The more these speakers stay around my listening room, the more I like them. Their flaws—the ill-defined deep bass and the slightly laid-back quality—are easily excused in view of the sheer musical pleasure they provide, and their "slightly soft" high end seems to be just right for the best CDs (Telarcs, M&K Digital Masterpiece series, to date), producing an amazingly convincing representation of the sweet but detailed high end in live musical sound. I find that these speakers "wear" better than any I have lived with…
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Gordon Holt returned to the Watkins in January 1984 (Vol.7 No.1):
Sidebar: Specifications
Description: Four-way loudspeaker system. Drive-units: three 8" cone woofers (one used as a subwoofer), two 5" cone midrange units, 1.25" soft-dome tweeter. Crossover frequencies: 40Hz, 100Hz, 2.5kHz. Nominal impedance 8 ohms. Sensitivity 89dB/W/m. Minimum power 30 watts. Power capacity 200 watts unclipped.
Dimensions: 53.375" H by 31.875" W by 12.5". Weight 129 lbs each.
Price: $2990/pair (1983); no longer available (2005).
Manufacturer: Watkins Engineering, 1019 East Center Street, Kingsport, TN 37660. Tel: (423) 246-3701. Web: www.watkinsstereo.com.
One of the things that fascinates me about the field of box loudspeaker design is how few original talents there are capable of designing a model from first principles. Yes, armed with the Thiele-Small papers on bass alignment, an understanding of filter theory, and a working knowledge of the OEM drive-unit field, almost anyone can, and has, come up with one commercially and sonically successful design—given a fair degree of luck. And the teams of well-trained engineers at companies like KEF, B&W, and Celestion have shown that they can produce a steady stream of affordable boxes with a…
Atkinson: There are a lot of ex-bass-players in the hi-fi industry.
Marshall: I tried for a long time to make a living at playing the bass—and came very near to starving. So I went to work for a hi-fi retailer in London, called Hampstead Hi-Fi, who now no longer exists. They told me I was the worst salesman they had ever had because I told customers what was wrong with the equipment. I was then given a job by KJ Leisuresound who were quite easygoing. John Read, who owned KJ, wanted to get involved in making loudspeakers, so by pure accident I ended up effectively starting Audiomaster for…
Atkinson: . . . with a plastic-cone 8" woofer and 1" soft-dome tweeter in a relatively small box.
Marshall: I decided to go in a different way all together. And, you know, I think it was good that Mo gave me the complete freedom to do that. He didn't put any constraints on me doing things. He didn't say, "Hmm, I'm not sure about that." He was prepared to let me just have a completely free hand, finish the design, and then he would go out and sell it. Fortunately it all worked.
It lasted two years. I left Mo to start Epos (though I went back to work for Mo for a week after my own…
The first bending mode of the dome, even an aluminum dome, is not what most people think. Most people say, "Here's our aluminum-dome tweeter, the first bending mode is at 23kHz." Not so. That's the second bending mode. The first bending mode is maybe at 200Hz. It's the second bending mode that's bothering them, which perhaps is at 23kHz. This is usually an oilcan mode, when the middle of the dome is going backwards while the outer edges of the dome are going forwards. It's not a rocking mode, which is not so much due to the dome—and whatever you make the dome out of—but is due to a…
Atkinson: They tried to notch out its amplitude peak.
Marshall: And they made it sound worse. Most people I think were in agreement that the best thing you could do with an SL6 was to take that kill circuit out. That made it sound so much better.
Atkinson: I said earlier that you make your own drive-units, including the 26mm dome for the ES-14 and the 32mm for the old '20. I've always been told that tweeter manufacture is fraught with problems because of the very close tolerances required on something so small. You went into that . . .
Marshall: Foolishly.
…
The woofer is very directional at the crossover frequency, while the tweeter is almost omnidirectional. You've got that horrible, sudden transition. So if you can spread the transition between the two drive-units over a larger part of the bandwidth by using gentle-slope crossover filters, you can fudge it, I suppose is the best term.
Atkinson: You would agree then with Floyd Toole's findings that, off-axis, you need a controlled dispersion across the band, with no sharp discontinuities at any frequency?
Marshall: Yes, absolutely. However, what you also get with gentle-slope…
When I got married, my mother pulled my bride aside and said, "Now it can be your fault!" You see, I have always practiced blame-avoidance. Now I get to do it again.
When I left you at the end of January's column, I was anticipating speedy upgrades for Denon's AVR-4806 receiver and DVD-5910 universal disc player (each costs $3500) so that I could assess my system with the latest version of Audyssey's MultEQxt equalization software, and compare Denon's DenonLink 3rd Edition with iLink to transmit the multichannel digital data while playing SACD and DVD-Audio discs. Then we could move on…
When I swept wideband pink noise from speaker to speaker, it sounded remarkably consistent to my ears and to the RTA display on my new TEF-25 acoustic analysis system. Using the 1-minute pink-noise tracks included on a Telarc SACD of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture (Telarc SACD-60541), I graphed the in-room response of the system and its parts using TEF. The response of the Paradigm Studio/60 center speaker, run full-range (fig.1), was representative of all three front speakers and reflects the action of parametric EQ described above. Clearly, MultEQxt (green trace) substantially smoothed the…