"My role as speaker designer is to reproduce chords, the arrangement of notes, their rhythm, tessitura, attacks, transitions, rises, fades and even more the holographic form of music. It's not easy. Music isn't just sounds at different amplitudes. There's an actual form to it. Throw a stone into water. You get concentric waves. Now throw a stick. It's not the same. When a guitar generates sounds, their shape isn't the same as when a double bass or violin does it. My brother plays the classical guitar, arguably not that well but with very elegant tone. Whenever he plays, I see before me an ellipsoidal form which pulsates like a living being that's breathing and singing. It's similar for all instruments."
"If we look at the ideal impulse response graph on the top left, then Joe d'Appolito's famous MTM array below which so many follow, we see a twin pulse. That means it can't do a proper square wave. But for a musical impulse to retain its uniqueness, a square wave must remain square. That's what Zero Junior will do as shown in the upper right screen shot. I didn't invent the solution. Dick Sequerra tackled this issue already 40 years ago. But most designers don't believe in putting in enough work. Their god is software whose pronouncement is simulation."
"Creating a filter in software is easy. Input a few measurements and it will calculate all the known filters from Bessel to Butterworth to Chebyshev. These are mathematical models whose output curves are varied by changing the input values. Regardless, we always end up with the same questions. Which one is or sounds best and/or makes the most sense? Which one best responds to the drivers' innate behavior when 10 different drivers of overlapping specs will all sound very different?"
"In his famous book, Vance Dickason said that a 4th-order Linkwitz-Riley filter with global 0.49 co-efficient creates a flat response, has strong attenuation, isn't very sensitive to phase shift and therefore certainly best for high-end audio applications.
"Everybody took that to the bank as the undeniable blind truth. Any filter steeper than first order oscillates. Now it needs damping. If we require steeper attenuation than 6dB/octave, we should stack multiple 1st-order filters. There's an elegant way to do that which also answers the question about time and emotion.
"I believe that the first and last thing we must have, know and recognize once we have achieved it is a clearly defined goal. We must intimately know the sound we're after and how we wish to transcribe the music. For that we return to the beginning. We must listen to opera, acapella song, live music without PA, kids singing on a beach. We must leave the noise pollution of the cities and rediscover the natural dynamics of a blackbird crying, observe the sounds of nature. I'm not kidding. That's essential. I observe and try to understand the composition of natural sounds. When I bicycle, I listen to the air rush over my body. It's all information. Then I apply that information to attempt to reproduce the natural sound.
"Right or wrong, for that natural sound I really like Supravox drivers. Their exponential membranes are very deep and their coil/cone junction is perfect and far superior to that of flat diaphragms. Likewise for Accuton whose mechanical assemblies are excellent. Careful listening to evaluate and get familiar with hundreds of different drivers is important. A driver is a very simple mechanical device but its real-world behavior under music signal is very very complex. That alone is an endless subject."
