Oh I agree with you, Neil on the one good sub deal. I just was curious about the build. I am not a Dipole bass type of guy. I had them with Carver ribbons . Its to rolled off for me ! But to each his own !
Chris, Siegfried Linkwitz is the king of dipole subwoofer design. Google < linkwitz subwoofer > and blow a few hours
As for the CLS/Depth phenomenon, well, to begin with, it's a rather unorthodox (or at least atypical) use of a subwoofer (in the sense that only a small portion of its performance capability is being deployed.) And the fact that it works so well with the CLS has to be serendipitous, rather than intentional on the part of ML. Even when the CLS was in production, ML allowed third parties to come up with low frequency solutions for the CLS -- notably Muse and Kinergetics. Interestingly, it wasn't until they
finally electrified the woofers in their hybrids (Summit and Vantage) that they got serious about subs
I say
finally because ML speakers
always needed AC, so I figured 'When are they going to put the amps in? Duh!" Oh well, whatever . . . . . I suppose the ML subwoofer development had more to do with the HT market than anything else.
Getting back to the CLS/Depth thing. I assume that like myself, the first thing people noticed was the "pulsating group" of three evenly arranged woofers -- reminded me a bit of the speaker clusters atop prison guard towers ;-) -- they had an omnidirectional radiation pattern. Well you say, so do downfiring subs. True. But in the ML design, all enclosure resonances are cancelled out because of the driver layout (the top and bottom can resonate, but they're so thick and small that they aint goin' anywhere ;-) And then you take a look at those drivers
, with a "cone" that is 80% surround!, and suddenly you realize: this whole device was designed for TRANSIENTS!! And if you want to help out a stat's bottom, it's transients or nothing!
This issue may not be obvious to many, but when the CLS debuted, there we just a couple of fast subs: the Entec (which had just folded) and the Hartley, that Mark Levinson used along with a Decca super-tweeter (the HQD system) in an attempt to turn the Quad 57 into a full-range electrostat
!! Since even those subs were not available to me, I listened (to e
verything), and finally settled on a pair of Wilson Puppies. And
they were fast enough, wow!! So let's see, the 2 Puppies + a Levinson 23.5 SS amp + a Bryston 10B electronic crossover + IC's/SPKR cables X 2, and that little extra bit of lower register came to (are you ready?) $13,000 1990 dollars!! Now that's just not right!
And it didn't solve the placement problem either.
The Depth/Descent incorporate servo feedback (first used in the Infinity Servo-Statik back in the late seventies) with a (
virtual ) infinitely rigid enclosure and a phase-neutral projection pattern and onboard amp(s). They perform
almost like dipole woofers, but without the rear wave, and that is their magic, because you can place them almost anywhere and match them to the panels' phase at that location. But as with all things, there is an optimum, and it's smack between the panels @ 90 degree phase angle -- that's a compromise halfway between the front of the panel (0 deg. phase angle) and the back of the panel (180 deg. phase angle) :bowdown:
