early 1970's speaker design Options

[Bartholomew MacG...]

Here's a quote from the engineer Siegried Linkwitz that was in an interview that was posted in Stereophile:

Dickson: You're most widely known as the developer of the Linkwitz-Riley crossover. Could you explain a few of the characteristics of this crossover?

Linkwitz: To answer your question, we need to go back to when I started out exploring the whole speaker issue in the early '70s. Then you could take the grille cloth off many of the available speakers and see a strange, almost haphazard arrangement of the drivers on the baffle. It really puzzled me and I wondered what was going on. So I asked some of the designers why they were doing this and they said; "Because we've found it sounds better."

As I looked further into this issue, I realized that two principal things were not well-understood. First, very little was known at that time about the effects of diffraction from the cabinet edges. Second, and more importantly, very little was understood about how phase-shift with respect to the current passing through the voice-coils of different drivers affected the polar radiation pattern of a speaker. In other words, the interaction between the electrical side of a driver and the acoustical response was not clear at the time. For example, the phase-shift between the current in the tweeter and midrange voice-coils, relative to the placement of these drivers on the baffle, affects the speaker's radiation pattern.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/siegfried-linkwitz-page-4



I was wondering if anyone knows if this is really true - that they just didn't know what they were doing and were in some way desinging the speakers by trial and error.

[julf]

I was wondering if anyone knows if this is really true - that they just didn't know what they were doing and were in some way desinging the speakers by trial and error.

Well, loudspeaker "design" in the early 70's was mostly by copying and tweaking "well-known designs". There was some serious research at places like BBC, and KEF was pioneering use of computer analysis, but most "designers" rehashed some basic designs and design rules. My favourite example is the original Linn Isobarik (I still love my modded early examples). Linn bought the design from the original designer/developer, but didn't understand it - as a result, pretty much every "improvement" Linn introduced during the production lifetime of the speaker was a backwards step...

[Bartholomew MacG...]

I was wondering if anyone knows if this is really true - that they just didn't know what they were doing and were in some way desinging the speakers by trial and error.

Well, loudspeaker "design" in the early 70's was mostly by copying and tweaking "well-known designs". There was some serious research at places like BBC, and KEF was pioneering use of computer analysis, but most "designers" rehashed some basic designs and design rules. My favourite example is the original Linn Isobarik (I still love my modded early examples). Linn bought the design from the original designer/developer, but didn't understand it - as a result, pretty much every "improvement" Linn introduced during the production lifetime of the speaker was a backwards step...

That seems strange to me. You'd think they'd be engineers who knew something about acoustics and would try to use some of that. The other thing that's weird is the phrase "sounds better" which sort of seems to imply they listened to music on them and made their decisions based on that instead of using measurements.

[julf]

That seems strange to me. You'd think they'd be engineers who knew something about acoustics and would try to use some of that.

There was a fair bit of academic work going on, but it only trickled into the industry during the 70's - remember that stuff like the Thiele & Small work was only published in the early 70's, and took a while to be accepted.. High-end hifi was also a very marginal business.

The other thing that's weird is the phrase "sounds better" which sort of seems to imply they listened to music on them and made their decisions based on that instead of using measurements.

Ah, but this was the 70's. Measurements were for men in white coats that smoked pipes. The cool crowd *experienced* things (and smoked other kinds of stuff...)

[Arnold B. Kruege...]

That seems strange to me. You'd think they'd be engineers who knew something about acoustics and would try to use some of that.

There was a fair bit of academic work going on, but it only trickled into the industry during the 70's - remember that stuff like the Thiele & Small work was only published in the early 70's, and took a while to be accepted.. High-end hifi was also a very marginal business.

The other thing that's weird is the phrase "sounds better" which sort of seems to imply they listened to music on them and made their decisions based on that instead of using measurements.

Ah, but this was the 70's. Measurements were for men in white coats that smoked pipes. The cool crowd *experienced* things (and smoked other kinds of stuff...)

The state of the art of acoustics measurements were very different.

(1) The FFT was popularized among engineers as a theoretical topic just a few years before. FFT's required computers, and the computational hardware required to compute even a 2048 point FFT was $10,000s or even $100,000s. Mainframes of the day are dwarfed by the processor in your cellphone!

(2) A really sophisticated lab in that time might be able to create a swept tone using a geared motor to drive the oscillator's frequency controls. There was a chain drive to the plotter to keep it synchronized with the oscillator tuning.

(3) HP came out with a minicomputer based 5427 FFT-based system in the late 1960s early 1970s but if memory serves, it ran more than $100,000. History of RTAs

By the mid-late-1970s Crown's TEF-based portable audio measuring equipment became available but still pretty well destroyed $10,000. Appropriate microphones ran > $1,000 and in those days this was a ton of money!

The state of the art of theoretical analysis was also pretty basic. The basic landmark work by Thiel & Small was published and popularized in the same time frame - early 1970s.

Bottom line. Without predictive theories, everybody was pretty well left to cut and try. Without good measurements, nobody knew for sure what their cutting and trying was actually accomplishing.