal.  Such characteristics can be obtained from the digital equivalent of tapped delay line filters, which have a finite impulse response (FIR) duration that depends upon the number of taps used. Digital FIR filters can have almost any desired frequency response, if the number of weighted taps is made sufficiently high. [1]

The linear phase shift comes at a price. The impulse response rings. The more so, the steeper the filter slopes. Both lowpass and highpass sections of the crossover ring, but when the outputs are combined, as for a crossover, then the two impulse responses add to a non-ringing, delayed pulse.

All would be fine, if we listened only in anechoic spaces or to speakers with coincident drivers. In reality we use speakers in rooms with reflections and reverberation and the the drivers are separated from each other due to their sizes. As a consequence the off-axis response of the speaker matters and contributes to what we hear. With the drivers non-coincident, the lowpass and highpass outputs are delayed different amounts at points off-axis, and the ringing is no longer canceled in the addition. In the best case the drivers might be coaxial, but this has another set of problems. Very steep crossovers can also cause a very abrupt change in the polar pattern of the speaker, when transitioning from a large diameter driver to a small one. Under reverberant conditions and/or listening off-axis this may have audible consequences.


#19
Cantata / Technical Information/Crossove...
Last post by Tranquility Bass - January 08, 2024, 10:54:53 AM
Please feel free to add any technical material you may have on these speakers.
#20
Millenium / Reviews
Last post by Tranquility Bass - January 08, 2024, 10:36:04 AM
https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/speakers/48322/review-dunlavy-audio-labs-millennium-speakers-review-by-brian-a-at-audio-asylum

QuoteAfter many months of research I went with these speakers for the following reasons.
Extreme tonal accuracy, +/- 1dB from 20Hz to 20KHz.
Non-ported enclosure for clean bass.
Fabric dome tweeter for smooth treble.
Phase/time aligned for accurate transient reproduction.
Non-parallel cabinet walls to minimize internal standing waves.
Quick signal drop off in waterfall plots.
Clean pulse and step response.
Auditioned them and enjoyed the best sound I have ever heard!

It is hard to describe these speakers for I believe they are pretty much fully accurate and transparent. They totally disappear when playing despite their 76 inch height and 300 lbs. each weight. When you slip in a SACD/CD the wall dissapears and becomes a music stage for the musicians. Others have noticed this too and are quite dissapointed when they get home only to find their speakers don't do the disappering act, you can hear where each speaker is. Dunlavy's are matched to withen 0.5dB of each other to ensure this.

These speakers have a certain cleanness and accuracy that is very hard to describe. When I was at the factory in Colorado springs and did A/B comparisons with other Dunalvy speakers these just sounded more open. It was like the band was in the open, on a hill outside or something. With the other speakers, though they sounded great, the music was slightly veiled. I believe this is born out by the waterfall plots of the Millenniums, very clean and quick decay.

The soundstage of these is excellent. With some source material you can hear sounds coming from beyond the left and right of the speakers. Instruments are accurately placed across the area between, and beyond, the speakers. The speakers totally disappear, when the singer and drums are between the speakers, that is where the sound is, you don't hear any sound from the speakers themselves. The sweet spot is only wide enough for one though. However, anywhere in the room the sound is tonally balanced and enjoyable, you just don't get that nice balanced imaging you do in the middle. This is what totally turned me off of planer speakers, their horrible off axis tonal balance, and their laughable bass for that matter.

Perhaps the most noteable aspect of the Millenniums is there stupendous bass. It is so clean you sometimes think its lacking. There is absolutely no boom, overhang, thump, or distortion, even at high levels. I must admit I am used to hearing the 100Hz hump on most cheaper speakers that simulate a good bass response. I notice songs sound different. The bass is very clean and deep too. You can feel deep bass that you couldn't with lesser speakers. Lest you think these speakers are lacking in bass, if you play a song that truely has bass, these will reproduce it in spades. It is just amazing to listen to songs and for the first time hear and feel the bass/drum line of the song very cleanly. There is lots more detail and nuances to be found in the deeper few octives of music than I was aware of before.

The mids are flawless too. Voices are clean and undistorted. Dianna Krall sounds fabulous. Here music with the bass and piano sounds simply stunning. Celine Dion sounds excellent too. The harshness and forwardness of her voice is subdued to some extent, more enjoyable. Though with some of her songs, let's face it, she's really hollering. Men's voices also are nice, never nasally or boomy, always clean.

The treble is so clean and accurate, it captures the metalic sheen of cymbols and other metalic instruments but you need SACD to really enjoy this. There is no brightness, exageration, or harshness to be found, unless it is in the recording. When I compare the treble of these to that of my Paradigm Studio 100's in the home theater room, there is no comparison. Fabric dome tweeters are some much cleaner than metal domes, more natural and enjoyable.

The speakers themselves are a joy to look at. Their looks really grow on you. You start to appreciate their unique hourglass shape. It is so gracefull. My wife, who about flipped when she first say them, way too big and ugly as sin. Now she likes their looks. When we have visitors the women are usually amazed my wife allows me to have them. All the guys drool. You can tell there is some prime sound able to be produced by these massive transducers. The speakers are actually larger than I am, I'm 6-3 and 250 lbs. The speakers have an inch and 50 lbs on me. My son calls them the speaker gods.

About the only thing I can say bad about them is how they reveal poor recordings. Imagine my dismay when two of favorite groups as a teenager have some bad recordings, Fleetwood Mac and Abba. I love listening to SACD music with these. Horns and violins are richer and not strident as they can be with normal CD's. Cymbols are more metalic. The soundstage is enhanced.

Is this the perfect speaker? Probably not, but I am very happy with it. To me it sounded even better than Dunlavy's top of the line SC-V and SC-VI's. For someone with some money to burn, fly out to Colorado and listen to them for yourself. I don't think any dealer carries these for demos.

Read up on the manufacturer's website for the theory behind these speakers. The time alignment of the drivers, the hourglass shape etc. It is www.dunlavyaudio.com. Good reading.