DevilDriver

Mark has got the moofas.

So it is the one I remember...looks gorgeous.

There is also another reason why I am opposed to national healthcare. All wealthy Canadians come here for "real" surgeries, Europeans too. Social medicine and great doctors don't go hand in hand. And the bottom line is of course, the least efficient business in the struggling US is the government so making it bigger and therefore less efficient yet is stupid. So are you also in support of removing or significantly trimming the IRS and/or CIA?

If it's the ones I remember seeing pictures of earlier....wow. Awesome.

Honestly, I appreciate nationally-funded health care here in Canada, but there are some flaws...most notably wait times and the financial weight of funding such a venture. I don't mind it here but I can appreciate why many Americans are very opposed to it.

I am not for Clinton or Giuliani. Almost anyone else is acceptable, to me. It is a shame that the strongest candidates in the public eyes are nowhere near what I would expect from a Presidential candidate.

Sean, congrats on the housing change.

Yeah, I realize our posts are very relevant to all the other Hoppers. lol.

If we're looking at who can speak intelligibly and passionately, it's Wall over Calvert every time. Honestly, Calvert doesn't even look like a guy who gets anything done. edit: I can assure you that I am one of the most hated people at SaskTel right now. I am young and support the Sask Party.

I have no doubt Sask Party will kill in Saskatoon...down here, it will be really, really close. There are so many government employees here that are still afraid of the Crown Corps being sold, but that would be suicide for the Sask Party. From a business and economy standpoint, NDP has just been very lucky that oil has been booming in Saskatchewan...otherwise, I don't believe much would have turned around. In the business sector, there are companies literally waiting for the Sask Party to win and adjust business tax laws, etc. Hopefully Sask Party will win and we will see some forward change...finally.

Terrible surgery wait times here. We'll see if Sask Party changes that (yes, I'm assuming they will win this go-round).

Point is...a single in-line capacitor is a 6dB/octave rolloff only. If you want 6th order rolloff, you'll need to look at something else.

Sure enough, I will be out of town this weekend. Routine surgery I hope?

No doubt, the AL East is the best division. Definitely the most competitive but we (the Jays) just can't compete with the salary caps of the BoSox and the Yankees. The weird thing is that the BoSox and Yanks both had success this year because of their young talent...which is a bit of a different approach. If A-Rod goes to the Sox in the winter...yikes!

I'm a Blue Jays fan but the AL East is damn near impossible to win in.

I will be uploading as much lossless as I can in the hopes that it will encourage others to come out of the woods with their lossless stuff. I do really like that they have the scene torrents separate or that you can view all at the same time.

I am raking in the ratio on stmusic now...uploaded Dark Side of the Moon SACD for mega-ratio.

Tori Amos is just soooooo good.

Sounds the part.

I knew when I posted it was too brief, so I will try to restate what I meant a bit more clearly. This my approach: 1. Identify what we interpret unfavourably. 2. Identify how this can be objectively measured and duplicated, if necessary. 3. Identify the sonic tendencies of a particular cone material. 4. Compare these tendencies to what we identified in steps 1 and 2. So step 1 is what we intepret unfavourably. There are so many factors here and this is something that people like Drs. Geddes, Lee, Klippel, O'Toole, etc. have been working on for years. For example, we all know that distortion is not a good thing...but certain levels of harmonic distortion with a reasonable magnitude (particularly in comparison to the fundamental frequency) are very acceptable, in some cases even interpreted positively. But it's so much more complex than that. For example, a little 2nd order harmonic distortion is no big deal (in my opinion) if you have significant InterModulation Distortion generated by heavy inductance variation...especially if this is occuring in a midrange. Any resonance or poor decay times (as seen in a Cumulative Spectral Decay plot) can make your detail disappear. I'm starting to blend parts 1 and 2 together here, but you get the idea. For example, I agree that in many cases, a Poly coned midrange has a tendency to be a little hazy with less detail than, say, a metal-based cone. From a scientific standpoint, this can usually be attributed to two very measurable causes: 1. Decay times, 2. Lack of break-up. Honestly, I do like detail, but usually this detail can be attributed to a form of break-up, resonance, or a rough patch in frequency response from a form of distortion. In the midrange (in my opinion, the most critical part of any speaker system), these things can be very detrimental, although a steep slope or notch filter can go along way to controlling these artifacts. But...I find this to be a much smaller issue in subwoofers...much smaller. Our ears are not very sensitive to small differences in SPL at low frequencies as described by various Equal-loudness contours (including Fletcher-Munson and Robinson-Dadson). In my opinion, these differences become even more minute with high SPL. As an example, the JL Audio W6V2 is routinely considered one of the best sounding subwoofers in the car audio market. It does employ a poly cone. Now it's only fair to mention that the W6V2 also has a "W Cone", which is basically JL Audio's approach at adding rigidity to the driver, which is very important for a subwoofer. If anything, this is just a good example of how a particular material might have various advantages or disadvantages, but the final result is controlled by a wide number of factors and the implementation of the material. Paper is usually interpreted very favourably. It has a tendency for higher 2nd order harmonic distortion with low 3rd order via its damping capabilities. You can mix various materials quite easily with paper as well and increase rigidity as you please. Personally, I know that paper is an old material and many manufacturers are pushing to get the newest and greatest material onto their drivers...but I still love the abilites and flexibility (especially from a manufacturing standpoint) of a good paper driver. But again, it's the implementation. The cone material can only account for so much if you have copious amounts of distortion generated from BL, Cms, and Le non-linearities. The material is only a small part of the final result...especially with subwoofers that are so unbelievably dominated by that filter we call an enclosure that falls right in our critical bandwidth and, even more so, the effects of the room or cabin that we put the speaker/enclosure into. As far as IB goes, I would agree that certain effects are more noticeable. I, personally, find IB to be more revealing of a drivers performance because there is little no masking done by the enclosure. Also, you can typically reach your output limits without driving tons of power into the coil, and this is great (again, my opinion) for natural sound. I've made the analogy before, but its really easy to dump enough power into the coil to double Re, which doubles Qes, which doubles Qts, which drastically changes the enclosure the driver will work best in. This is perhaps the biggest advantage of an IB approach: you're almost forced to keep the power out of the coil or risk driving it to mechanical damage. Also, because you can so easily reach Xmax, you can also easily (and routinely) notice any distortion generated from BL and Cms non-linearity. Rambling a bit, but my point is that yes, a material does have an effect on subwoofers, but one that can be easily accounted for during the design process and is swamped by various other effects, most notably any non-linearities of the driver.

Either way, nice to have the afternoon off, especially on a Monday. I still feel a little sluggish from Saturday night....

The good type of female friend?

Doing anything with the afternoon?

Monday mornings...take em or leave em....I'll leave em. Need some tea in a hurry here. Jim: How are you liking stmusic so far?

The reason a flared port works in the first place is because the flare causes the air in the boundary layer (air close to the walls of the port) to expand and loose speed in a controlled manner, the amount of expansion obviously depending on the various radiuses I listed above. The problem is that the flare effect is most predominant on the boundary layer and has little to no effect on the air in the center of the port. As the velocity increases, this air becomes increasingly turbulent (for a given diameter port) and the flare does nothing to help this. This is port compression at it's finest, where there is a little loss of output and the helmholtz resonator shifts in frequency (the tuning frequency of the port changes). For a given port diameter and throat velocity, you will encounter problems regardless of the flare radiuses. Flared ports work with reason....if a design would call for 4 4" ports, you probably won't get away with one flared 4" port. But in the example you suggested, I would say yes, a flared 3" port will work just fine over a straight 4" port.