I'm no expert but my take is that coax could sound better as you would in effect have a point source setup. However it is rare for manufacturers to use their best stuff in that configuration.

Besides that I'm sure there are some acoustic issues with the tweeter being "in the way", but that is speculation on my part.

 

I'm a big big believer in "point source" drivers. Whether it be a coax or full range driver. EG. HAT L3SE, Morel Integra Ovation XO4.

 

Tannoy makes an interesting coaxial design they call 'dual concentric' where the tweeter is housed inside the midrange motor structure. They sound wonderful and flat.

In general though the coaxial design is primarily a budget speaker with many compromises in design.

If done right a coaxial can sound better than components, but very rarely are they ever done right.

 

similar to the old KEF uniQ. those sounded amazing, but where not cheap.

my $0.02 on coax or any point source in a car is location. if you have a 6.5" coax low in the door, the tweeter needs to be aimable or have fantastic off-axis response.

 

Just saw this posted in another thread:

FAITAL PRO 4FE30 - 4" MID-HIGH SPEAKER

These Faital look interesting... I might have to look into them further.

 

What do those have to do with coaxial speakers? Are you trying to infer that a single full-range driver would be a substitute for a coaxial? Those 4" aren't full-rangers (there's much better examples of full-range speakers). I'm planning on adding some Mark Audio Alpair 10's (full-range) to my a-pillars with a sub in the back (two-way system).

 

Back in the late 90's I competed with a pair of MB Quart co-axials (bridge mounted tweet) in the kicks of my Mazda B2200. I had great success with them. I would love to see a 3-way component speaker with a midrange and tweeter, both mounted co-axially in a straight line with a sound shaping plug behind the tweet and midrange. Might make for a great sounding 3-way setup.

 

Coaxials can certainly sound as good or better than components, but unless they're similar to the Kef or Tannoy speakers, they aren't point source drivers because the acoustic origins for tweeter and mid aren't the same. There are a couple of big problem with coaxials. te first is obstruction and reflections between the midrange cone and the back of the tweeter. The second is the fact that the moving woofer cone is the baffle for the tweeter, which can cause a warbling sound (like IMD) at frequencies that the tweeter plays where the tweetre radiates into all angles (rearward as well as frontward). That can be improved by making a bigger baffle for the tweeter (which causes more of problem #1), by reducing woofer excursion (which reduces the amount of bass the speaker makes) or by the Tannoy or Kef deals.

 

How come JBL, or any Harmon product, does not have any point source drivers? I was always amazed that there is not that many out there. I personally would love to see a 3.5" one, since alot of OEM systems come with that size on the dash. I know I would purchase some instead of having to run a fullrange which lacks the top end of a tweeter. Something with a super small tweeter crossed pretty high.

 

lol...well for me the coaxials have been fine. I dont have a competition system or anything.

if the install were correct I imagine comps would be better but for me the coaxials I have had lasted longer than any of my gear...going on 3rd car now with the same ones..

I noticed no real difference in the first car with all kinds of comps vs the coaxials I put in there for ease of install. had the install been better I am sure the comps would have sounded better.

but again, my system sucks compared to most here..lol

so I guess I would agree that comps would sound better..but I dont really care.

what I have works for me and is as loud as I can stand it. the current car kind of sucks for comps anyhow due to the stupid design of a door with no air space. I have basically speakers on stilts. thanks volvo

 

I think we've established that the general consensus here is coaxials can sound better than components, but what about any point source speaker? If a coaxial and a full-ranger had reasonably similar output range and efficiency, T/S, etc... which design would work better?

Do you guys think all coaxials need a sub - at least for a 'good install'? Or are there examples of coaxials without a sub that cover toward that range?

What sort of install would anyone on here do that involved only a coaxial? I'm not trying to turn this into a battle of subs stats, just an honest question.

 

^^^^^^^ Are you trying to do a build with coaxials only and expecting it to sound as good as components with a sub(s)

 

Nope, not personally. I'm just asking more coaxial questions to continue the discussion. I have encountered the attitude that 'coaxials might not need a sub' from some newbs in my personal experiences - was just curious if there were cases of such. I can imagine some installs that the driver wouldn't really want a sub.

 

I remember back in the early 90's I heard a toyota single cab that had managed to squeeze 2 MB Quart 8 in coax's in each door. He cound'nt role the windows down, but it sounded phenominal with great BUF and actually imaged well.

 

Wow!!!! I bet the doors were taking a beating:laugh:

 

Sound quality is very subjective in how it's perceived , if you can live without the lower octaves, than coaxials only might work for you

 

My thoughts: A "coaxial" is simply a woofer that plays full range and a tweeter with an inline capacitor. The woofer has no low pass so it plays to the top of the spectrum and an inline capacitor on the tweeter is a crude form of high pass.

I think if you modify the terminals on a coaxial and run it with a 2-way passive crossover to bandpass the woofer, you will get better sound. I used to do this to Aura MR x.2 coaxials back in the day. They use the same tweeter and woofer as the x.1 sets except they just had inline caps on the tweeters instead of 2-way passive crossovers. They still sounded good but needed a little more EQ. I used to run them through the MR 2-way passives and they sounded identical to the x.1 sets.

 

I'm a real lunatic when it comes to intelligibility. I think good intelligibility is an aspect of a speaker that can improve *everything* that you listen to.

Here's an example of what I mean by this. I have an eleven foot tall subwoofer in my listening room that does 10hz, but it really doesn't add a lot to my stereo, because there's nearly nothing that digs down to ten hz.

And my reference speakers, a pair of Gedlee Summas, can do 130dB without breaking a sweat. But it's a semi-useless feature, because I simply don't need to play anything that loud.

But intelligibility is great, because it improves almost everything you listen to. It makes the lyrics in songs easier to understand. I listen to a lot of talk radio, and intelligibility makes it easier to listen to the radio, particularly if you're listening in another room. And intelligibility is something that isn't dependent on the source. It doesn't matter if you're listening to SACD or if you're listening to Howard Stern on XM Radio at 32kbps, intelligibility improves both.

The problem is, most component speakers have crappy intelligibility, because there's a big gap between the two radiators at the crossover point. Let's say you have a 17cm woofer and a 2.5cm tweeter, separated by 15cm, with a 2khz crossover point. 2000hz is 17cm long, so this means that your woofer and tweeter are separated by a full wavelength at the crossover point. This leads to a multitude of problems if you want good intelligibility. The first problem is that you can't get the woofer and tweeter in phase, unless you use a low order xover, and even then you can only get it right at one point in space. The second problem is that the sound off-axis will have a series of peaks and nulls due to the pathlength differences.


Reading all that, you might think, what's the big deal? It can't possibly be THAT bad.

But it really is. The easiest way to solve all these problems, and improve intelligibility, is to get the woofer and tweeter within one quarter wavelength at the xover point, or at least one half. There's a few ways to do that. The easiest is to simply use a coax. The second easiest is to drop the crossover point. For instance, instead of using a xover point of 2000hz, use a xover point of 500hz. Obviously, that rules out a conventional tweeter.

Here's a real world example of what I mean by this. I listen to a pair of very expensive monitors for over eight hours a day. (Gedlee Summas) They sound great, but I've long noticed that you have to sit quite far from them for them to 'blend' properly. This is because there's 38cm gap between the woofer and the tweeter. By moving back, the woofer and tweeter 'blend' better. A couple of weeks back I took a pair of cheap 10cm coaxials (Jamo i300) and I set them up near my computer, and used them in lieu of my expensive over-engineered monitors. And interestingly, I found that the 10cm coaxes were more intelligible in the nearfield than my expensive monitors.

Now I'm not saying the cheap coaxes play louder, or have lower distortion. But at very close range, they are more intelligible than a loudspeaker that retails for more than a used car.


Now don't go and run out and ditch your expensive speakers, because coaxes have issues, as Andy noted. BUT if you set them up very carefully, and focus on what they do well, I think you may be shocked by how much better they can sound than a component set.

Here's some things I'd recommend if you do this. First, use a phase-coherent xover. One of the primary advantages of coaxes is that they're very close together, so you might as well use a crossover that has optimum phase.

Second, put the coax in a location where there are no early reflections. I have my Jamo coaxes mounted on one of those wire shelves you see at Home Depot, with nothing close to the coaxials to cause diffraction. This is important; early reflections will mask the excellent intelligibility of the coaxial. It's a really cheap experiment obviously; you can get a pair of car audio coaxes for under $40, a wire shelf for $40, and a couple of capacitors for $10.

Third, if you can afford to invest the time, consider a low diffraction enclosure like a sphere.

Once you do that, I think you'll be astonished by how articulate and intelligible a coax can be. I am listening to the Jamo coaxes as we speak, and though they're playing in another room, I can understand every word that's being played. This is due to the excellent phase behavior and off-axis response of a coaxial.

 

One of the best systems I ever had was a coax and a sub. I ran the JBL gti 504's biamped with an old round solobaric sub. That system was so simple and people always got out of my car saying how clean the system sounded. I ran a few componets in the car and always went back to the 504's. Maybe it was the pointsource, but I always liked how everything sounded like it was all in the same space. You couldnt pick out anything, it just sounded like the music was up front.

 

As I said in another thread, I LOVED my Kef Uni-Q's and I would run another pair in a heart beat if a) I could find a set BNIB (good luck with that, I know) or b) someone would release a new version (even better luck with that one I know). Presently, I have a set of ID Chameleons mounted as coaxes. For my next car, I would like to hear a set of SEAS point sources, or the HAT Mirus coaxes to see how they sound. If that fails, I may just go back to a set of Dynaudio System 262's mounted quasi-coax style.
JPS

 

i loved the uniq's from the early 90's. we had a customer car that swept the novice circuit then the amateur circuit the next year. His car made it into Car audio and Electronics.

Only problem was he kept blowing them, i don't know if it was the user or the speakers themselves. i see them on ebay once in a great moon.

aren't the morel integras point source?

 

I've heard great things about the UniQs too, never even seen a set though, let alone heard

 

they were popular in the early 90's. just like most KEF stuff, they sounded really nice, for a "coax" (even though they dont really act like a coax) as I have said before, in a car, they suffered the same problems any coax does. tweeter is too low in the door and WAY off axis. For the money they wanted, they didnt stay popular for long.

 

At the T.H.E. Show this past weekend, I was chillin' in the KEF suite listening to their Coaxes. Real big, precise sound from those small boxes. Anyways, while all the old men were oohing and ahhing over the music, I was off to the side fondling a raw Uni-Q driver. That thing, although small, is packed full of shiny metal parts. Super heavy for the size too. I asked how much for the driver itself and the salesman laughed at me and said I could buy the actual speakers for 1800 bucks and strip them out. I told him that it might be worth it to stick them in my car. He looked at me like as if I had magically turned into a talking bipedal feral pig.

 

lol, how many drivers are in the enclosure-get a group buy done?

 

right, and I am not saying you are wrong. just that most people that were gonna drop $700 for a pair of speakers went with comps, right, wrong or indifferent. that is the reality

 

Agreed

 

Rawdawg, what day were you at T.H.E. Show? I was there Sunday. I also heard the Uni-Q's. I still have a pair of the original Q10's from almost 20 years ago on my patio (yes, they are covered from the infrequent rain we have here in SoCal). I prefer the silk tweeter in the originals to the metal in the newer ones. I like your thinking of using the drivers in the car .

 

I was there Saturday and Sunday. There were a couple of coaxial implementations at the show. All of them very good. My favorite set-up was the funny retro steampunk omnidirectional lamp speakers. Huge stage from anywhere in the room. Did you see the Scaena rig with the 6 18" Bazooka tubes? That was something else.

Absolute standout of the show was the ribeye blue cheese salad in a laced up, deep fried Parmesan cheese bowl from one of the Gourmet Food trucks.

 

Absolute standout of the show was the ribeye blue cheese salad in a laced up, deep fried Parmesan cheese bowl from one of the Gourmet Food trucks.

Damn

 

All I can say is....LOCATION LOCATION and LOCATION. Has anyone notice how speakers sound like crap when their not pointing directly at the listener??? And the position of the speakers in a car are usually located.... pointing at the passenger and drivers knees.

 

Exactly

 

Rawdawg, I saw the Scaena rig and my mind flashed back to 1991 and my old civic with a 10" Bazooka tube (before I had a clue about car stereo, just wanted to be loud). My favorite room was the Magnepan room. I am not into HT, but it sounded really good. I didn't do the food trucks, but went to a little Mexican place I know about across from Trianglr-Square (while reminiscing about the Virgin Megatsore that used to be there). Good show and I will definitely be there again next year. Perhaps we should have a small DIY meet in the parking lot? JPS

 

jpswanberg, the Magnepan room was awesome. Initially, I was like what? because the panels were offset 90 degrees. Then they pushed the button and the panels moved into place like X-wings. I kept walking around the plants looking for the subwoofer(s). Until they pointed it out, I would have never guessed the locations. Amazingly thin enclosures with big @ss sounds! Real big stage on that set-up.

Actually, there were about 6-7 of us DIYMA guys on Saturdays hanging out by the Bus.

 

Why debate?

MB Quart PCE. Component, or coaxial mount.

German Maestro Status/Epic. Component, or coaxial mount.

http://www.german-maestro.de/US/status.htm

http://www.german-maestro.de/US/epic.htm

 

Why debate?

MB Quart PCE. Component, or coaxial mount.

German Maestro Status/Epic. Component, or coaxial mount.

GermanMAESTRO - Powered by MAESTRO Badenia

GermanMAESTRO - Powered by MAESTRO Badenia

In some cases like those GM's you get a nice sized tweeter but in more cases then not you get a lower level tweeter and mid then you would for the equiv model components. This smaller less capable tweeter and sometimes mid too is enough to prevent me from wanting to run coax.

What about running a coax and a pair of tweets, and crossing them over active where you would normally cross? like using a coax just as midbass?

WHY???????

Then you would essentially be running a component set.