PIC'S OF ICONIC'S DEMO ROOM @ GREAT PLAINS AUDIOFEST IN TULSA!

[zelgall]

Ron, when you decide to upgrade, I would be more than happy to provide a safe, happy home for your 19's. I'm not far away and will gladly pick them up. I have a pair now and would really like to get that big time surround going.

[GM]

>Interesting that the floks here who attended didn't comment on the sound......
====
Greets!

I wasn't there, but I asked Bob Brines (http://geocities.com/rbrines1/) his take on them and he thought they had a too 'in your face' prosound presentation, though he admitted he wasn't the one to critique vintage 'stuff', so to my way of thinking, then depending on your POV it's either a ringing endorsement or a polite damnation of their performance. Great for HT, but for HIFI/studio monitor apps it's more the latter than the former IMO.

As always though, YMMV.

GM

[Todd W. White]

We heard one or two comments like that.

I think part, if not all, of that perception had to do with the room - the rooms were small and not condusive to demonstrating how a speaker actually sounds in a real living room or studio.

On the High-Efficiency Audio Asylum, Norris Wilson commented on this thusly,

"As with any show inviroment, there were uncontrolable problems related to the smallish cubical shaped rooms."

There was a wall to the immediate right of the listening couch that made for some interesting reflections. Dr. Geddes tried to work around the problem by placing articifial trees at the corner of his wall to minimize the reflections, but it was not very helpful, IMHO.

In addition, there was a LOT of traffic in our demo room - people going in an out all the time (for which we are grateful), and that made it difficult for some to concentrate on the actual sound. One lady kept popping in and out, and finally came in and had a listen when the traffic was in a brief lull.

The door being open most of the time also had an effect, especially with relation to the opposing side wall...

I think had your friend had time to listen to some of his favorite recordings in a better environment, he would have a different opinion.

All that being said, despite all of the encumbrances of the room, the foot traffic, the talking, and the not-so-super-wonderful amplification system (we didn't have anything elaborate - just an off-the-shelf from Radio Shack CD player and the Altec 711A 30-watt/channel receiver), the Stonehenge V's and their 704's did quite an impressive job of sounding great ANYWAY!

Norris Wilson, in his post on the Audio Asylum, said it this way:

"First,I have to say that the Iconic speaker was the most dynamic and full spectrum speaker at the show.

"I only heard them with two different cuts, one with female vocals and light acoustics, which I cannot remember who, and the thyme from the first Star Trek movie, where they were moving the new Enterprise from the dock bay for the first time.

"The female vocals were clear and convencing, but there were a few areas where there was a small amount of metal horn shouting when turned up loud."[I posted him back and let him know that I think that sound is in the recording itself, as I have heard it in every speaker I have played it on, not just horn loaded ones, either. - TWW]

"I feel that the room was truly to small for the speaker and compressed at high volume levels. But, that was true of all the systems that I heard at high volume levels.

"When the Iconic speaker played the ochestral piece from Star Trek, they were a great match with plenty of control and dynamics, especially when the kettle bass drum kicked in, they moved some air. I really got that dynamic response going with the music and my emotion, it was fun, yeehaw. I could only imagine how good these speakers could sound in the right room playing heavy orchestral music at high volume levels."

[GM]

Greets!

The room has nothing to do with the 'in your face' phenomenon, being strictly a FR boost in the mids/lower HF. This is controlled by the horn in the 704's case, so the room doesn't come into play unless they were toe'd out (look at the 604-8K's polar plots). How 'honky' it sounds, particularly when driven hard, depends on the horn's design, so while the Mantaray is pretty good overall, a large conical replacement is about your only option now that using foam in various ways are patented by others, unless building the proper damping into the grill allows ya'll to get around them, then adjusting the XO/box tuning to suit.

Room modes/near boundary reflections only affect the BW below ~250- 500Hz when mid/HF horns are used, so any perceived weakness in this BW is compensated to some greater or lesser extent by it. Judging by the comments, the small room was to ya'll's advantage.

I'm well aware of the acoustic problems of such a gathering/demo (been there, done that), but horn systems can negate some of it since they can go a long way towards 'removing' the room from the presentation. Indeed, BB considered the Pi corner horn system to be ".......about as smooth as a speaker can get", and he's about as 'picky' WRT to accurate reproduction as me and the better pro designers, so IMO if ya'll are more interested in accurate reproduction than propagating the 'Altec sound', then ya'll have a ways to go yet.

If not, then it 'sounds' like you've accomplished your goal and it will be interesting to see if there's enough demand to make it a profitable venture.

GM

[Todd W. White]

Well, he wasn't complaining about an "in your face" phonomena, as I see it. I heard what the fellow was referring to, and it only showed up when I listened to it on that particular recording - it wasn't there in the others, as far as I noticed (and I am a degreed musician with many many years of ear training and critical listening). The system never sounded "honky" - on;y in that one passage on that one recording did I notice it getting shrill, and I attribute that to the recording, not the speaker, as I have heard that same phenomena on multiple speakers. I can send you the disc if you'd like to hear it for yourself...

As far as the comments room go, I understood him to mean that the room was too small ot handle the acoustic power the Stonehenge V/704's could deliver - everyone knows that every room has it's acoustic saturation point, beyond which everything becomes a lot of noise - these rooms were small with hard walls, and lots of glass, and just didn't handle large volume levels very well, and several have pointed this out in various forums.

With reference to the room as it related to the HF horn - remember that the 704's MANTARAY horn crosses over around 1,600 Hz, because it just can't load below that. It's very much like the original 604 and the 604B in that regard. The C-G series let go way higher, even though Altec wouldn't admit it publicly. The Mantaray horn does help with stereo imaging in the region above that, though.

As for the "accuracy" of the 704, i.e., frequency response and polar plots, we are working to get these made and will publish them - warts and all - when they become available.

With regard to another horn - this is something we've talked about, but, as with all things, this takes time and money, things that are rare and precious for some of us...

[bfish]

For a guy with a decent ear (and a weak brain), I knew as soon as I entered the room that I wouldn't be able to evaluate anything accurately under the circumstances, so I didn't really try. There might have been a sweet spot in the center of the couch, but I never got there. With 8 feet of separation, and squarely facing a reflective wall (with a couch and coffee table) at 12 feet, standing spots not only over-emphasized whichever side you were nearest, but the numerous reflections as well. Perhaps if we'd closed the door, and cranked it up into a pressure mode.....but I've already expressed my sentiments for the open door. The fact that the sound was as good, or maybe even better, from a few feet out the door in the hallway, than anywhere in the room, told the tale for me. Unless some of the other exhibitors came prepared with adequate room treatment materials, no one there could have gotten a decent evaluation, IMO, but I didn't hear the others, due to the closed doors.

[dgwojo]

I wish I could have been at the GP Fest but it's a little far for me, the speakers look exceelent, I bet with the correct size room and proper electronics they would have really sung!! At the 2005 Audio Karma Fest here in Michigan last month I had a pair of my Altec A7's in a hotel room with 60 watt mono blocks, a stereo Blueberry pre-amp from Juicy Music, and a Sony SACD player plus a turntable. Craig of NOSValves owned the electronics, I own the speakers. At 1 - 3 watts on those tube amps the SPL's were at concert levels, your ears started stressing after about an hour. The entry-way into the room was just bouncing with sound waves and it really sounded bad, when you walked closer to the speakers the sound was amazingly clear and dynamic. I damped the 511B horns and was using 902-8B compression drivers, 515-8B Lansing woofers, and re-capped N1209-8A crossovers with a Zobel network. Bottom line, everyone said the small rooms did the speakers no justice, probably the same situation at the GP Fest!! Dave.
Picture;http://www.audiokarma.org/gallery/sh...at=3024&page=2
AK Fest and gallery link; http://audiokarma.org/ak2005/

[dgwojo]

The Picture link didn't take correctly, maybe this time?
http://www.audiokarma.org/gallery/sh...ort=1&cat=3024

[bfish]

I forgot to mention the intermittent use of a hammer-drill on the 2nd floor (right behind my headboard!). Don't know if that jaw-rattling vibe made it to the 6th or not. Strange, though, I never noticed it in the bar.

Also, the floors were laid out like stacked donuts, with an open center, common to all rooms on all 8 or 9 floors. Utensils being placed on plates at ground level could be heard all the way up to the glass ceiling, as could all other sounds produced in the hotel commons. Whenever there was much activity, the combined noises and echoes became so jumbled (almost pink), a person tended to 'tune them out', but I suspect a meter would have shown a surprisingly high background noise level. This likely didn't effect the closed doors, and may have even had the opposite effect, as the mind welcomed the sudden lack of noise when the door was closed,and was able to focus on the far-less-complex signal at hand.

[joyspring]

I'll have to concur (somewhat) with GM: how `horn-like' the 704 sounds has much more to do with the driver rather than the room, and as GM also stated, the small room (and the attendent benefits of proximity to the systems that yielded higher direct-to-reflected sound ratio) was definitely to the 704's advantage...

The `horn' (or `strident' or `shrill'`) description has a lot more to do with the system directivity.

Despite having a constant-directivity Mantaray(tm) horn (which was a huge improvement on the earlier six-cell horns on the C,D,E,-8G), the 704 and all 604s suffer from a directivity mismatch at the crossover frequency, where directivity rapidly narrows at the transition... and power response subsequently suffers.

This was duly noted by JBL's Smith, Keele, Eargle in the early 1980s (D. Smith, D.B. Keele, J. Eargle, "Improvements in Monitor Loudspeaker Systems," presented at the 69th AES Convention, Los Angeles 1981).

They also noted that "it is doubtful that a wide-angle horn with good midrange control could be built into the available space of a typical coaxial design."

Note that the UREI Time-Aligned(tm) monitors were rapidly losing favour to the newer, even power response systems (i.e. - JBL 4430/4435) during the early-mid-1980s while the Altec 604 had been long dead in professional usage... heightened consideration of control (listening) room acoustics and monitor system power response buried systems based on the 604 and similar coaxes with typical 60x40 or 90x40 horns.

GM's assertion that a large conical replacement (a la Tannoy, Bag End, etc.) is a solution is on the mark really as these systems definitely have better DI matching between LF and HF drivers.

These will be issues that Iconic will have to contend with, particularly now that even power response is highly associated with overall system performance. Savvy reviewers will readily note this deficiency as even modestly priced two-way domestic systems are heavily-optimised driver- and crossover-wise for even power response.

Not necessarily a criticism (hey, I still prefer my 604-8K-based UREIs), but this is stuff we advocates should definitely be aware of.

BobR