Professor Doug Jones of Danley Sound Labs gives an explanation of what differentiates the Synergy Horn technology from more traditional approaches both current and throughout history. www.danleysoundlabs.com
Reading RU-vid comments is something so underrated I think. It makes you see or read thoughts as valuable as those expressed by an engineer/technician/doctor to question progress.
I have followed turbosound /funktion one since they started .And they do deserve all the credit they get .Then L'acoustic came along and added themselves to high end PA . But due to Danley been SOOOOOOOOOOO US based and very little UK exposure .No one really thought about them. What i love is the way they are just keeping things simple and almost working along classic designs and sound quality . They are easily the current "Game changers"
Country music has a very different idea of fidelity compared to techno. Country is vocal music, so they have a very different requirement for midrange fidelity.
But there is a reason why I've seen Funktion One around the globe such Buenos Aires, Sydney, Europe, London and the Middle and far east and not Danley. They are focused power and fidelity with control. Classic speaker design. No need to complicate which is exactly the opposite of Americans
I wonder if it's possible to optimise line array cabs - e.g. a type of synergy horn that stacks and forms a giant "Skinny big horn" when arrayed. The problem is that each lens in the paraline array is slightly different e.g. the drivers are more off vertical centre of the paraline lens at the top and bottom of the SBH. Ideally creating some sort of variable vertical coverage version of the GH60.
Do the horns have to be clustered together? I don’t see any physical round over on the horn mouth to reduce edge diffraction. This would effect the off-axis response and cause stored energy in the time domain measurements.
I'm just a random guy who likes audio, I don't have any real pro audio myself, I was more into car audio, but I am from Trinidad, where pro audio is very prevalent, my cousin has a full 4x4 EAW KF850/KF940 replica setup, which is fairly common practice here. Wood is cheap and people are skilled, so there is a lot of replicas about, but thankfully EAW provides full tech specs of their products so the replicas are exact and sound spectacular. I had built some small bookshelf speakers to replace a 5.1 LG surround sound system (lhd427) using Faital Pro 6fe200's and NB2 dome tweeters, which I had used previously in my car, and for a long time, I was very satisfied with those, they sounded good enough, the subwoofer from the HTS was also replaced with an old car audio sub, a Premier 12" in a small L ported bass reflex of about 1.5 ft^3, which sounded better than the original sub, but is VERY peaky, which is fine for music, but truly terrible for home theater uses, but I still enjoyed it for a while. Recently, I had been wanting a slightly larger stereo system for outside as the old Sony system I had is starting to show it's age. I know this doesn't sound very audiophile of me, but I wanted a certain look for this system, I wanted it to look like a pro audio 4x4 system, but miniaturized. So that's what I did, I just copied EAW's exact design for the KF750F and cut them in half to size it for a 6", mocked it up with cardboard to ensure clearances and I built a pair of mini KF750 (Will post a video on this channel soon), I plan to build two more as well as some matching MTH30 mini subs, the plan is to do the same thing, just shrink down the MTH30 design for a 6.5" woofer, but that's gonna have to wait until I get paid so I can buy the subs. The reason I typed all this out, those mini KF750F's are the best speakers I've ever heard, no offense to Danley, you all are also incredibly well regarded, the only reason I used their design is because it's prevalent locally. My speakers each have a pair of Faital Pro 6fe200's and a single Faital Pro HF102 driver w/ LTH102 flares powered by the same LHD427 home theater amp, and it's SO much louder and cleaner than my old bookshelf speakers on exactly the same power. I built those within the last 3 days, RU-vid suggested this video to me yesterday and I put it aside to watch later, I swear to God they know your every move. The Synergy Horn is incredibly interesting to me, because it's very similar to the KF750F design, but with the addition of subwoofers, and based on what I can hear from how well these perform throughout the bandwidth of sound, I can scarcely imagine how good the Synergy Horn would actually sound, because the only problem my system currently has, is that the subwoofer is incredibly peaky at 30-40Hz, which does interfere with how full the mid-high range sound is. I did have to do some DSP tuning to get the sound just right, but it wasn't a lot and it wasn't very difficult with the KF750F minis, but nothing I do except physically repositioning the sub in the room has any appreciable effect, it just doesn't blend well. So, my apologies in advance, but I think I will 'borrow' your design for the Synergy horn and attempt to build myself a pair. I'm genuinely grateful for the contributions of greats like yourself and I wish that someday I'll be in a financial position to actually be your customer, but unfortunately, that day is not today, but I will infinitely sing your praises if it's any consolation. Thank you very much for the detailed explanations, you all have really helped me understand exactly what I'm trying to accomplish, I can't express how grateful I am for you sharing your expertise.
Thank You For your great Video, It was very Informative, I do have a question , I have a jam / Party Room it is 27 feet wide and 50 feet long and I like it loud but clean I have 2 10.4 cubic feet Bass reflex 18" Subs 1000 watt RMS Each , I also added 2 EV T18 FOLDED HORN , because THE BASS reflex SUBS WHERE NOT VERY PUNCHY when it came to Drums, T 18`S did help a lot , But now I wanted more an d I purchased semi folded 4 EMPTY 115 MARTIN`S hopefully i BE HAPPY SOON, if I get the Thump I want to get in the Chest, Your Opinion is appreciated. I do have lots of power I`m Running QSC`S AND Yorkville` Amp`s,
large transducers can be loaded behind the throat and still keep that volume small. check out jim mitchell sharon penn. its very welcoming to hear someone who actually knows what there talking about. thank you doug
So if you played back a recording of a guitar through a well functioning Synergy horn, would it sound like a guitarist was in the room live playing, and if you played back a voice whilst blindfolded, would you swear someone was in the room speaking in front of you?
Fascinating. I probably can't afford your horns, but I would really like to spend a few hours listening to a pair. I own a pair of Altec A7 VOTT. Got to say, I love them; however, I understand what you mean. Your solution to the inherent issues of using multiple drivers seems very elegant to me.
I'm curious, how are horn reflections dealt with? There is sound emanating from the ports out of the horn mouth and some energy goes backwards to the apex and out. How is this dealt with or not a problem? Is every driver 1/8 wavelength from the apex so the direct and reflected sound reinforce? I suppose if each hole in each pass band is within a quarter wave, then the apex in the centre would be less than 1/6 wave from any driver. All this would do I suppose is put the phase back a fraction of a wavelength when combining direct and reflected waves.
This has been a beautiful watch TBH. From line arrays to spirals and j-arrays, I have run into every problem a rig may give. Synergy is everything. I cannot wait to hear these horns.
I found out now in the patent it is made with layers of metal sandwiched together. Whilst it's hard to explain in a youtube comment, each layer equalises the path length of part of the HF driver's exit. E.g. imagine 4 drivers in a square pattern. The inner parts of the driver exit circles (closest to the middle of the square) are path length equalised, then the centres on the next layer and then the outer parts of the compression driver exit circles. Because the bottom layer of the combiner is further from the ear, the edge of the driver exits nearest the centre of the 2 x 2 arrangement naturally having a shorter path length to the 2 x 2 centre equalises in length as it travels to the front of the combiner, compared to the outer edges of the driver exits combining nearer the surface of the laminated combiner. Most of you are lost reading this comment and it took me a while even reading the patent. To combine more than 4 drivers, the outputs of multiple drivers are combined not in another combiner but in a section of a paraline lens. This is lots of layered hyperbolic section wave reflectors that steer the soundwave into a narrow portion of a beam. See the video for paraline but where the word "ellipse" is used it is actually two parabolic sections mirrored around the focal points to create a "straight" wavefront and hyperbolic sections to create a diverging wavefront of varying angles. I'm not sure how asymetric divergence (e.g. the beam has a down angle on both ends instead of an equal up and down angle) is created in a straight array (instead of curved like a banana) of paraline lenses. I know the driver is mounted off the vertical centre but am not sure of what parabola/hyperbola hybrid the reflectors are shaped. This is a rough explanation but you could shade the amplitude by concentrating the wavefront angle down so that more compression drivers cover a given angle. It would be advantageous to send equal power to all drivers (so some aren't about to blow whilst others are loafing) and have more drivers working the back of the room.
I didn’t understand how the Jericho horns combine the HF. Earlier in the clip you pointed out that even when they’re touching they are over 5 wavelengths apart. How has this been solved?
An acoustic lens is placed in front of the tweeters. It equalize the path lengths from all the drivers to "combine" their output. Look up and read Danley's patent on the technology.
What's next? Will Sir Danley build giant synergy horns? There is a more elegant solution to getting extremely high sound pressure levels for point source.
Absolutely. Line arrays do provide certain benefits, but at the expense of phase coherence and "impulse" response, which is the very thing that separates a "musical" sounding speaker from one that can reproduce sine tones, sweeps, and pink noise very well but falls down on musical detail and impact. Think carefully about this: Your ears are not a line. They are points in space, and they pick up stimuli from acoustic events that happen around them. A line source is actually made up of infinitely many points, in theory (in practice, in real line arrays, there are a large number of discrete points that begin to acoustically act "like" a line source) and because the distance from each point along that line to your ears is different, the impulse response from a line source is inherently more smeared (longer decay time) than the one from a point source speaker.
The student loan situation right now is BS, but keep in mind that if you invest in the means of production instead, you are setting yourself down a path that you probably won't be able to hop off of when things get difficult - you are investing in the future of your business. If you can stick with it, maybe owning your own business might be appropriate for you, but I recommend building and testing your concepts (and obtaining some independent, impartial feedback and validation from others) before committing fully to that path.
So is each mid range speaker doing a specific range of frequency or are all four mids on the same range? Say mid is 200-3000 Is one speaker doing: 200-900 900-1400 1400-2300 2300-3000
I would imagine all are doing the same if it's 200-3000 as an example. 1: It's louder. 2: All 4 speakers are the same brand so no point in splitting them up as they all play each frequency band equally well. 3: The crossover design is much simpler.
I really agree with the idea that the best sound comes from one source. However, I did in fact hear this system at a festival last year and I was really not impressed. The weekend after, I heard a d&b rig of similar size and the difference was night and day. Louder, clearer, more coherent and better coverage.
I think that theory which tells us that all sound should emanate from single source per channel is way too much overblown in terms of practical importance. It is a factor, but how large, compared to other factors that make sound being percieved "good"? I don't think it is large. In my opinion that is one of the last concepts that should be tried to be satisfied, if all other more important problems are solved.
point source has been an overrated myth for many years....the entire discovery and application of "line arrays" is to eliminate point source db nonlinearities!!further, these are not really "horns"..i use d+b at EDM RAVES bass, and thier dual 18 box hits 155db/meter with much difficulty!!
Horns are actually very compromised, the opposite of “a better mousetrap” but for all that, they’re also an addictive challenge and can be wonderful. They are great at controlled dispersion and high efficiency but can also be impossibly hard to integrate or have a smooth audible field free of artefacts and distortion. The best I’ve heard include models from the Caesaro. Too big for most domestic settings. The other aspect is cost. Relatively simple in construction, the markup on decent systems is usually huge, largely to account for relatively small sales nrs yet high development costs. Also the synergy horn was NOT the first point source device to solve the audio field issue. The most successful design historically was the British Tannoy Dual Concentric, the first true time and phase aligned coaxial which is also front horn loaded. The British got there first I’m afraid. It was also the first speaker system to produce true passive cardioid response.
great. i've always been a fan of horns and compression. This seems like a great step forward in fidelity.... but when it comes to anything non-acoustic.... like most Electronica, it's pretty irrelevant.
Exactly - sensory queues. Think shadow puppets and silhouettes. In many ways, we often prefer caricature and exaggeration. An extra kicking kick. An extra hi hihat. Etc. Often reduced bandwidth and artistic creativity can create enhanced intelligibilty.
As a machinist and young audiophile I thought the same thing. Let's use surface finishes an one mechanical example. But anywho... Good Lawd do I want a set of Danleys... 🔥🙏🔊🎶🎶🎶🎶
The only real method to get realistic sound is to use microphones set up into an array that surrounds the instrument or performer into multi-track and then played through similarly arrayed speakers. We hear omni-directionally, therefore the recording and playback should be the same. Everything else is trying to make something "realistic" sounding out of entirely unnatural recording and playback limitations. That doesn't mean that your products don't solve the trouble associated with current sound reproduction, however.
I'd have to disagree on saying line arrays weren't a massive leap forward (not that I think point source horns are better, they're so much more fun to design, line arrays are kind of boring), line arrays made it able to achieve loudness levels that we can barely withstand and package it up into a truckload or two, which made touring possible, sure they don't sound great but they get the job done just enough that the average joe can enjoy it. This and the small form factor led to the ability for more bands, with smaller followings even, where able to tour the states and companies and make shows louder so they can house people, but not relying on the infrastructure only a festival could provide, now it can be done in just about any arena or outdoor space. Also line arrays are very good with directivity in my opinion, not the best (especially for the higher end of the frequency spectrum), but for the voice range with matters most to most people where line arrays easily fall under the quarterwavelength rule, they have very good directivity, not perfect but there's really a practical limit to how much one singular point source can deliver
around 20hz to 20khz and that's it.generally speaking its not really that wide compared to other speicies of animals. but enough for what we use it for.
That's very true. Many bat species can 'hear' up to around 200,000 Hz. Scientists theorize that they may actually use this ultra sound information to assist their poor vision, more akin to seeing.
+lizichell2 I wonder how many audiophile bats obsess over which brand of cable and power conditioner they get for their hifi on which they pay their 384k 24 bit WAV files in a treated room over diamond tweeters
Now i know how you came up with the name Jericho...On the seventh day, they circle seven times, and upon the sound of the horns, the people burst out into war cries, whereupon the wall falls down.
But are you SURE it has to come from a single source? Did the vocalist swallow the guitar player? Does the guitar player keep the drummer confined within his anus? And did the guitar player tuck the single source bass player within a snare? Looks to me like the problem is stereo only has two channels and needs about 5 or 6 and sometimes more. Then you can have a "Multi Source" band in your living room! :-)
IF it would be THAT important that the whole sound source must arrive from one single direction, then WHY are we all using stereo? Given your logic, Mono must be far better but it isn't. And at that moment, your record anything with a microphone that has its own directivity, you also ignore the directivity of the instrument. I think we have to accept that we can NOT recreate the sound, "as it was in its origin"
Apache Cai I'd say that synergy horns are all extremely powerful, you should look at Danleys new go2 line, they are very good, cost effective boxes. But if you were to ask for my favorite i would say the SM80's
@@user-jp2ji4lh8r danley has done alot of positive things for this world ❤️👏 love an respect......but as an ex-roadie in my youth , i can assure you any cabinet more than 6feet long per dimension OR heavier than 150 pounds wheels or not, is a disaster waiting to happen.... including "skyrigging"...
