Punchy bass

[Henry Curniffe]

Good afternoon all. I am a new member so this is my first post. Firstly to conform with members wishes please let me introduce myself. My name is Henry and I am not at all technically educated , nor am I even electronically adept. However I am a lover of music , jazz , blues,60sand70s soul and some classical search.
I have been reading a great many of the threads on this site for sometime now and came across the one regarding the bass shy wd25ts. I have a pair of these speakers and am in full agreement of this characteristic. They may very well be room dependent, but if my memory serves me well, they were designed to work in any average normal room so in this instance they have not achieved the objective.
At some point in the future I will try and replace the thick fomefilling and try something else ,long hair wool fibre etc,to free up some volume in the cabs. Has anyone done this already. What was the result.
Henry Curniffe

[bob orbell]

Hi Henry and welcome, I think that you should use these speakers hard against a wall for better bass, you may have read that I tried a pair and found them bass light, in fact, I was very surprised by the lack of wallop for such a large speaker, I think that this my be a Peter C trait, as have recently heard his new QUAD Z speakers, and these too are disappointing in the bass department, I will let other members comment on your suggestions. BOB

[Henry Curniffe]

Thank you Bob. Yes they are close against a rear wall. I think that this is just the way they are. Will change one of these days when funds permit

[Greg.]

Welcome Henry. I have also owned a pair of these with the Seas Millennium tweeter. On mine, the treble was absolutely fantastic but the bass was adequate but not stomping. They still made a reasonable sound and obviously they were more than adequate for many music genres especially if they are close to the wall to give Peter's designed 3dB bass lift. They didn't however have the bass slam of my KLS3's.

I would be wary of replacing the foam in the port or at least, don't do anything you can't reverse. Remember they are an aperiodic design and the air resistance the port foam provides is specifically part of the design. I agree with suggestions on how Peter likes to hear his music. I worked with him closely on several occasions when he was MD of WD and in my view, he likes a much brighter treble and lighter bass from what I personally would wish for. I thought all the tweeters were over bright in the 25A and 25T versions until he introduced the Millennium which I think he got right.

[Shane]

Indeed. Going back to Heybrook days it was never easy to get deep bass out of HB1s or HB3s, both of which used relatively large paper bass units like the WD25s, albeit in IB enclosures, and were designed to be used against the wall. The exception to the rule was Peter's first design, the HB2. This had a Bextrene bass unit with a resistive rear-firing port. It was intended to be used about six inches from the wall, and produced a bass performance out of all proportion to its size.

[Cycleallday]

I am going to defend these speakers as I really love them and they were only bought after an hour with Peter demonstrating them with his big band music and fed by WD amps.

Mine are in a small room and tight into the corners. They are fed by a Quad Classic integrated amp and sound great.

Personally I hate modern boxes that sound both bright and bass heavy with little mid body - the exact opposite of Peters speakers and his current Chinese produced variants.

Mel

[Henry Curniffe]

Just to emphasis how different our taste are. Even the designers have different tastes from the rest of us. Let's listen to music , to our out taste.
Henry.

[VantheMan]

I´d like to revise what I said about the bass on my speakers. They weren´t at fault - it was the output caps value on my DIY souped up Puresound P10 valve phono pre which were originally 1.0uFand at designer Guy Sergeant´s recommendation I upped their value to that of current P10 production, namely 2.2uF. Not that I understand much but it would seem a larger value output cap allows lower frequencies to get through and presumably thanks to their aperiodic nature the WD25Tex can in fact manage this extra info without booming. I still haven´t fitted my air core mid/ bass inductor coils yet so presumably they can only get better. I am certainly not going to change my WD25Ts just yet.

[Edwin]

I built a pair of 25Ts about four years ago and I like them. However, I've sometimes wondered if the bass might be be a bit light. My conclusion is that the overall response is natural and that the bass is neither exaggerated nor understated. I doubt that they would produce a sound that would make your ears bleed or your ribs rattle, but that suits me. My assumption is that the music I'm hearing is close to the music that was recorded, taking into account the natural hearing loss of old age.

[petercom]

Originally Posted by Edwin

I built a pair of 25Ts about four years ago and I like them. However, I've sometimes wondered if the bass might be be a bit light. My conclusion is that the overall response is natural and that the bass is neither exaggerated nor understated. I doubt that they would produce a sound that would make your ears bleed or your ribs rattle, but that suits me. My assumption is that the music I'm hearing is close to the music that was recorded, taking into account the natural hearing loss of old age.

Gosh, what I've missed by not visiting this forum for some time!

Anyway, thanks Edwin, you got it just right.

Just to put the record straight:

Nowadays I design a lot of speakers to sell in large quantities. I absolutely love doing this but the criteria are very different to how I would design for my own use.

Criteria #1 is to get 5 stars from What Hi-Fi? Frankly this is a bit of a lottery but, in order to stand a chance, the speakers have to impress straight out of the box, initially with modern music.

Criteria #2 isn't so far from the above, except that the speakers should not only be impressive but also not tiring for a long listen.

If you look at the reviews of my designs you'll see that I've been managing the above pretty successfully since 1980! Both my Heybrook HB1s and the Mission 780 won What Hi-Fi? Awards for 3 years running and sold tens of thousands in their time.

What's this got to do with this thread? Only that the WD25A and WD25T were designed for a purpose - to reintroduce the Aperiodic system made popular in the Dynaco A25 and originally designed by E.J. Jordan for Goodmans.

The Aperiodic system is interesting in that it is neither a bass reflex or closed box but lies somewhere inbetween. The problem with bass reflex is that it is a resonant system. The benefits of reflex loading are substantial bass output and a corresponding increase in sensitivity. The demerits are loss of bass accuracy and transient smearing, largely due to group delay effects.

Modern loudspeakers nearly always use bass reflex enclosures because they give the bass 'oomph' that hi-fi listeners have got used to. Digital music storage is much better than vinyl at delivering powerful low frequency information and a lot of people like to hear it, whether it is natural or not!

Go to a classical concert, however, and you're more likely to be impressed by the clarity and nimble nature of bass instruments than their power. Occasionally you'll hear compositions, like Verdi's Requiem, which use tympani to hit you with some 'oomph', but it's not the norm.

A closed box system gives a more natural and articulate bass but requires a large cabinet volume to give good extension. The Aperiodic system gives, to my ears, the same articulate bass as I hear in the concert hall, but using smaller cabinet volumes.

The WD25T design, based on the Dynaco A50 concept, is clever in that a small volume behind the bass unit 'vents' aperiodically into a larger closed box underneath. The aim, here, was for good bass extension while enabling you to hear exactly what the players of bass instruments were playing.

There's another advantage to the Aperiodic system in that it damps the impedance phase swing around the system resonance making the bass unit easier to control by the amplifier. This is especially useful for valve amplifiers, that use transformer impedance matching, and you'll really hear the true benefits with these.

Yes, the 25T does have a slowly falling response below 80Hz but this can be helped by trying different room positions to maximise room gain a very low frequencies. In any case the tonal balance of WD25A and 25T is adjusted for close to rear wall mounting and you can even put them closer to room corners without introducing boom.

So it really depends what you want a speaker to do. If a loudspeaker is meant to be an accurate transducer then my feeling is that an Aperiodic design gets closest to it, especially with valve amplifiers. (BTW, like the WD25 designs, Quad Z series is meant to do just that).

On the other hand, if you have a high current delivery solid state amplifier and want to hear that 'oomph', modern bass reflex designs can sound wonderful when well designed.

But you can't possibly say, as has been hinted here, that 'Comeau designs' are typically light in the bass. Just listen to the current Wharfedales, the slot-loaded Diamonds or the marvellous Linton Heritage, to hear what they can do.