Buddha
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I've been suspecting it, now my wife verified it: Size does matter.
bifcake
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I could have told you that. Your wife told me that size mattered years ago!

Buddha
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Quote:
I could have told you that. Your wife told me that size mattered years ago!

Well, that explains her being single when I met her!

Glad to see you took it so well.

(Just in case, since things have been a little tense around here lately, I'm just doing some dick related trash talk with a fellow audiophile. No actual dick insult was inferred or implied.)

RGibran
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I couldn

rabpaul
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How about design matters more than size or quality matters more than quantity?
Its kind of unfair to compare one manufacturers sealed design to another's ported design.
You only mention Genesis but what were the other subs you compared them with, were they even in the same price range?

Buddha
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Quote:
How about design matters more than size or quality matters more than quantity?
Its kind of unfair to compare one manufacturers sealed design to another's ported design.
You only mention Genesis but what were the other subs you compared them with, were they even in the same price range?

Hi, RG and RabPaul!

Well, where to start?

All the woofers were sealed enclosures.

I think it's completely fair as a consumer to compare anything I please, especially since they were all Hi Fi products.

Of course design and quality matter, I was just making a general observation from my experiences and asking if anyone else had decided they had any specific design/'quality' preferences.

I only mentioned the Genesis because I did not want to start a brand name tussle about the woofers. The Genesis are the single woofer 12", with a cabinet that is about 24'X24"X30". I got them about 15 years ago for somewhere near a grand each. The other woofers were in smaller enclosures, but are of that new 'flat driver'/lowcompliance (i.e. stiff) design. I try to give the manufacturer credit for deciding on his own enclosure size appropriately. Both the newer woofers retailed for 50% to 300% higher in price than the Genesis cost in 1993 dollars.

RG, I am pretty happy with the Ferguson Hills, but since I had everything taken apart for T.H.E. I thought, "As long as I'm putting everything back together, I think I'll see how these babies sound."

I admit to a predilection for lean bass. It has been an almost vanishingly rare event for me to hear bass in a Hi Fi rig that is "just right." Every audiophile has his somethin', and for me, it may be transient response, or 'speed', if you will, that I may value more highly than some other attributes. Hence, my love for planars and ribbons and maybe more emphasis on bass speed than total bass output.

I can happily live with the speakers 'as is,' but you nailed me - I also like to play and see what happens...

This whole fooling around with the woofers mostly served to remind me that, in general, I have seemed to prefer larger diaphragmed subwoofer drivers. One hypothesis may be that they require less excursion than a smaller driver, I'm not really sure.

RabPaul is right about ports, I think, making comparisons with sealed enclosures - it seems sealed enclosures (again, in freaking general) seem to present a more 'multi-note' bass than ported designs, but that is not written in stone.

In my basment rig, I actually ended up plugging the subwoofer ports on my Studio Grands and changing the crossover settings to get the bass response I like best...so I admit to a bias. I hope nobody takes my comments as a matter of me attempting to foist a universal truth on y'all.

RGibran
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Buddha,

Good stuff as always.

Didn

Buddha
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You know, RG, you raise another great point.

For me, much of the fun of audio is not so much the pursuit of the absolute sound (because all systems fail, and then I could never be satisfied) as it is the pursuit of "sounds better than I thought it would!"

I think I get more excited about something surprising me with how good a job it does despite fiscal or physical limitations than I do about the latest assault on the state of the art getting one percent closer to 'live' sound.

Hearing a single small driver cover more of the frequency range than I expect (and how well it does what it does) makes me more tolerant of what it doesn't do, if that makes sense!

I do the same with wines. If they pour well and conform to the shape of their container, then I'm pretty hard to convince that any wines are not worthy of being "potated!"*

Anyway, getting back on track. As an audiophile, I am pretty easy to please in the "sounds fun" or "sounds better than I thought it would" part of the hobby, but I'm overly hard to please in the "best sound in the world" category.

I guess it all boils down to "sounds good," and from there the enemy of good becomes "better."

I know that sounds crazy. It's hard to describe.

*"Potated:" verb, made up. Derived from the adjective 'potable' (drinkable.) Potated means "imbibed" or "past tense of drink."

KBK
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contrary to popular belief it is possible to get a two way passive crossover to sound as good as a 'single driver' when it comes to phase integrity. You just have to be willing to throw away over 50% of the amplifier's power, right from the get-go. How? By using that tossed (but not wasted!) energy to crowbar the phase shift of the two divers into full agreement.

Who would do such an insane thing? I'm not even sure anyone has made the attempt yet! After all it hasn't been that long that watts have become cheap. Now that mediocre to high quality watts have become relatively inexpensive-it's time to explore that particular passive crossover design route.

or go to two amps and do it electronically.

Single driver systems do definitely have their charms-and they are good, important ones.

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