Unconventional speaker designs

That’s a very eclectic way to define ‘unconventional’, but I like it. Looking at the TG speaker designs since quite some time…


Antony Gallo designs

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FrontRo hybrid electrostatic… Seen at last year’s Daventry hi-fi show. About chair height.

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mmmh, not bad looking! How did it sound?

Can’t really remember, but didn’t stand out. Room acoustics at the show weren’t particularly good so not a place to make a fair judgement.

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Davone Speakers.

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But it is a normal dynamic speaker. Nothing unconventional there, imo.

yeah, but there’s a lot of such in this thread…

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1102A4E4-5339-4250-9C47-31049FDE3623
must be posted, of course
Martin

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I have actually heard 3 of those. They sound pretty good and look even better. You are paying for the wood work and looks though.

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Yes, but speakers are part of the furniture . I once impulse bought a pair of Ruark Sabres based purely on their looks, in my audio regrets they feature highly - when I gave them to someone who blew them up .

Those Davone speakers and these beauties from post 102 would grace any lounge

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Lawrence audio. Unconventional in their form.

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Fidelio by Philips

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And then there’s Jern that are built into cast iron enclosures and look like they’ve escaped from a particularly annoying cartoon.

Conventional enough as to drivers and cross overs though the rubber ring support is fairly unusual. The French quite often use the word enceint for speakers, these look like it, it also means pregnant.

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Origami speakers. French design. Around 50 k.


Origami 86th is therefore not a fanciful project. Its creators explain the principle to us: distortion, the main audible defect, increases with the power sent to the speakers and therefore their travel. The idea is therefore to use speakers with membranes with the lowest possible travel. However, the speakers still need to send sound. To compensate for their small size, the creators of Origami 86th chose to increase the performance of the speakers by multiplying the drivers.

Truncated icosahedron
Aside from distortion, the other problem the Origami 86th creators chose to combat is the creation of standing waves between the speaker cabinet walls. More than avoiding any parallelism, as we can see on quite a few audiophile speaker models, they avoided the speaker having any side without a driver. Thus the shape of the box on which the midrange and treble drivers are placed, which resembles a sphere, is technically called a truncated icosahedron, or a volume with 32 faces.

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So why didn’t they do likewise with the bass box?

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Very curious if there is any experience on forum combining Klipsch La Scala with Naim amplification. I’m interested in having custom cabinets built, with upgraded internals like ALK engineering crossovers and Crites drivers / horns.

Obviously not an easy speaker to home audition.

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I’d like to know this, too.

SkiFi Audio sells and likes the LaScala, and used to (and may still) have a Naim Olive series system in stock:

Please let me know how you get on with that.

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It is not out of patriotism that the Bretons Ludovic Fournier and Gilles Milot chose to give a hexagonal shape to the box. Their idea would have been, as with the truncated icosahedron used for the mids/treble, to cut a shape approaching the sphere to accommodate the bass drivers. However, their manufacturing constraints did not allow them such a feat, nor to print a large box in 3D.
The twelve speakers used for each subwoofer are rather small (for bass) and follow the idea (as for the icosahedron) of leaving only a few faces without speakers. The walls are made of high-strength aluminum 20 mm thick, which is enormous and rather worthy of the wall of a High-End audiophile amp cabinet.

40 channels
We can imagine that with 86 speakers, amplification and filtering can be a headache, or even a mission impossible. The creators of the project chose to give each of the speakers 20 channels, or 40 in total. A specific and dedicated DSP has been developed for the Origami 86th, in order to carry out all weighing and phase, frequency and synchronization corrections in real time.

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From a technical standpoint, I would say yes. BMR driver, special attention paid to isolation and innovative bass loading.