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Was Peerless a subsidiary of Altec?

ken kantor said:
Thanks, I am happy to see that. Several of the Peerless designs are really good and not too expensive. Some of those PE drivers look familiar, others seem to be from the new Chinese design team. I'll find out if any of the Danish designers are still involved. (FWIW- the 830986 was my baby, originally designed for a large, fruit-flavored customer that discontinued their product within six months. :( )

-k

BTW- Which Peerless woofers are you using? I did a 10" for Peerless (1727) many years ago on behalf of a Japanese client of mine, long before I could have anticipated any formal relationship with the company.
Click to expand...

I'm using quad arrays of 831735 6-1/2" HDS woofers, these guys:

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=299-281

The idea is to avoid cone breakup up to and beyond the 800Hz crossover, yet have the directionality and cone area of a 13" driver. It worked out pretty well.

For a friend's speakers I used quads of 830869 8" woofers:

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=264-1098

They're in 10 ft^3 ported boxes, with the port tuned to 28Hz. I also used a 511 for the tweeter in that design.
 
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That quad of 830869 in 10cu.f sounds like fun! I'm using singles in ~2cu.f MLTL's tuned to 35Hz I built recently. I'm getting good behavior up to 2.5kHz and a fair directivity match to the waveguide I use above. They are fine drivers and not too pricey. I too bet 4x moves some air, they have a fairly generous Xmax.

az
 
audiozaz said:
That quad of 830869 in 10cu.f sounds like fun! I'm using singles in ~2cu.f MLTL's tuned to 35Hz I built recently. I'm getting good behavior up to 2.5kHz and a fair directivity match to the waveguide I use above. They are fine drivers and not too pricey. I too bet 4x moves some air, they have a fairly generous Xmax.

az
Click to expand...

They worked out really well. I tuned the cabinet volume and ports in WinISD Pro to get a gradual roll-off at the low end for good transient response. It's not quite as punchy as a sealed alignment, but it's not bad at all, no boominess or one-note sort of stuff. My friend wanted bass down to 30Hz without needing a subwoofer, in a fairly large listening room, and we needed to match the directivity of the 511 at 800Hz, so the plan came together around those requirements. The 830896s easily go up to 800Hz. He has BMS 4550 drivers on the 511s, and the whole thing sounds good at low or high volumes.
 
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fpitas said:
They worked out really well. I tuned the cabinet volume and ports in WinISD Pro to get a gradual roll-off at the low end for good transient response. It's not quite as punchy as a sealed alignment, but it's not bad at all, no boominess or one-note sort of stuff. My friend wanted bass down to 30Hz without needing a subwoofer, in a fairly large listening room, and we needed to match the directivity of the 511 at 800Hz, so the plan came together around those requirements. The 830896s easily go up to 800Hz. He has BMS 4550 drivers on the 511s, and the whole thing sounds good at low or high volumes.
Click to expand...

I guess the four Peerless 8" give a cone area not too far from a 15", but a larger spread on the baffle, so increased directivity?

I also like the BMS 4550, though I use it over a 15" pro woofer, AE TD15M. My Peerless box still uses BMS treble, the tiny 4540ND.

az
 
audiozaz said:
I guess the four Peerless 8" give a cone area not too far from a 15", but a larger spread on the baffle, so increased directivity?

I also like the BMS 4550, though I use it over a 15" pro woofer, AE TD15M. My Peerless box still uses BMS treble, the tiny 4540ND.

az
Click to expand...

Yeah, the cone area is about like a 15", and the directivity is a little greater at 800Hz. We split the cabinet front board vertically, and angled the pairs of woofers about 14 degrees outward to get a little more horizontal dispersion. That also matched up cosmetically with the front radius of the horn mouth.

I've never heard the 4540ND, although I've read good things. The 4550s need a little EQ to flatten them; on the 511 the response looks almost identical to the data sheet response. They sound pretty amazing, especially for the price. Natural sounding and good clarity.
 
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A second on the comment that Peerless seems to have descended from Royal Copenhagen.
But I hope the soap opera of corporate ownership doesn't lead people to overlook the excellence of many Peerless drivers, especially the little cone tweeters that are often only marked with the impedance, which is printed, oddly enough, on the front of the cone. There was a polypropylene version of it also, which had ferrofluid in the magnetic gap, which gave it an almost constant impedance, a real advantage for crossover design. Lovely sound but it came out when cones were thought to be old hat, so didn't get used as much as it should have. The last (I think) SPICA, which, suprising, was in a regular rectangular enclosure used it.
 
ken kantor said:
Thanks, I am happy to see that. Several of the Peerless designs are really good and not too expensive. Some of those PE drivers look familiar, others seem to be from the new Chinese design team. I'll find out if any of the Danish designers are still involved. (FWIW- the 830986 was my baby, originally designed for a large, fruit-flavored customer that discontinued their product within six months. :( )

-k
Click to expand...

I've had good experiences with the Tymphany/Peerless drivers.

My studio monitors use the (Tymphany) Peerless 6.5" woofer optimized for sealed enclosures (SDS series). Coincidentally, it is paired with a standard Peerless dome tweeter from about 30 years ago. The monitors sound superb, though I listen within the ASC Attack Wall, so they have every sonic advantage in terms of monitoring space. PE sells the woofers for $20 each.

My subs there and in the home office use the new 8" subwoofer model 830667 which is excellent for a small sealed sub.

I seem to be quite the Ken Kantor gear fan, since I'm also driving the subs with NHT sub amps and the home office satellites are original SuperZeroes.

I also have the 830986 bookmarked as a small, single-driver studio monitor I plan to build!

Cheers,

Otto
 
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Since they didn't label most of their drivers, it would be nice if there was a gallery somewhere on the web. Anyone know of one?
 
fpitas said:
Yeah, the cone area is about like a 15", and the directivity is a little greater at 800Hz. We split the cabinet front board vertically, and angled the pairs of woofers about 14 degrees outward to get a little more horizontal dispersion. That also matched up cosmetically with the front radius of the horn mouth.

I've never heard the 4540ND, although I've read good things. The 4550s need a little EQ to flatten them; on the 511 the response looks almost identical to the data sheet response. They sound pretty amazing, especially for the price. Natural sounding and good clarity.
Click to expand...

Ok, so you wanted wider dispersion? I guess many 15" do collapse starting much below 800Hz. The TD15M is built to disperse well above 1klHz, but is a rather unique driver OTOH. What is the horizontal angle for the 511 at these frequencies?

BMS seems to be one of the best values around. Can't say I've heard lots of compression drivers, but it's no small upgrade over a D220Ti, IMO.

Back to the Peerless, I would have liked to use two drivers per enclosure to fight-off baffle-step and keep sensitivity up, but could really not afford 2x the Vb. :/ The smaller 830875 also seems good and I'd not hesitate using it if wanting to build a small vented bookshelf two-way.

az
 
audiozaz said:
Ok, so you wanted wider dispersion? I guess many 15" do collapse starting much below 800Hz. The TD15M is built to disperse well above 1klHz, but is a rather unique driver OTOH. What is the horizontal angle for the 511 at these frequencies?

BMS seems to be one of the best values around. Can't say I've heard lots of compression drivers, but it's no small upgrade over a D220Ti, IMO.

Back to the Peerless, I would have liked to use two drivers per enclosure to fight-off baffle-step and keep sensitivity up, but could really not afford 2x the Vb. :/ The smaller 830875 also seems good and I'd not hesitate using it if wanting to build a small vented bookshelf two-way.

az
Click to expand...

The 511 has about 70 degrees horizontal dispersion at 800Hz.

A7-dispersion.png


We probably didn't really need to splay the woofers out, but they're about 18" across the outside of the flanges, so it seemed like a good idea, and it does look good below the horn that way.

The BMS is a huge upgrade over the D220Ti. I bought some of those because of all the excitement, but they sounded pretty metallic to me.

My 831735s at home are in 3 ft^3 sealed cabinets, with an F3 of 60Hz, but I have 15" woofers for below there. The 831735s were a PE buyout special, but they're very clean sounding if I don't push them.
 
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