Single driver speakers, do they make a valid point?

[spwath]

From a single driver speaker company, their site makes these points about why single driver speakers have an advantage.

http://omegaloudspeakers.com/singledrivers.html

This means that regardless of price, once a crossover is introduced into the signal path, no speaker will ever be quite as coherent or open as even Omega's lowest priced single driver design.

Is this true?

Would crossovers really effect the signal at all?
And would this point be not valid when adding a sub?

 

Just curious if these are valid points.

[Enderman]

no

good crossovers will not change the signal

 

the only benefit of a single driver is all the audio coming from the same position

but this is just marketing because a tweeter a few cm off center does not make an audible difference

 

also you dont keep your head in the exact same position 100% of the time so even if it did make a difference you would always hear something different

[Lutkeveld]

1 hour ago, Enderman said:

no

good crossovers will not change the signal

 

the only benefit of a single driver is all the audio coming from the same position

but this is just marketing because a tweeter a few cm off center does not make an audible difference

 

also you dont keep your head in the exact same position 100% of the time so even if it did make a difference you would always hear something different

Crossovers do change the signal a lot. Its point is to combine the two acoustic outputs into one with a straight frequency response.

A couple of centimeter can change a lot, especially at higher frequencies (smaller wavelength). Mainly with regards to combing, lobing and diffraction.

A couple cm offset can fuck up your whole crossover. How much you'd care would be another story...

In most cases the advantages of a two-way outweigh the advantages of a single-source system.

[Enderman]

Just now, Lutkeveld said:

Crossovers do change the signal a lot. Its point is to combine the two acoustic outputs into one with a straight frequency response.

A couple of centimeter can change a lot, especially at higher frequencies (smaller wavelength). Mainly with regards to combing, lobing and diffraction.

A couple cm offset can fuck up your whole crossover. How much you'd care would be another story...

In most cases the advantages of a two-way outweigh the advantages of a single-source system.

crossovers take one signal and split it into two, one high frequency and one low frequency

they do not combine anything

 

if the speaker is built correctly it will have a good waveguide to prevent the high frequencies from being extremely directional

 

and no, I highly doubt any human can hear the difference between the tweeter being 3cm high vs 6cm high

the human ear is far from accurate enough to hear that

a bat maybe, but not a human

[Lutkeveld]

@Enderman

No they don't combine anything, but their goal is to combine the acoustic output from two sources in to one.

They don't alter the input source if that's what you mean, but their output is significantly different from the input (bit redundant to say ofcourse).

 

Almost all crossovers do way more than 'splitting a signal'. Sure in reality it's just a combination of a high and lowpass, but it has to take a lot of external factors in to account.

There is a lot of science behind combining two sources in to one flat output. By just splitting you'd have a mid/treble heavy sound signature due to baffle step diffraction and higher tweeter sensitvity, including a lot of roughness in the high end due to diffraction (or even worse, comb filtering due to difference in phase).

 

It's not that shifting the tweeter location is a problem, but it's shifting its position on the baffle and in relation to the woofer that causes problem with phase and diffraction patterns.

 

[SSL]

40 minutes ago, Enderman said:

snip

 

Without getting into a tiresome exchange, multiway speakers do change sound. Placement of the driver in the baffle and relative to each other can have a big impact, and the quality of the crossover as well. Group delay, diffraction, and so on.

 

As to the OP, this sounds like typical marketing hype. We've seen this kind of "magic bullet" advertising in other areas, from 1 Tesla driver magnets to nano-thickness diaphragms. Sounds great on paper but in reality things are not so cut and dried.

 

If someone had figured out how to consistently make a single-driver perform better than a good two- or three-way, everyone else would be doing it, too.

[spwath]

6 minutes ago, SSL said:

 

Without getting into a tiresome exchange, multiway speakers do change sound. Placement of the driver in the baffle and relative to each other can have a big impact, and the quality of the crossover as well. Group delay, diffraction, and so on.

 

As to the OP, this sounds like typical marketing hype. We've seen this kind of "magic bullet" advertising in other areas, from 1 Tesla driver magnets to nano-thickness diaphragms. Sounds great on paper but in reality things are not so cut and dried.

 

If someone had figured out how to consistently make a single-driver perform better than a good two- or three-way, everyone else would be doing it, too.

That makes sense. So similar to all these alternate speaker ways, Planar magnetic speakers, ribbon tweeters, ect?

 

I have a pair and i think they sound quite good, but That is probably because i upgraded from a pair of 100$ polks to these 450$ ish new speakers.

 

Interesting, the drivers from That company are all custom made, and all the cabinets are hand made by the one guy.

[TheAudiophile]

There is some truth to the single-driver community's love of no crossover parts in the signal path. However, the idea of one driver covering the entire frequency spectrum is one that is rife with problems.

 

The pieces of knowledge that you can take with you from them are as follows: Yes, do remove all you can from the path between the speaker driver and amplifier. Secondly, point sources (single driver, concentric drivers) are an excellent way of maintaining phase coherence, but they also come with their own set of compromises. In total, use active crossovers on a multi-way system, and you can acheive the ideal of no components between the driver and amplifier with none of the drawbacks.

 

However, I do find that most of the drivers the fullrange community likes make some of the BEST midrange drivers in a 3+ way system. Really, all serious audio systems should start with active crossovers and at least a 3-way design. Good sound can of course be achieved with a 2-way system, but 3-way is where a good stereo starts IMO.

[spwath]

1 hour ago, TheAudiophile said:

There is some truth to the single-driver community's love of no crossover parts in the signal path. However, the idea of one driver covering the entire frequency spectrum is one that is rife with problems.

 

The pieces of knowledge that you can take with you from them are as follows: Yes, do remove all you can from the path between the speaker driver and amplifier. Secondly, point sources (single driver, concentric drivers) are an excellent way of maintaining phase coherence, but they also come with their own set of compromises. In total, use active crossovers on a multi-way system, and you can acheive the ideal of no components between the driver and amplifier with none of the drawbacks.

 

However, I do find that most of the drivers the fullrange community likes make some of the BEST midrange drivers in a 3+ way system. Really, all serious audio systems should start with active crossovers and at least a 3-way design. Good sound can of course be achieved with a 2-way system, but 3-way is where a good stereo starts IMO.

Ok. My single driver speaker seem to cover the spectrum well, just not too low, but I have my sub for that.

 

But I have not compared them to a similar price range 2 or 3 way speaker, so.

[TheAudiophile]

The main problem in making a midrange speaker driver cover the highs is intermodulation distortion. The larger cone movements from the lower frequencies will affect the production of higher frequencies unless the driver has a very linear BL curve (not found on all but the most advanced motor designs). If the driver is also fed bass frequencies, the problem becomes exponential. 

 

As well, most full-range drivers will have poor dispersion/off-axis performance in the treble region. This is a result of the cone diameter. Treble drivers need to be small for good dispersion. This may seem like the issue is remedied by simply always keeping the driver pointed at your ear, but speakers with poor off-axis response do not image well. 

[TheAudiophile]

I went on a full-range excursion once. I had a pair of Fostex FE-127s in ported boxes, and FE-166's in back-loaded horns. Both sounded great in the midrange, but were so weak elsewhere that I quickly got disappointed and sold them. I took the good things I learned from the experience with me to better speaker setups. The FE-127s truly did sound lovely in the midrange, though.

 

EDIT: I forgot I also bought a pair of Zigmahornets with Merrill drivers, too. Those were pretty neat and really started to perform the more power you fed them (to a point). Of course, those were sold as well.

 

Maybe the most fun part about small full-range drivers is being impressed by the sound that comes out of them for their size and primitiveness. Ultimately they are inferior to multi-way, however.

[mao91]

This thread is entertaining. Yes, crossovers do affect the output signal. If a person is standing in front of you talking, and they move, you can tell they are moving because of the direction the sound is coming from. Likewise, if two people are standing in front of you talking, saying the exact same thing at the exact same time, but they move in different directions, you may have a harder time hearing one over the other. That's sort of the dilemma of having separate tweeters and woofers. And it's true that with cheap audio systems, this becomes an issue. But most higher quality systems are engineered so this doesn't become an issue that detracts from the sound. This allows them to then get BETTER woofers and BETTER tweeters, so you're getting a clearer sound overall. Of course, I just use reference monitors, so those are definitely engineered better than your run-of-the-mill surround systems.

[bob345]

Having designed and built quite a few pairs of speakers including single driver speakers similar  to what that company makes. Its just a marketing thing to sell their product and make themselves appear different form the competition. While in some use cases a single driver may be a great option, there are still allot of compromises that have to be made. With a single driver, the larger the moving mass is, the less responsive it is at the high end of the audible spectrum. If you want to keep an acceptable high end response you need to have a less moving mass which in nearly all cases ends up meaning using a driver with a smaller surface area which means a weaker low end response. If you want to somewhat correct both of these, you can use a specialized enclosure design such as a Transmission line/quarter wave enclosure or folded horn, but at the expense of size and weight of the final design. There is no such thing as a perfect driver, so there will always be compromises with a single driver system, you just need to choose which ones you feel you can live with. While its true that crossovers do alter the sound, that is exactly what they are meant to do. A well designed crossover using good parts should not add any kind of audible artifacts to the sound.