When the 3-day AXPONA, aka Audio Expo North America, opens this Friday, April 12, in Chicago’s spacious Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center, the team of Editor-in-Chief Jim Austin, Technical Editor John Atkinson, Senior Contributing Editor Herb Reichert, and a lowly Contributing Editor with the initials JVS will be posting reports throughout the day and eve on many of the most exciting and noteworthy displays in the show’s 197 active exhibit rooms.
AXPONA’s…
After 40 years of evolution, a new species of tweeter has appeared: the Linaeum TLS, which stands for True Line Source. This…
Everything stays resolutely where it belongs on the soundstage, including sounds located midway between each pair of…
Equipment used for this review included a Pioneer Elite CLD-99 laserdisc player, Sony DTC-2000ES DAT recorder, Lexicon DC-1 THX surround processor, and three Boulder 102AE power amps.
The video display included a Sony 1252 line-doubled video projector and 84"-wide 16:9 Stewart Ultramatte 150 screen. Software included a handful of recent CDs and blockbuster laserdiscs, a compilation of digitally copied music and soundtrack excerpts on DAT tape, and some stereo LPs of varying vintage.—J. Gordon Holt
Model 10: Floorstanding two-way, fullrange speaker. Driver complement: 1 Model TLS-1.5 soft-ribbon dipole tweeter; one 8" cone woofer in ducted-port reflex enclosure. Frequency range: 32Hz–20kHz. Sensitivity: 89dB. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms.
Dimensions: 34" x 10" x 15" (HxWxD) Weight: 82 lb each.
Price: $2500/pair, black or maple; $2700/pair, cherry (1997); no longer available (2019).
Center-Channel Speaker: Low-profile horizontal configuration. Driver complement: 1 Model TLS-1.5 soft-ribbon dipole tweeter; two 5.25" cone woofers in sealed…
Both Linaeum speakers have similar average B-weighted sensitivities at around 86dB/2.83V/m, While the Model 10's impedance (fig.1) doesn't drop below 6 ohms over most of the audio band, the Linaeum Center Speaker has an impedance of 4 ohms or below through the music and vocal "power region" in the lower midrange (fig.2), meaning that a receiver or amplifier rated into 4 ohm loads should be used.
Fig.1 Linaeum Model 10, electrical impedancwe (solid) and phase (dashed) (2 ohms/vertical div.).
Fig.2 Linaeum Center Channel,…
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Digital sources: Pioneer CLD-99 CD/LD/DVD player, Sony DTC-2000ES DAT recorder, Toshiba DVD player.
Preamplification: Lexicon DC-1 DTS surround processor.
Cables: Canare Video Coax interconnects (sources to controller), Straight Wire Symphony II RCA-to-XLR cables (controller to speakers).
Room treatment: Owens-Corning 4" painted Fiberglas cloth.—J. Gordon Holt
Genelec Studio Monitor 1031A satellite: Biamplified two-way speaker in ported enclosure. Drive-units: 1" metal-dome tweeter, 8" polypropylene-cone woofer. Frequency response: 48Hz–22kHz, ±2dB. Maximum peak spl: 120dB at 1m. Maximum short-term output: 110dB, 100—1000Hz. Continuous RMS output: 101dB, 100—1000Hz. Input impedance: 10k ohms (balanced).
Dimensions: 15.5" H by 10" W by 11.5" D. Weight: 28 lb.
Serial numbers of units reviewed: 30348, 30353, 30378, 30817, 30818.
Price: $1999/pair in pebbled black, $2099/pair in matte black (1999); no longer…