Sierra-2 Development Thread

[davef]

Dave, just out of curiosity, have you ever built a Sierra tower or Horizon with the Curv woofers from the Sierra-2? Just wondering how something like that might turn out.

There is really no point as the dedicated mid in the tower is a better overall midrange driver and the bass woofers in the tower extend quite a bit deeper. The Sierra-2 woofer is about as good as it gets for a driver that needs to reproduce both mids and lows.

That said, I have been working with SEAS on a dedicated 6" Curv midrange, but, so far, the performance is only marginally better than the current midrange driver we use in the tower. The cost, however, is over 4x higher, which would force us to raise the price of the towers by quite a bit and the price increase isn't justified IMO.

[SunByrne]

We have made this speaker for a few customers of ours as some prefer the sound of a high quality dome tweeter over a ribbon, but they also wanted more detailed mids and a faster transient response than what the Sierra-1 NrT woofer is capable of.

Fascinating. Can you use the stock Sierra-2 crossover for this, or does this arrangement require a new one, something in between the S1 NrT and the S2?

[Roen]

There is really no point as the dedicated mid in the tower is a better overall midrange driver and the bass woofers in the tower extend quite a bit deeper. The Sierra-2 woofer is about as good as it gets for a driver that needs to reproduce both mids and lows.

That said, I have been working with SEAS on a dedicated 6" Curv midrange, but, so far, the performance is only marginally better than the current midrange driver we use in the tower. The cost, however, is over 4x higher, which would force us to raise the price of the towers by quite a bit and the price increase isn't justified IMO.

Would this option be available for one-off orders?

[davef]

Fascinating. Can you use the stock Sierra-2 crossover for this, or does this arrangement require a new one, something in between the S1 NrT and the S2?

Proper loudspeaker design always requires a new or heavily modified crossover when using different transducers from what was designed for the original crossover.

[SunByrne]

Proper loudspeaker design always requires a new or heavily modified crossover when using different transducers from what was designed for the original crossover.

That's what I thought. When I upgraded from S1 to S1NrT I noticed the crossovers were quite different. (The NrT crossover uses much larger transformers and caps.) Haven't seen an S2 crossover yet.

[davef]

Would this option be available for one-off orders?

Not at this time, perhaps sometime in the future. As mentioned, we are not at the point where I feel the performance of this woofer justifies the price point. SEAS custom builds everything for us, and in order to do so - we must typically order 500 or more units at a time. I don't feel it would be a wise financial move to spend a huge sum of $$ on a component for a few custom builds

We are constantly in a process of evaluating ways to improve product performance, in many cases - since all of our speakers are heavily engineered to begin with, it is far more complex than one might imagine and replacing a component means a complete redesign of the crossover as well.

[dtsequoia]

Dave, I know you're insanely busy with the website update...

But, have you thought about providing this option for those who may want to upgrade the midrange on the towers? Similar to what you did with the Sierra 1.

Just curious!

[mikesiskav]

There is really no point as the dedicated mid in the tower is a better overall midrange driver and the bass woofers in the tower extend quite a bit deeper. The Sierra-2 woofer is about as good as it gets for a driver that needs to reproduce both mids and lows.

That said, I have been working with SEAS on a dedicated 6" Curv midrange, but, so far, the performance is only marginally better than the current midrange driver we use in the tower. The cost, however, is over 4x higher, which would force us to raise the price of the towers by quite a bit and the price increase isn't justified IMO.

Ah, that makes sense. I totally agree on the Curv woofer on the Sierra-2. People always talk about how great the Raal tweeter is, but the curv woofer is just as amazing IMO.