Product Review - SE Electronics Munro Egg 150

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Published in SOS January 2012

Reviews : Monitors


SE Electronics have enlisted the help of renowned acoustician Andy Munro to design these striking studio monitors. Does their unique approach to speaker design pay off in the real world?
Hugh Robjohns
In an ever-changing world, the one thing we can probably always rely on is the fact that, at some point, the ‘music’ (in whatever electrical form it might be) has to be turned into acoustic sound waves for us to hear — and in most cases that means some form of monitoring loudspeaker. The Sound On Sound Monitors & Headphones Smart Guide catalogues 185 small and medium-sized monitors, and there are probably even more currently available on the global market, each with different strengths and weaknesses.
And that’s an important point: none could be said to be ‘perfect’, and it’s very hard even to point at a high-end professional monitor that could approach true perfection in every respect! The plain fact is that loudspeaker monitoring remains the weakest link in the audio chain by a considerable margin, producing far more distortion and unwanted response irregularities than anything else. Although it’s true to say that small and incremental advances are still being made, fundamental loudspeaker science has barely changed in well over 50 years. The differences between the countless monitor speakers basically come down to slightly different design compromises and priorities, with the end users choosing one model over another largely on the basis of personal preference rather than technical achievement.
Amplifier technology is mature, and even low-cost systems can deliver extremely good quality. Loudspeaker drive units, too, have reached something of a quality plateau: yes, a bigger budget buys a fractionally more capable driver, but even budget units perform acceptably. However, the most influential aspect of a loudspeaker design is, arguably, the cabinet: the big wooden box that holds everything together. Although constrained by the size and budget restrictions imposed by the intended market, cabinet design plays a huge role in determining the overall sound quality and character of the loudspeaker.
There are several different cabinet operating principles available to a loudspeaker designer, such as sealed cabinets, vented or ported cabinets (with the option of passive radiators instead of open ports), and the so-called (but not really in the true engineering sense) ‘transmission-line’ cabinets. Each approach has different strengths and weaknesses, and each manufacturer tries to optimise those in creating a well-balanced final product, albeit with varying degrees of success! One thing that almost all cabinet designs share, though, is that they are almost all rectangular cuboid in shape...
Thinking Outside The Box
Rectangular boxes are relatively easy to construct, relatively efficient in terms of enclosed volume, and relatively easy to live with. If you place a rectangular box on a flat surface, it won’t fall over or roll away, for example! In a hi-fi application, the ‘domestic manager’ can place a flower vase and a photo-frame on the top to make it look less industrial, and in a studio we often place all manner of technical studio debris on top! This might be very convenient, but is not necessarily the best way of building a loudspeaker cabinet.
The acoustic effects of different shapes of loudspeaker cabinets have been known about empirically since at least the early 1940s, but it was really the academic work of HF Olson that properly documented what was going on, in a paper he published in the Journal of the AES in 1969. This work revealed very clearly that cubic and rectangular cabinets had a very damaging effect on the overall frequency response, whereas cabinets with rounded or deeply angled front-baffle edges performed considerably better. A spherical cabinet delivered an almost perfect frequency response. (The ‘Cabinet shape and frequency response’ diagram shows the frequency responses of various different cabinet shapes.)
Cabinet shape and frequency response: These graphs demonstrate the effect a loudspeaker’s cabinet shape has on its frequency response.
Cabinet shape and frequency response: These graphs demonstrate the effect a loudspeaker’s cabinet shape has on its frequency response.
The physics of the situation is essentially that the sound wave generated by a loudspeaker driver radiates outwards in a hemispherical wave, travelling sideways across the baffle surface and out into the room. However, when the sound waves reach the baffle edge of a cuboid cabinet, they encounter a pressure discontinuity. There is nothing for the sound waves to press against any more, and that step change causes severe diffraction. In effect, the sharp cabinet edge forms a secondary source of sound-wave radiation, and sound waves from that ‘virtual’ source interfere with those from the loudspeaker driver itself, resulting in comb filtering, directional beaming and an uneven response. The precise frequencies affected and the strength of the interference effects depend on the relative distances between the driver and the various baffle edges.
Not surprisingly, Olson’s work revealed that chamfering or rounding the front baffle edges helps to reduce these interference effects by softening the transition and severity of the pressure discontinuity at the cabinet edge — and that’s why most modern loudspeaker cabinets have rounded edges to varying degrees. But the best performance was obtained with a spherical cabinet, since there are obviously absolutely no hard edges, and thus no step-change discontinuities.
However, a spherical cabinet presents other practical problems, not least being how to stop the speaker from rolling off the console meter-bridge! On a more serious note, a sphere has only one dimension and thus has a very strong resonant frequency. A better compromise, combining the soft baffle edges of a sphere but with a broad spread of internal resonant frequencies, is the ovoid or egg shape. And that’s where SE’s new monitors enter the picture.
Hatching The Egg
...

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Published in SOS January 2012

 

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In this article:
Thinking Outside The Box
Hatching The Egg
Egg Boxes
Control Unit
Listening Eggsperiences
The Eggs Factor
Alternatives
Try Before You Buy
Frequency Response Graphs
information
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SE Electronics +44 (0)8455 002500.
Click here to email
www.seelectronics.com
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Fingerprint Audio +1 512 847 5696.
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www.fingerprintaudio.com
www.seelectronics.com
Monitors Demystified
Monitoring Tips
Monitors vs Hi-Fi?
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