Ooo Decware Tube Tots! Haven’t seen many of those in the wild and there aren’t many reviews. How do you like them? (Sorry to be off topic)
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@ericrosenfield
Here are a few words about the tube tots written by our friend Camus;
I very much enjoy the Tube-Tots, it’s because i have a variety of equipment and 2 different rooms i get to play them in and have been able to experience them with enough variety and positioning 
By pure chance i happen to have them in rotation as i type this reply, they are keepers as far as I’m concerned and at their price point are more than worthwhile addition to any collection that includes a variety of speakers purpose built for various styles of listening enjoyment. Very easy to power and easily integrated into various size and styles of rooms.
Folks in this hobby are very finicky and there are so many thousands of speakers to choose from it’s very difficult to make choices if you are not familiar w/ the general characteristics of the various styles of speaker. The Tube-Tots perform well as a small stature, crossover-less design, in a nice enclosure, priced appropriately in the lower cost quadrant. Very good value if used for their strengths with some decently mated equipment.
Mine are currently being powered by a Decware 341.5 (6wpc) amplifier and Sonnet Pasithea DAC.
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This is fascinating, thanks for sharing! In your opinion, what are their strengths?
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Incredibly fast, and capable of tight imaging, taught bass but in my home I prefer to blend them w/ subwoofers for proper low end impact and more depth to the overall presentation and soundstage.
The top end is not fatiguing and very clean but will not compare to the air and extension top quality tweeters will bring out.
The midrange and tone are excellent making the speakers a joy for someone whose preference is moderate volume for the likes of jazz, blues, indie, folk and the like especially if used w/ amplifiers whose own prowess and character are voiced in the same fashion. For example the speakers mated extremely well with my Decware 341.5, First Watt Sit-3 and Lance Cochrane Miss Scarlet VII (6L6).
When I use these speakers I’m usually listening to music as opposed to playing with my equipment. They are not high end resolution beasts but also don’t pretend to play with that class of speakers. I don’t find they require much effort on set-up, placement, and seating arrangement in my rooms, I find them easy to get into a sweet spot, power up and just sit back enjoying music, not necessarily listening for every nuance that can be squeezed out of a high end system.
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The one time I tried a full range speaker, the problem I had with it was some wonkiness in the upper mids and treble (as well as a weirdly nasal effect from a spike at 1k) that I think had something to do with cone breakup. I’m intrigued by the tube tots because I wonder if two full-range drivers might help compensate for that kind of thing. (I don’t mind not having so much air and treble extension, but wonkiness in the treble is bothersome). But I don’t know if my curiosity is enough to try them over the perfectly excellent all-rounder two-way speakers I use now.
Both pairs of full range speakers I’ve had have required very thoughtful chains that leveraged synergy to get the most out of them. Omega speakers tend to NOT exhibit the traits your describe but they have their own needs.
Voxativ speakers which is what I have now, exhibited some of what you describe especially when I first got them due to the fact that I had my previous system tweaked for the Omegas.
No one speaker is perfect so what you’re left with is maximizing their strengths while minimizing their weakness. In the end you have to know if there’s enough in the strengths you hear to chase what it will take to minimize the faults you hear. Some things like speaker placement and room treatment are cheap.
Other things like cabling or chasing the right piece of gear to maximize synergy may not be so cheap. You just have to trust your hearing to guide you to where you want to wind up.
Mistakes should be (and will be) part of the journey IMO. lol
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We’re getting way off field here and should probably move the discussion to another thread.
That said I hesitate about the Omegas because I’ve had bad experiences with metal tweeters and from reviews I fear that I’ll have a similar reaction to them that I had to the Harbeth P3ESR where they won’t have the warmth I’m after and I’ll feel like the tweeter is drilling a hole in my brain.
Anyway, the speakers I have now (Q Acoustic Concept 30s) I love and I’m not really looking to change them, but you know how it is, always curious about other things nevertheless…
I’m using a 35W tube amp at the moment (LTA VT-30) so it’s nice to look at speakers that might have good synergy with something like that.
(I’m also in this thread since I was thinking of the LSA stuff as potential someday endgame, but that’ll a different story. Would be curious to how a Z40+ would be different sounding with its ZOTL tech, but of course that’s a dramatically more expensive amplifier.)
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Did it have a whizzer? That or a phase plug helps with the issue you’re describing.
No idea. Not even sure what those things are. The speakers were Closer Ogys.
These were the measurements I made of them in my space (with REW)
For comparison, here’s the measurements I made of the P3ESR and the QC30s in the same space:
While my space clearly has some acoustic issues, you can see how wonky the Ogy is in comparison.
Whizzer cone is the that flower like circle in the middle of the driver, or in the case of older designs it’s a diffuser type piece, nest example of the latter are the old Altec Lansing boxes.
Here is a brief article with what they look like:
Your REW measurements are of the speaker or what you are hearing in the room? There are different methods for measuring, if the former it will be not be indicative of the actual speaker measurement given it’s not a controlled space.
Assuming the latter, your issue is not treble spikes, but rather bass/room pressure. It’s more about the room interaction vs, the speaker capability.
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Hi, I put the microphone where I sit and measured.
The bass stuff is absolutely an issue and there’s room modes and whatnot involved. I put a little treatment in there, and use EQ, but that’s a whole other conversation.
For the Ogy though the point was to look at the difference in how it measured compared to the other two speakers, which is to say the 1k spike and the unevenness throughout the treble. What you see w/ the QC30s and the Harbeths are the issues with the room, but with the Ogy you can see major differences that indicate issues with the speakers (at least in my system, in my room).
Yeah that’s placement for measuring your room, sure it will show you how the speakers react to the room. It’s not a speaker measurement.
In terms of the differences you are seeing are not necessarily an issue of single driver full range speakers. You’re applying the room acoustic measurements as a control for the speaker measurements.
Another issue is you’re comparing multi-driver speakers with extensive crossovers to ensure their linearity does not fluctuate as much, single driver may look chaotic under these graphs as they are simply more raw in the output with nothing in the path. That could also be an amping mix-match, which is the biggest takeaway I’ve learned in recent years as I’ve been able to borrow gear to switch in and out.
An example, for a while I thought my speakers were my biggest pain point, all the while it was the amplifiers I had initially used that was the issue. Trying out some other amps and experimenting showed me the speakers were not the issue, the mismatch of amps was the issue.
Either way it’s a moot point, you don’t like how the OGY sound. All I’m trying to say is don’t necessarily write off all full range single driver designs like the Omegas or others who design similar speakers. It’s more like a recipe and tossing in the usual ingredients may work to get by, but definitely does not make it Michelin rated.
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This is a very interesting sentence and I’m not sure I understand it right. What does it mean that single drivers are more “raw” in the output? Or you saying they look more “chaotic” in these graphs because their linearity (which is to say, how they sound) is inconsistent and changes from moment to moment? That seems like a problem, doesn’t it?
I fully agree that even though I didn’t like the Ogys that doesn’t mean I won’t like other single-driver speakers. I literally haven’t heard any others! Only that my experience with the Ogy’s leads me to, if I were to try another full range driver speaker, to try and find one that doesn’t have the problems the Ogy has (which is why I’m asking about them in the first place).
Btw I was amping the Ogy’s with the Schiit Aegir 1, which at any rate had plenty of power for them, but I can’t say how other amps would compare. (I think I also tried them on a Parasound Zamp, which didn’t sound as good as the Aegir but had similar sonic issues.) No idea if some other combination of gear would’ve made them work.
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Figure i will cross post this here.
I’m super happy with the amp so far. Definitely took my omegas to the next level compared to my EC studio b and it pairs excellent with my lampi b3 as one might expect it would.
I would also probably be singing the praises of the amp paired with my Utopia if it wasn’t for the fact that days before the amp arrived I discovered the infamous pad goop where it had chemically reacted to the plastic and melted onto the underside of my utopia and the drivers… they are currently with focal getting serviced so hopefully within the month I will be able to report on that.
In the meantime does anyone have tube recommendations for me to try when I do get around to rolling them? Post you favorite combinations if you have any, thanks!
for tradition’s sake lol
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Another CanJam listen.
LTA Aero DAC > LTA Z10E > Audeze CRBN2 (i think it was 2 as it had the rose gold trim) > the noisiest row of CanJam
This is my first electrostatic listen outside of listening tests as a kid. The unit is bigger than i expected from pics, and while i stopped at 69 on the volume, it needed double that to be audible. I was expecting something very exacting and precise but thin and sharp like a painting done using only a razer’s edge.
It was all those good things but none of the thinnes or sharpness i thought would be inherent to an electrostat. It was nice and full from top to bottom and had good weight downlow. There was bass, good quantity and quality bass. It felt very even across all frequencies and well spaced and separated. A good sense of tempo, time, and touch. I do think it erred more on the delicate side but was able to deliver some power when called upon, like when the guy next to me convinced me to put on Alice In Chains. Anything beyond this is probably lost on me with the room being what it was. But I enjoyed talking to the LTA guys a lot.
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