They have several good qualities including cheap, easy to build, friendly to low power SET tube amps (7 ohm impedance with no crossover in the woofer signal path, about 96dB sensitivity) and seveal shortcomings including somewhat opaque midrange from the $3 drivers, little output below 70hz (need a subwoofer to sound right) and limited hf extension of the ASD-1001 driver. Nobody will confuse these with high end speakers, but they don't do anything outrageously bad either.

Now imagine the look of surprise and pleasure on your wife's face as you carry a pair of these into the house unannounced.

• The "Tallerays"

Open baffle arrays. Cool! How do you think they compare with your ART Arrays?

The primary avantange of the Tallerays is they are really cheap to build, and since no box is required, they are an especially easy project for a beginner. But don't misinterpret what I'm saying - these speakers don't sound bad at all. They are sensitive and are very dynamic, and their soundstage is really big.

It looks like you set them up with a bit of a taper 4,3,T,3,4. Which waveguide did you use? I see it in the picture, but I'm not sure which model it is.

Why did you choose to use so many of the foster drivers - was it just so you could get the taper? I had thought about using 9 or possibly 12.

The waveguide is the 7" elliptical from Parts Express, #270-316. I used fourteen drivers for the worst possible reason; I wanted people to gasp in astonishment (WOW!!!) when they first saw it. I succeeded, but nine, ten or twelve would be a more practical choice, both in terms of a more manageable size and the fact that 7'4" is too tall for the typical listening room where your listening chair is less than 10' from the speakers. If you wanted the woofer array to be arranged symmetrically above and below the tweeter you would have to use ten (3-3-4, with the four consisting of the top two and the bottom two woofers, giving you 8.7 ohms nominal impedance) or twelve (3-3-3-3 or 4-4-4), yielding a nominal impedance of 6 ohms or 10.7 ohms.

• Talleray Pictures

That's the line array interactions at work dragging the response down with increasing frequencies. In particular, that's why I chose this driver when I was searching for cheap drivers (the raw driver response has a bit of a tilt in the response, which is brought down when stacked in an array, allowing me to cross over higher to cheap tweeters )

I think I'm gonna wait to build the ART arrays until we have purchased a new home so I can have a semi dedicated listening room to put them in. Wifey has pretty much nixed the idea of them in the living room. Great thing about the ART's is that I have all the pieces so I can build them whenever!