In Reply to: Re: JBL 4648A with SET's? posted by jlharden on December 04, 2002 at 19:42:13:
I know that you've been through the archives for information on the subject, and have participated on many of the threads therein. But in order to make it easy for others interested in this issue, I suggest that the collection of posts about "tube friendly" speakers on this forum yields a lot of useful information.As an aside, you'll notice that I used to consider the Professional Series offerings to be "tube friendly" until experience showed that their performance on SET amps was marginal in some cases. So maybe the 2226's work well for some people but not for others, as one might expect from its moderately high Zmax. It isn't terribly high, but isn't low either. It probably works well on some amplifier configurations and not on others.
Also, some very interesting articles on the technical issues surrounding interfaces between electrodynamic speakers and triodes have been written by Steve Bench and by Norman Koren. I suggest not only the articles directed by these links, but also the others at each authors' sites.
About how two drivers will interact, at low frequencies, they will combine and even act as acoustic mirrors to one another. It's like having them up against a room boundary in the way they reinforce one another. But as frequency rises, there comes a point where the two begin to form nulls in the room. The pattern looks like dual slit diffraction experiments, with hot spots and dead spots.
Follow Ups: