The Soundwave Point Source 3.0 Loudspeakers

Unusually musical , unusual design

ANYONE WHO DESIGNS speakers seriously must work from some vision of the fundamental nature of musical sound. But, in most cases, the vision is that of an audiophile or music appreciator. James Gala, the designer of the Soundwave speaker line, is a musician himself; and one might expect that, as such, he would have a rather different perception of music from that usual for speaker designers. For whatever reason, he has certainly come up with a speaker that is far from ordinary.

The speaker is so sonically distinctive that some may find it disconcerting. Personally, I found it fascinating, and, in some important ways, unusually musical. While I have reservations, I also have very considerable admiration for Gala’s willingness to rethink fundamental matters and for what he has accomplished by doing so. The Soundwaves may not be the speakers for everyone, but they are speakers that each person should listen to carefully, because they point out in no uncertain terms the limitations of more conventional designs and offer more than a glimpse of a brave new world.

It is not the drivers themselves of the Soundwaves that are exotic. The dynamic drivers are exceptionally good and are custom designed, but they belong to familiar families. Rather, it is their geometric arrangement that is unusual. Later, I shall explain the technical rationale and the construction details. But let me go first to what one hears, pausing only to remark that the unusual design aspects of the Soundwaves are in no way associated with any awkwardness in their appearance. They are graceful, forty-inch columns of pentagonal cross-section smaller than a square foot, some of the most elegant looking of all speakers. Now the sound:
The most immediately striking aspect of the Soundwave 3.0 is that, listened to on-axis at least, it is almost without character as a sound source. What I mean is that while boxes sound like boxes and panels like panels, the Soundwave doesn’t sound like anything in particular. More precisely, it sounds like a point source. Its full name suggests it should do this, and it does. The issue here is relatively subtle and worth exploring a bit.

Traditional audiophile wisdom is that boxes sound “boxy” because of resonances, and, of course, box resonances do contribute coloration to the sound of a box speaker. But, in addition, a box in a room, as opposed to one in an anechoic environment, sounds like a box because it has the radiation pattern of a box speaker. That is, the directional characteristics of its sound radiation change with frequency in a way associated to its being a box. As I remarked in some detail in my Spendor SP1/2 review [Issue 90, pp 98-1 02] boxiness that all but vanishes outdoors can be much more obvious indoors for this reason. And, for the same reason, a panel will sound like a panel in a room, while outdoors it will have far less character. Character of this type is made most obvious when one listens to a single speaker. The interacting radiation patterns of two speakers in stereo blurs the perception of speaker character. (That is one of the reasons most people think mono recordings sound better in stereo!) But if the character is audible with a single speaker, it will still be audible in stereo, albeit at a lower level.

What is almost unique to the Soundwave 3.0 is that it is essentially without character, in this sense, in actual listening rooms. The only other speakers that I am aware of that are similarly characterless are line sources and panels (like the Quad 63s and Stax F-81 and F-83) that synthesize a point or line source by time-delay circuitry.

Along with the characterlessness of the Soundwave 3.0, there is spatially complete coherence (again on-axis) among the drivers. Unlike many column speakers (e.g., the Snell Band C models, for all their other virtues), there is no sense here of bass down, treble up. Moreover, there is no sense of “exposed” tweeter, another problem that plagues most multidriver speakers.

It could be argued that identification of the character of a sound source is a leamed process, and that we hear, for instance, a box as sounding like a box as a result of having heard a lot of boxes. Then one might claim that, with enough exposure, the Soundwaves would begin to sound like what they are, physically, rather than like a disembodied point source. The first part, about the identification being leamed, is surely true at some deep level. But I have been listening to the Soundwaves for months now, and it still retains its characterless nature, under the on-axis condition noted. Apparently, one learns only certain things of this sort. Just as one never leams to hear stereo as two separate, unrelated sources, one also does not learn to hearthe Soundwave 3.0 as anything but a point source.¹

Another striking sonic aspect of the Soundwaves is their extraordinary resolution of detail. We hear a lot of talk nowadays about the resolving power of electronics and cables, the settling times of amplifiers, and so on. But any amplifier that can claim to be half-way decent will certainly “settle” faster than any speaker. Here, as in most audio matters, it is the speaker that calls the tune, and one is reminded of this emphatically by listening to a speaker with exceptional performance in some department.

The Soundwave 3.0s sound very non-resonant and, moreover, add an unusually low level of perceived noise to the music. The former shows up on the popular “waterfall” plots, but the latter does not. But, in fact, all speakers add some grain and noise, and many add a lot. The Soundwaves are exceptionally quiet, in the non-resonant, no-energy-storage sense, and most especially in the sense of lowness of added noise. To my ears, this latter is a vital matter. It is almost never measured, for public consumption at least; and it is seldom discussed in reviews. But it is indeed vital, not only for purity of sound as such, but also for resolution. Signal-related noise always masks detail. Detail is virtually unmasked in the Soundwaves, and purity reigns.

Advocates of the position that frequency response in its various aspects completely dominates the perceived sound of speakers will, no doubt, jump to the conclusion that the apparent resolution of detail by the Soundwaves is a by-product of its tonal balance. This is not true. I undertook the experiment of moving the tonal balance all over the place with electronic equalization. The sound changed dramatically, of course. The resolution and the absence of signal related noise did not. The idea of hearing new details on familiar recordings is a cliche; and, more often than not, it is a question of altering masking effects by presenting a new tonal balance. With the Soundwaves, the situation is different, in my view: These speakers have a legitimately high level of resolution.

The stereo performance of the Soundwaves is potentially excellent, but somewhat idiosyncratic. The speakers are intended to produce a 180 degree dispersion pattern horizontally, and o~e has to be careful about placement to avoid unusually strong side-wall early reflections-more careful than usual. And there is an even more unusual effect that can arise that is related to the driver configuration.

I have avoided describing the driver setup until now, because I thought it was important to assess at least some of the sonic picture without distraction by the construction details of the speakers.

There are two identical bass-mid drivers mounted one on each of the front vertical faces of the pentagonal prism enclosure. These faces make an angle of a little over 60 degrees. (Actually, one of the drivers is a little higher than the other, presumably so that there is room for the magnet assemblies behind.) The main tweeter is mounted on the edge where the front faces meet, the tweeter pointing forward. There is a second tweeter that fires vertically, this one being mounted in the top plate of the column.

It is apparent how, on-axis, such a setup produces point source effect, since the crossover point is low enough that the two bass-mid drivers combine acoustically to sound like a point source on the same axis as the tweeter. (Time differentials are handled in the crossover.) The crossover point is almost low enough, anyway. In practice, there is a rather complex lobing pattern right around the crossover frequency–more details on that momentarily. But on axis, all is well for one speaker, or for stereo, too, with the two channels in phase with each other.

Think for a moment, though, about out-of-phase signals. These cause strange stereo effects with any speakers (the “diffuse and direction less quality” of the well known Shure test record of years gone by). But with the Soundwaves the effect is even odder. Presumably because of cancellation between the inside-facing drivers, one hears not a generalized diffuse sound, but something like the two outside drivers as separate sound sources.

The theoreticians among you are likely to be saying to yourselves that stereo is not supposed to contain any out-of-phase information; the two channels are supposed to be in phase. This is true for theoretical, Blumlein stereo; but for spaced-microphone stereo, which is commonly used even if theoretically wrong, there is considerable out-of-phase energy. There is seldom enough to cause the dramatic effect one hears with the Soundwaves when one channel is totally phase-reversed relative to the other. But there is enough, sometimes, to cause some slightly odd directional effects. Not surprisingly, records, which are not too terrific for interchannel phase agreement, are worse for this than CDs, microphone techniques being equal. Outside-the-speaker, phase- driven images, which are somewhat hokey by nature, can be too far outside, and are also rather more unconvincing even than usual.

With in-phase signals, the Soundwaves do a remarkable job of “floating” stereo images. Here the absence of speaker-generated noise helps; noise of this sort naturally tends to make the speakers audible as sources and to confuse stereo imaging. Moreover, the somewhat unusual radiation pattern of the Soundwaves also helps, in a sense. This is not a question of the wide dispersion. Rather, the particular interference effects occurring among the drivers creates a kind of “focal point.” With everything set up just so, the Soundwaves create a realistic image at the optimal listening position. And the particular cancellations occurring nearby seem to enhance focus and eliminate the pressurized, “head-under-water” effect that is the more usual consequence of such interference patterns. The whole thing is rather odd, and may even be unintentional. But when it works, it works in an almost hypnotic way.

The stereo is not bad elsewhere, but the special magic is in just one spot. Of course, truly ideal stereo is always available only to a centered listener, with any speakers, because of time-of-arrival cues, but here this reason is augmented by the focal point effects already mentioned. But the superbly “floated” images of the Soundwaves, and the equally convincing depth presentation are, to my ears, more than adequate compensation for the necessity of being in a particular listening position and for the need for careful speaker positioning.

The Soundwaves’ stereo performance is idiosyncratic, but it is not what I would call a problem as such; indeed, in some respects, it is superior to ordinary box speakers. But what may be problematical is the Soundwaves’ tonal character. Actually, on the basis of relative accuracy compared to other speakers rather than absolute tonal truth, I would be reluctant to make a big issue of this. Observation of general audioophile reaction to other speakers suggests that sensitivity to tonal balance is remarkably low. The audiophile public has embraced quite a number of speakers which aren’t neutral at all in my terms. In recent times, the Martin Logan Quest, the Sonus Fabers, and various Magnepan models come to mind-they may sound wonderful, but they certainly don’t sound flat (to me, anyway). Considering that tonal balance is almost always the most obvious difference when comparing one speaker directly to another, or to live music, it is rather surprising that people often hardly seem to worry about details of it in their own systems.

Be that as it may, it is only fair to point out that the Soundwaves have a distinctive balance, which is not what I would perceive as entirely flat and neutral. The Soundwaves are somewhat mid rangy, rather laid back in “presence,” and, compared to the presence recession, back up in level in the treble. (There is a control on the tweeter.) The mid ranginess, in particular, is fairly conspicuous; conspicuous enough to have some musical impact.

The timbral discrimination of the Soundwaves is very good: Instruments are readily identifiable even in complex textures, different registers of each instrument are given properly different and distinguishable timbres, and even the distinctive timbres of individual notes are well differentiated. (Every note of, say, the violin or piano has a specific timbre different from other notes of the instrument; these timbres are easy to hear in reality, and should be correspondingly easy to hear in reproduced music, but aren’t always.)

In short, what one might call relative timbre is fine. But absolute timbre is not really true to source, though quite often it is true to music in general terms. In practice, microphones are not ears, nor are they often placed where ears ought to be. Monitor speakers, which tell the truth about recordings, don’t always tell the truth about what one would hear live. Much recorded music has too much “presence” (how can one expect a recording with a microphone hanging directly above the first violins to have natural balance?) Moreover, most of the self-styled “neutral” speakers really aren’t all that neutral-few of them sound anything like the others, for one thing.

Still, there are a few speakers that manage almost complete tonal neutrality over the part of the spectrum that carries the character of instruments, namely everything but the frequency extremes; for instance, the Spend or SP1/2s do this very well. Speakers of that sort have an innate tonal rightness that is hard to surrender. And this kind of exact rightness I never quite seemed to get from the Soundwaves.

The balance of the Soundwaves often gives a sound consistent with live experience, and the lack of sound-source character makes the sound natural in that sense. But personally, I found the sound more natural tonally and more true-to-source when I re-EQd the speakers by pulling down the midrange (300-500 Hz) a bit and pushing up the 2-4 kHz region. This was only a matter of a few dB or less, and many speakers are further off than that. This sort of thing obviously matters more to some people than to others, and the Soundwave people believe that the speakers’ perceived balance is more nearly correct than usual and arises as a conseque1Jce of the radiation pattern, not frequency response. You’ll have to evaluate the issue for yourself.

The bass of the Soundwaves is extended enough to cover the full orchestral range. And it is very well-defined in pitch and transient articulation, especially when the backward-firing port is plugged with the optional rubber plug. However, the midrange prominence makes the speaker sound fairly, loud before the perceived bass is as “full” as it would be if there were less midrange. (This is a standard Fletcher-Munson effect: If you set volume by midrange, as one tends to do, then small variations in perceived volume setting will give large variations in perceived bass volume, since the equi-Ioudness curves are bunched together in the bass but are much further apart in the midrange.) The Soundwaves are, however, easily capable of realistic dynamic levels, without stress or change of character with changes in loudness.

I have so far not discussed the theory behind the Soundwaves because I wanted to describe their sound first, so as not to pre-judge the sonic case one way or the other. But the Soundwaves are built to a theory, and this should be mentioned for completeness, at least in summary form: James Gala and his associates believe that the irregular radiation patterns of most speakers are seriously detrimental to natural sound. In particular, they regard beaming as a fundamental problem, and specifically the baffle-loading of tweeters as a serious source of loss of resolution. The Soundwaves, by having the main tweeter at an edge of the enclosure, do not substantially baffle-load the tweeter, even though the crossover point is quite low. The twin bass-mid drivers which fire at angles from the central axis give wide and uniform dispersion. The overall result is a speaker that is free of gross beaming up to 4-5 kHz.

This does not mean that the speaker is entirely uniform in response as one moves around horizontally. Actually, there is a rather complex lobing pattern around 1 kHz in the neighborhood of the listening axis, which causes audible shifts in balance if one moves off-axis even a little. This sort of thing is a terrible no-no according to the minions of Floyd Toole’s school. But I did not find it nearly so annoying as the vertical interference pattems of most boxes, especially ones with first-order crossovers. There is no “pressure” effect, and the shifts in balance are not seriously amusical.

The idea that a non-box radiation pattern makes a speaker sound non-boxy is almost surely correct, I think. There is nothing entirely new under the sun, and over the years, there have been a number of speakers that tried to use this idea-the original DCM Time Windows, the Design Acoustics dodecahedral speaker, and, in our own time, the Mirage bipolar models. This general aspect of the Soundwave theory is tried and true. And they do a particularly good job of using this theory in that they dissipate the boxiness without spewing so much sound around the room that the sound becomes completely “swimmy” a la quasi-omni-radiators. (You do have to be careful with the first sidewall reflection, though.) About the other parts of the theory, and especially about the supposed defects of baffle-loaded tweeters, it is not so easy to be sure. The speakers do have unusually good resolution, but the design has enough distinctive factors that it is hard to decide which factor causes what effect. A speaker design is not a controlled scientific experiment! And who knows how much of the resolution is due to the high quality of the drivers, how much to the carefully designed and damped enclosure, and how much to the unbaffled tweeter?

Theory aside, however, the speakers are fascinating as they are, and they are gratifying to listen to. To my ears, they would be even more gratifying if they were “voiced” a bit differently. But, they are still quite a musically pleasing experience. They also stand as a signpost toward the direction speaker design should go. Creative experimentation with radiation pattern is a necessity. The would-be prophets of final answers must be resisted. The question of which patterns work best is both too important and too subtle to be left to superficial, statistical pseudo-science or to commercially biased amateurishly conceived psycho-acoustic half-truth “standards.” Bravo to Gala and Soundwave for having the courage to pursue their own thoughts. Listen to these speakers with the courage to pursue your own.

Manufacturers Response:

I wish to thank Robert Greene and The Absolute Sound for reviewing the Soundwave Point Source 3.0 loudspeakers. Certainly we’re aware that there are more than enough High End loudspeaker manufacturers. Only the fact that (as far as we can determine) no manufacturer was comprehensively addressing the parameter of wave propagation-a parameter so fundamental and so essential to proper sound reproduction… inspired us to enter ,this crowded field.

Soundwave Point Source models acknowledge the simple acoustic fact that any wavelength of sound shorter than the width of a loudspeaker’s front panel is mechanically distorted. Those familiar with the physics of wave propagation understand this. Further, any frequency which has a wavelength shorter than the width of a loudspeaker’s front panel will be heard more than once by a listener. That is, the listener will first hear the direct sound, and then, microseconds later, its reflections off the baffle or diaphragms. This seriously degrades transient response and stereo imaging, and alters tonality.

Point Source loudspeakers have a unique “V” -shaped cabinet with the point of the “V” facing the listener. A special high-frequency drive unit located at the point of the “V” is flanked by two bass/midrange drivers oriented in a variation of the D’ Appolito configuration, which allows for mirror imaging and an improved (horizontally and vertically hemispherical) radiation pattern. It’s sort of a “V”-shaped coaxial speaker. This geometry is patented and approximates a true point source; it propagates a coincident, hemispherical wave. Mr. Greene was concerned that the “voicing” of the Point Source 3.0 was “slightly midrangy” and slightly depressed in the “presence” region. We believe his impression is due to the fact that virtually all other loudspeakers switch from a 4 pi steradian to a 2 pi steradian radiation pattern in this region. Mr. Greene went on to say, however, that this “voicing” often sounded more like “live” music; this was our objective. We thank you again for reviewing the new Soundwave Point Source 3.0.

James Gala ,Technical Director, Soundwave Vero Research Corporation

Di cosa si tratta: Diffusori a torre

Produttore: Soundwave  Canada

Caratteristiche: Reflex  due vie

Costo: 6.200.000 lire anno  1997