'Megafoot' speaker lives up to its name
(Credit:
Audio Junkies)
We acknowledge having certain phobias here at Crave, one of them involving freakish-looking speakers. But to date, most of our fears have involved those that resemble floating eyeballs or sea monsters.
The "Megafoot," on the other hand, is terrifying simply because of its sheer size. This behemoth is a whopping four feet wide with eight drivers powered by an amplifier housed directly in the stand, according to Audio Junkies. The image here is only a rendering, but the RSC500 model may be available by year's end at an estimated price of $1,200, though the cost could vary depending on what type of wood and other materials are used.
That's not so bad if you break down the dollar amount per square inch alone. But the real question is how much they'll charge for shipping this mini-ark.
whether this thing ever went through serious anochoic testing as a horizontal
array of mid drivers will produce standing waves and interference patterns
that will disrupt high frequencies and the stability of the audio image.
Vertical patterns with placement carefully determined work far better. There
has been a sad loss of acoustical knowledge amongst the public since the
MP3 became the ubiquitous sound source via such mid quality sound sources
as the iPod which though wonderfully portable just does not cut the mustard
as a high fidelity source of sound which it was not designed to be. There is
no substitute for the CD and appropriate purpose built amplifiers and
speakers to deliver the goods. I am not saying that a fine all in one theatre
system cannot deliver this..it can but the problem as is often the case, lies
with the compromises that are inherent in the transducer..the speaker, its
placement and engineering. It is not about style but about sound. I am still
using AR9s which are near perfect except for their huge size and the fact that
the company now exists in name only. Most of you likely never heard of it
but the 9s were the preeminent transducer of its era and are just wonderful. I
will say this also of the Allisons of the same vintage. They were made during
the age of High Fidelity when that really meant that people were pushing the
envelope towards sonic purity. Its time seems to have passed for the vast
majority of listeners whose musical tastes require just a pile of bass and ear
damaging decibels..boo...Neil Fiertel
As you can clearly see, they are not an array a midrange drivers, but an array of woofers. The midrange is reproduced by a single smaller driver, below the tweeter. In order to know whether or not the woofers will create destructive interference, you need to know their passband. This information is not available yet.
Dr. Joseph D'Appolito, in "A Geometric Approach to Eliminating Lobbing Errors in Multiway Loudspeakers," concluded the distance between the centers of the adjacent drivers should be one wavelength of the crossover's frequency.
It appears the widest center-to-center distance between the woofers is ~3', therefor it is quite possible that no such interference exists in a reasonable listening window (~60 degrees), as this is the wavelength of 375 hz, a more than reasonable crossover point for a single midrange to multiple woofers.