I think Savvy ditched Harbeths for Cubes ? Terry - was it linn isobariks or some such ?
Madmick- don't feel sad, many do not like the semi omni presentation.
I ditched a pair of B&W P4. Floor standing 2 way with 6.5" mid bass and 1" metal dome. They are a quarter wave folded tapered ljne affair (kind if transmission line). Crossover was a single iron cored series inductor on mid bass and a more complex third order on tweeter- two series caps with an air cored inductor to ground and in parallel to the driver from the junction of the two caps. Oh and a 1R5 padding resistor.
I bought some new, same finish as above for £650 in 1997. They stayed with me as my main speakers for 20 years and I will never part with them. They were ousted though by a craply built pair of sealed diy semi omni's with cuboid (not cube) dimensions visaton G25ffl and a doc doped 5 incher. That was the turning point.
I never had a problem with the mass loaded open ended transmission line, still don't but the tightness of the sealed approach won me over even though the bass was much less powerful and not as deep. I do take exception to a few other aspects of them though especially now after I have tinkered with speakers for four years.
Like DQ I don't like electrical xovers or any components between amp and drivers- don't like powered active xovers either but the simple addition of a tiny polystyrene capacitor at line level came to the rescue. I believe that ANY component degrades the music and that means padding resistors too, they add noise and have parasitic inductance and capacitance.
I don't seem to like metal dome tweeters either at the price level I am interested in. Fabric domes are to my ears superior and luckily Doc chose a very good and sanely priced one in the Visaton.
I also don't think I can live with point & squirt anymore. So if I were to mod the B&W P4's it would have to include doping the driver and pointing it upwards. Modding a transmission line is not that easy though. If I fire the driver upwards it is at the very end of the line rather than 20cm from the end and that apparently makes a difference with response peaks. Whether I would be able to hear the effect is another matter
The tweeter would also need to be visaton g20sc with a single series capacitor high pass filter, behind the up firing mid bass and probably several of them wired in series (to get rid of padding resistor) and pointing in different directions. Watch this space
I never had any major room issues with the 6.5" mid bass and TL loading. I did with big sealed 12 inchers however. Tk make them work in my small square room is going to take a lot of work.
for cube3's and Fret similarly with panel speakers.
