diyhifisupply®
The Crescendo (Grande) Speaker System
1 Introduction and Overview
High Efficiency, friendly size, reasonable bandwidth and good
sound. SET friendly. Impossible dream?
Unfortunately horns with any bandwidth are the size of a
refrigerator. So…we have developed a horn ribbon based system
which achieves our goals. The wide band horn ribbon covers from
about 600hz to 23khz. The special carbon fiber reinforced paper
cone cast frame 8” Driver covers below that, using 1st order
(phase-coherent) crossovers.
The 600Hz Crossovers uses extreme
quality parts: all film caps, oil paper and
copper foil inductors, Silver Wire,
Kiwame Resistors etc.
The Systems sensitivity is an honest
98db/w (100db in room as specified by
many speaker manufacturers), nomi-
nally 8 ohms. The box is 30L and covers
from about 60hz to 23khz in room. The
Crescendo can be used with many
commercial Subwoofers to extend the
low frequency response.
The -6dB coverage angle for the
Crescendo HF 50 degrees horizontal
and 30 degrees vertical. Such controlled dispersion over such a
wide frequency range ensures that even in acoustically difficult
rooms and the midrange and treble remain from excessive
reflections and room reverb.
There is an option for bass modules – making the Crescendo into
the the Crescendo Grande System. We wanted a cabinet that
could slip under the Crescendos and take the place of the stand.
For this a really beefy, quick bass driver was needed, which
happens to be exactly what the DynaFone is. The cabinet is about
50L and tuned to cover down to 25hz flat.
Also needed was lots of power to drive the bass modules. We use
some high quality plate Amplifiers which give us about 250w in a
small footprint integrated into
the woofer cabinet. This
bass system has no problem
keeping up with the Cres-
cendo horn ribbons while at
the same time giving up
really clean earthquake
tones in our 170m
2
shop.
How does it sound? The
dynamics from this combo
are pretty scary at times.
Since the ribbon is horn
loaded, wideband and closed
on the back (doesn’t need
nor use the box) it gives
Electrostatic levels of trans-
parency and immediacy, and
the coherence of a full-range
driver.
